Signposts
Every street tells a story
1. Dead end street
WHEN I was 15, my parents bought a house in a quiet cul-de-sac in an affluent, leafy part of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Up until then, we had lived a nomadic existence in Australia and New Zealand, moving city every 18 months or so to follow my father on his next posting with the big corporation he worked for.
But arriving back in Melbourne after a couple of years in Auckland, it felt as if my parents were putting down their roots once and for all. My middle sister and I were both in high school now, and our moving days were over.
Ours was a big double-storey cream house, third down from the corner. At the end of the street were private tennis courts belonging to the local Catholic parish, hidden by a high hedge and gate which was locked to the street’s residents, and every Saturday, the kerbs would be clogged with the BMWs, Mercs, and Volvos of the tennis club members. Sundays were quieter, apart from the constant humming of lawn mowers.
A retired bank manager lived across the road. Once a week, he would trim his immaculate front lawn in dress pants, a buttoned up white shirt and a tie, silvery hair slicked back with Brylcreem, as if on his lunch break from work. The only other kids our age lived next door to him. They went to two of Melbourne’s most exclusive single-sex private schools, while we went to the local high school, not because our family was poor but a deliberate decision by our parents, who had both gone to state schools.
Underneath the name of the street on the sign on the corner were the words ‘No Through Road’. It might as well have said ‘Dead End’. Suffocated by the WASP-ishness, the stiff-necked good manners, and most of all the rigid conservatism, I felt I didn’t belong there, and I didn’t want to be there.
Around my 19th year, the neighbourhood was briefly terrorised by a mysterious arsonist who would set fire to garden hedges late at night. Who would be next? people speculated. Vigilante groups prowled the quiet streets, looking for any strangers loitering in the area. Secretly, I cheered for the phantom hedgeburner. Then, he was arrested and everything got back to normal.
Cheap thrills could be found at the Golden Bowl in Camberwell Junction, a Ten-Pin bowling alley with a couple of banks of video games where the local delinquents would hang out, smoking cigarettes and picking fights. It felt dangerous and exotic.
The Golden Bowl was around the corner from Burke Road, the main shopping strip. Like the wall that divided Berlin, here was the impenetrable border between the alcohol free area of Camberwell and neighbouring municipalities, and the looser morals of Hawthorn and the inner city. Not a single pub or licensed restaurant was allowed to operate on the eastern side of that boundary. But the city side had no such restrictions, and at the top of Burke Road, across from the railway station, was the Palace Hotel, a mundane pub in a grand Victorian building, but a beacon of excitement for anyone looking for signs of life in this suburban Cold War.
2. Lygon Street
I SET my sights on a degree from Melbourne University. Not because I was convinced that Melbourne was any better than Monash or Latrobe, but because its ivy-covered bluestone buildings fitted my ideal of a proper university.
It was an hour-long commute from the family home, usually on the number 70 tram along Riversdale Road and Swan Street to Flinders Street and then the number 1 up Swanston Street. This long ride gave me plenty of time to read and listen to music on my Sony Walkman. On the tram, I consumed books from the second floor library in the Union Building, classics like Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Hemingway; music biographies; and the new journalism of Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion. This was as important a part of my education as anything I learnt in lecture theatres and tutorials.
Mostly, my friends and I spent our free time on campus, but sometimes we would sneak away for a few hours to one of the many pubs dotted around the university: Naughtons on Royal Parade, the Prince Alfred on Grattan Street, or the Clyde on Elgin Street. We’d return to our next lecture in a happy, sodden daze. Less often, we would go to Lygon Street, feeling sophisticated as we twirled our pasta and sipped our cappuccinos.
In the late-80s, the common lament was that Lygon Street had lost its spark and the epicentre of bohemian Melbourne had moved a few blocks east to Brunswick Street in Fitzroy. People blamed the arrival of big chains like Country Road and Sportsgirl as having killed the buzz, but I found the cocktail of Lygon Street’s Italian and Jewish heritage mixed with the academic crowd to be intoxicating and alluring. It was still possible back then to walk past Jimmy Watson’s at 5pm and narrowly avoid a well-known literary figure lurching drunkenly from the front bar on his way back to the university after a long, long lunch.
Apart from books, my other great education at this time came from a radio station broadcasting from a Fitzroy back street. Three Triple R, the epitome of cool, was up several flights of stairs in the Universal Theatre building in Victoria Street. As I navigated my late-teens, Triple R was my most reliable companion and eventually I felt compelled to hear my own voice on air.
One evening a week, our group would spend a couple of hours in the Triple R studios learning about panel operation, tape splicing, interview techniques and other arcane skills now made redundant by digital technology. Our ambition was the prize of a graveyard shift — 2am to 6am.
We were sent by our tutors to record mini-documentaries, vox popping in Brunswick Street about subjects such as armpit hair: pro or con? Afterwards, I would catch the tram to the city and make the long journey home.
The tram stop was on the corner of Johnston Street, outside a shop selling falafels, a culinary delicacy unseen in the eastern suburbs. Waiting for the tram, munching on my takeaway kebab, I would gaze across the road at the Provincial Hotel, my eyes drawn upwards to the window of the ladies’ powder room, and I would longingly fantasise about the Fitzroy girls in their vintage summer dresses, scuffed Blundstone boots, their nose rings and forests of armpit hair.
3. Barkly Street
FOR my 21st birthday, my parents gave me a three-month Eurail pass. With the money I had saved from weekend, night and holiday jobs since I was 15, it was enough to fulfill my great dream of backpacking across Europe and the US.
Overseas, I saw and did things that would have been unimaginable in my Melbourne life. But I was the first of my circle of friends to do the backpacking trail and within weeks of arriving back home I realised everything was exactly as I’d left it. Moving back into the family home was a humbling experience. The street sign still said ‘No Through Road’, the air on Sundays was still filled with the buzz of lawn mowers. After Paris, Rome and New York, even the busiest of Melbourne’s city streets felt empty and wide. And the faces walking towards me were all so white.
The only thing that seemed to have changed was that the girl across the road, who I’d had a crush on since I was 16, had a new boyfriend. He was a few years older than her and drove a black BMW, and he was rapidly making a name for himself as a newsbreaking sports reporter on TV. Years later he would become president of Collingwood Football Club.
Worst of all, I still had one more year of uni to do, and while Lygon and Brunswick streets had felt exotic and stimulating before I’d gone overseas, now they seemed like second-rate copies of the real thing.
As soon as I graduated, I was on the move again. This time to country Victoria, as a cadet journalist for a newspaper in a town on the Murray River. But my real ambition was to work for a metropolitan daily, and after three years in the bush, my next step was back to Melbourne as reporter for a group of weekly papers in the western suburbs.
Our office was in Barkly Street in Footscray. Leaving the city via Dynon Road, your arrival in Footscray was heralded by the giant Franco Cozzo store at the corner of Hopkins and Moore streets, with the latest in baroque faux gilt furniture imported all the way from Italy. But as you progressively travelled west towards our office and Hopkins Street morphed into Barkly Street, the signage changed to Vietnamese words, the air thick with the aroma of aniseed and chicken stock from countless pho restaurants, bags of rice and boxes of vegetables spilling from the doorways of Asian grocery stores. A sprinkling of African restaurants and cafes heralded the next wave of migration to the western suburbs.
Among this transplanted Saigon, like rotting teeth in an otherwise healthy mouth, were the old pubs of Footscray, where at lunchtimes topless barmaids served alcoholic Anglo-Irish male customers, many of them residents of the rooming houses that studded the back streets nearby.
By the time you got to our office, the Vietnamese influence was replaced by the markings of postwar Italian and Greek migration. Down the road was a cake and pastries shop where we ordered our extra-strong espressos each morning from a grumpy Italian princess who was always arguing with unseen middle-aged men doing the baking out of sight but within earshot of the customers. But smack dealers and their customers had also moved into the area, and we often found used syringes in the car park behind our office.
From the editor’s upstairs window we could see into Hoy Heng restaurant, where a box of takeaway noodles and Coke would set you back $5. Glancing out the window one day, I saw a black BMW parked outside the restaurant, which I recognised as belonging to the boyfriend of the girl across the road from my parents’ house. Inside, he was having lunch with Ted Whitten and Doug Hawkins and somehow, as they finished their meal, I managed to snaffle a quick interview with the two Bulldogs legends on the eve of Hawkins’ record-breaking 322nd match.
That Saturday afternoon, a kilometre further west up Barkly Street, Hawkins was triumphantly carried off the ground on the shoulders of his team mates after inspiring the Bulldogs to victory, and embraced at the players’ race by the man whose record he had broken.
A year later, we would mourn E.J.’s premature death from prostate cancer at the same location, and another couple of years later, the Bulldogs played their last ever home game at the renamed Whitten Oval in a torrential downpour, before relocating to the new Docklands Stadium.
4. Fitzroy Street
I MET my first serious girlfriend — who later became my wife — at that newspaper office in Footscray. By that stage I was living above a clothing shop in Errol Street in North Melbourne with a dope-addled musician. He sequestered the front room for band practice twice week, and the living room was mostly off-limits because of the rancid cloud of stale fumes from his home-made bong. My room was at the back, overlooking the little roof top balcony where he grew his cannabis crop.
North Melbourne was a tiny pocket on the edge of the CBD that people went around on the way to somewhere else, and consequently, Errol Street was so quiet, especially on weekends, that it felt like the main street of a country town. In the mid-90s, the suburb was still mostly ungentrified, and the pubs were notorious hangouts for hard-drinking wharfies and homeless men. Gourmet delights extended no further than a pie shop and two Chinese takeaways.
I lasted there for about 18 months before the constant mishaps — the kettle catching on fire, the bath flooding the flat when my housemate passed out with the water running — drove me to somewhere safer.
My girlfriend was living on the other side of town, in St Kilda. She had a one room flat in an art-deco building two blocks from Fitzroy Street. Before her, I really only knew the suburb by reputation but I began spending as much time as possible hanging around Fitzroy and Acland streets.
Transvestites and pale street girls in tiny miniskirts worked the corners on Grey Street and its tributaries, and dirty Fitzroy Street had a palpable sense of menace at any hour of the day or night. Junkies and dealers conducted business in shadowy doorways, and the chemist across the road from The George doubled as a methadone clinic. Magnificent mansions had been carved up into boarding houses for single men and women, who ate lunch each day at the Sacred Heart Mission.
Everyone wore black. The hit TV show The Secret Life of Us depicted St Kilda as sunny and carefree, but to those in the know it was more like Berlin’s Kreuzberg transplanted to Port Philip Bay: grim, edgy and defiantly alternative.
St Kilda was the heartbeat of Melbourne’s live music scene and I was willing to concede that it had also displaced the inner north as the centre of Melbourne bohemia. On a Friday and Saturday night, we could generally be found knocking back beers and shooting pool at the Espy, or watching a band from the sticky carpet of the Prince of Wales. Around midday on Sunday, we’d stroll down to Acland Street for lunch at Café Scheherazade or one of the other Jewish delis; if it was a nice day, we’d stretch out under the palm trees outside Luna Park or loiter on the pier.
As St Kilda locals, we had nothing but scorn for the weekend visitors from suburbia, and the British and Scandinavian backpackers who invaded our locale. “Tourists”, we smugly derided them as from perches in our favourite café. But even then, the tourists were taking over, converting the decrepit old mansions and terrace houses into luxurious homes. The POW had a makeover, and the Espy closed down, then the Greyhound was bulldozed for apartments. Within a decade, most of the old St Kilda in all its deviant, wasted glory, was gone.
5. The street that is home
I ONCE calculated that by the age of 15, I’d lived in two countries, five cities, and eight houses, and gone to seven different schools. It had not been much different in my adulthood. In the dozen or so years since university, I had shuffled between four cities and at least 10 different flats or houses. I began to understand why my parents had hit the brakes in Melbourne 20 years earlier.
The year 2004 found me living in the national capital as a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. I enjoyed the work in the maelstrom of national politics, but compared to Melbourne, Canberra was really not much more than a large country town.
My girlfriend and I had been saving for a house deposit for a few years. We’d rented a small terrace in Chetwynd Street in North Melbourne for a couple of years after she’d had enough of St Kilda, so North Melbourne was where we began our house hunting.
But after a few months it became obvious that anything but the smallest, most claustrophobic flat or the most run-down terrace in North Melbourne, was beyond our budget. We began to look further afield, and focused our attention on Brunswick, a dozen or so tram stops up Royal Parade.
After two years of looking and a couple of near misses where we’d been outbid at auctions, my partner stumbled upon a renovated single-fronted weatherboard terrace in our price range in a narrow street within walking distance of both Sydney Road and Lygon streets.
I knew Brunswick mainly for its discount shops and Turkish restaurants, but little else. I knew it had a proud working class history, had been transformed by postwar migration, and now was undergoing a hipster-led renaissance. The same week we moved in, a new café opened in an old milk bar around the corner, named after a Bonnie “Prince” Billy song and staffed by young waitresses and baristas who all looked like they played in bands, made experimental short films or were preparing for their first gallery show.
Our little street is now mostly occupied by young families like ours, although there are still an elderly Greek and an elderly Italian couple among us. The brick warehouses which over the years have served as band rehearsal spaces, housed a taekwondo school, a theatre props maker, and a florist, are about to be demolished to make way for dozens of town houses and apartments. Starting price $900,000.
Our two boys have never known any home other than the one they were born in. Unlike their father, they have had stability and certainty from day one.
I often wonder when they’ll feel the same restlessness their father did, a longing to seek out and explore a world bigger and more challenging than the street they grew up in. Their own signposts. No doubt it will happen, and when it does, their father will encourage it because there is nothing more important than forging your own independent path in life.
But wherever they go in the world, they will always know that home is here, in Melbourne.
