Here’s an article written about Mr George Shoes on October 8th 1986* and featured in the Daily Telegraph. It gives a personal and professional history of George Ghossein.  He still says some of these phrases until this day!

MR GEORGE SHOES, Oct 8th 1986

George Ghossein made his first pair of shoes at nine, taught by an Arab shoemaker who was boarding at his parents’ house. One of six kids in a Lebanese migrant family, he left school at 12, putting his age up to become an apprentice shoemaker in a Kogarah footwear factory.

Since then he worked as a foreman in more than a dozen inner city and southern suburbs shoe factories, before burgeoning imports forced mass closures in the local footwear trade. Now 62, George runs his own show, Mr George Shoes, at the back of the house he built in 1986 for his wife and 4 kids in Carlton.

Here, in a detached and rustic brick workshop crammed with mysterious devices, he holds court, for George is neither an ordinary shoemaker nor a conventional man. Able to trace his ancestry back 7,000 years to Phoenician storytellers, George’s antecedents would approve of the way he blends healing and homespun philosophy.

“When factories started closing they started cutting us to one or two days a week, I thought damned this, so I made myself a pair of shoes,” George said. “A friend said ‘make a pair for me’, then he brought firends and it snowballed. I haven’t stopped since.”

The bulk of George’s business is orthopadeic shoes, but he also does a steady business in fashion shoes for dancers, rock band special orders - ususally wild boots, and, also a small crop of specially balanced mega stilettos for the Sleasze Ball and Mardis Gras.

“I make the impossible stuff,” he said. “Any shape, any style, any form. I’m like those old craftsmen who make barrels. How many of them are left? People hear about me, come here and say they were expecting a much older man. In the past 14 years [in 1986] I’ve had more than 7,000 customers, only three of them I couldn’t please. And I tell you, nobody could have.”


He was still shaking his head about a recent newspaper article contest seeking the biggest foot in Australia. “Someone from Melbourne with a size 19 foot won it, but complained he had to have his shoes made in Hong Kong. I could make shoes heaps cheaper and better here with a 100 per cent guarantee. It’s just that people don’t know about me.”

George estimates 95 per cent of so-called normal feet now jammed into joggers and store-bought shoes need corrective footwear. “Take high-arched foot, for instance,” he says. “They’re the best kind of feet for running, swimming, jumping, climbing and walking, in fact everything except wearing shoes. Unless the shoes are specially made.

“These feet can’t use their arches for support, so the weight is carried by the heel - which hardens and goes yellow - and the ball of the foot, which pushes up the toes and gives them callouses.

“The biggest problem is the in-turned big toe because 85 per cent of people have straight feet, yet all shoe shapes turn to the centre. This pushes out the bone causing lumps and bunions. People say they inherit bunions, but that’s a load of rubbish.

“And the back of the heel is just as important. All shoe heels curve in the the ankle, but not all feet curve, in fact the majority of people have a muscle that goes straight up the back of their leg. When their curved shoes cause blisters they wonder why.”

That people have come to accept ill-fitting shoes, warped feet and calloused soles upsets George.

“As for those joggers. They’re the most comfortable shoes to wear providing you use them what they were designed for, and for no longer than an hour,” he said. “By wearing them seven days a week you end up with arthritis, because they draw the feet badly, make them sweat, dry out and deaden the muscles. Besides, plastic lining should be illegal, the damage it does. These are the problems that keep podiatrists in business.”

There is a steady stream of work, including repairs and George takes several calls while we chat, including one from a man who has ordered 15 pairs of shoes, all in the same style, but each in different colours.

George has strong opinions on most things, including pricing. “My wife says ‘George, you are not greedy enough’,” he said. Customers can design their own shoes and select the leathers. However, George reserves the right to point out the suitability of the design. A few weeks later, upon slipping them on it was a case, said George, of “believe your feet”.

*Some person details have been amended to reflect changes that have occurred.