MY SUBURB 2001 I live in an old brick house built on the edge of an orchard in the late nineteenth century. I have been here since 1988 – actually quite close to the city. The mock Tudor shopfronts of long ago are still here on Whitehorse Road, near Balwyn Road, alongside flash new marble and glass. There are no covered malls, just old-fashioned shops – Italian greengrocers that open onto the street, a pet shop surrounded by dog kennels. There is a big supermarket. And some real butchers. I came here by accident and then I stayed and I got written into the script. The first year or so I spent a lot of time in the front garden, and nearly everybody walking by stopped to talk on their way down to the shops. There is a warm sense of communal life – we like to know who is doing what and who is going where and why and how it is going to work out. Conversation overheard. Customer to shop-keeper: Did you hear about Victor? Shop-keeper: What happened? Customer: He was run over. Shop-keeper: Killed locally was he? And we discuss these things with each other in the frozen food aisle, in the flower shop, the shoe shop, the library, the video shop. I once had a cat who used to like to walk by himself down to visit the second-hand bookseller, The Merchant of Fairness. The cat would hang out in the bookshop for a while, and then the Merchant would ring me and I would go down to get him, and have coffee and a long chat and a browse through the shelves. Like a village, it is, well, bustling, but sort of quietly bustling. When the violins and clarinets appear outside the shops round Christmas, you realise that there usually is very little noise. In fact I always think on New Year’s Eve that this must be the quietest spot, right then, in all of Melbourne. Just us and the possums. I once heard Hugh Wirth say on the radio that there are no possums in Balwyn – I have to tell you there is a possum plague. Balwyn, I believe, was the old name of the property which is now Fintona Girls’ School, its two parts meaning ‘place’ and ‘wine’. This used to be a vineyard. Imagine. For generations Balwyn has been famous for being part of Melbourne’s publess dry area where you have to bring your own wine to the restaurants. Mind you, today you can buy as much wine as you like at the bottle shop, as long as you take it away with you. It is early on Sunday morning. People are coming for lunch. I go down the street to collect the wine. The sun is shining and I enjoy a short detour. It is spring, and ratepayers are expecting the rubbish collector soon, so people have started to put out their old stoves and cupboards and rusty gates. These things lie on the manicured nature strips, beneath the spreading ancient branches of elms and oaks. A soft haze of translucent green feathers the old branches, fills the air with light. In one silent Sunday street, not one, but two households have assembled for collection a dining table and six chairs. A dinner party for twelve ghostly guests. Desire under the elms. Discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. Improbable empty chairs and tables of blonde wood, out of fashion, high and dry, shipwrecks of marriage or renovation or transfer interstate. And further along the street a perfect plastic miniature, yellow, kindergarten table and chairs. Has everyone given up gathering round tables, retired behind the dark velvety hedges to lie on leather lounges with bowls of pasta, byo chardonnay, and a television set? Out with the old; make way for the new. I am not only an observer, but also a player. Once I put a red velvet armchair out on the nature strip for the collection. In no time at all it was gone. I amused myself speculating on who might have got it, enjoying the mystery of its destination. Yet somewhere still within the sensibility of the place there is a deep resistance to change. Small green signs, neatly screwed to fences, carefully lettered in black: We Will Oppose Inappropriate Development. Such controlled and decontaminated language translates swiftly in the mind into simple and enraged graffiti. The grand elaborate houses are disappearing, being replaced by a weirdly funereal form of architecture with sacophagal doorways, paths of white, white pebbles, and tight rows of miniature box trees. I am as sad as anybody to see the Edwardian fantasies and follies swept away, and it’s eerie when they fade to nothing, when their land lies empty, before the memorial blocks start to appear. 2,560 square metres of garden allotment on three titles are for sale on the corner. The enormous ‘landmark Queen Anne’ house with its tall terra cotta chimneys and graceful lookout tower is still there, but for years it has seemed to be fallow and empty, the neat notice on its pretty lych gate reading: Danger Dog Inside Do Not Enter. All those five bedrooms and gum leaf ceilings (I don’t know what they are either) for a dog? It was designed, says the advertisement, by Beverley Ussher in 1899. Well, I think the House of Ussher is probably doomed, and Inappropriate Development is about to swing into action – 2,560 is a lot of square metres, when you think about it. It suggests a life of sweet and dignified leisure, of tennis parties and garden parties and tea in the conservatory. It is Saturday afternoon in summer. Local cricket in progress in Cherry Road. On a nearby empty block of land where once there stood another Queen Anne mansion, two little girls in pastel dresses have set up a flower stall. There they are, almost lost in the middle of knee-high oxalis, which could at a distance be buttercups, with a table and chairs, selling sweet peas and lemonade. Only a block away is Whitehorse Road, and yet the cricket and the sweet pea stall could almost be out in the countryside. And leading from some of the small informal bits of parkland that open up in unexpected places there are wide grassy rambling laneways where jasmine and roses spill over from back fences. I walk along these lanes and get there a sense of timelessness, as if in a kind of lotus-eater land where it is always afternoon. There’s a system of underground streams honeycombing the area. Yet it is not all sun and lemonade stalls. By night newly painted fences will be graffitied; car aerials and wipers will be torn off; letter boxes will be smashed, hedges will be torched – I assume there’s a lot of youthful boredom here. The surface charm is soon restored, fences re-painted – and I find that people don’t really like to talk much about the vandalism. Once, in the dead of night, my car was shifted from the kerb and dumped in the middle of the road. People told me not to worry, it had happened before. For a while I used to write to the Council about the dim street lighting, but I never got an answer. There was once a woman who lived over the way, and she is gone now, and her house is gone, and the land is rapidly being clothed in vigorous morning-glory, and the sign on the fence says: Whelan the Wrecker. Once long ago the woman suggested I ought to write something about the suburb for the paper. And now that I have, I look at that uncompromising sign in the place where her house used to be, and I get a little shiver, a sense of memento mori. They will probably build one of those sepulchral places there, and when they do the memorial fence the graffiti will come, and then it will go… Change is relative. I do sometimes remember that a couple of hundred years ago the whole thing belonged to different people, and the trees were gum trees, wattle trees – and the water underground was probably sacred.