Aspendale is a sleepy paradise from Monday to Friday,a blip on Nepean Highway on the way to Frankston. But my suburb is transformed on weekends.
After a fruitless search in cooler suburbs,my partner and I ended up in Glen Iris ourselves,thinking we wouldn’t stay in the area long. Twenty-five years and two extensions later,we’re still here.
Owning a piece of sky instead of land? Raising a family in an apartment? All these things are normal in Asia,and yet so strange to many Australians.
The shops are now bigger and brighter in Greensborough’s beehive of development – and no longer owned by people whose names I once knew.
Inseparable like two peas in a pod,my suburb and its twin are tight-knit communities where families intermingle across their Scouts and sports clubs without a second thought.
When I moved house,friends in the “Bayside Bubble” promised they would visit. But one thing turned out to be as much of a psychological barrier as a physical one.
We haven’t had a gangland funeral across the road for years,but North Melbourne has always been an in-between place – a suburb of two identities.
I’m proud to live in McKinnon now,but as a child,I was embarrassed by the suburb my grandparents called home. Why couldn’t they live in the more fashionable Caulfield South?
After leaving Nunawading in the 1980s,the quest for a refrigerator recently drew me back to my childhood suburb. Somehow,the neighbourhood survived without us.
Ivanhoe might sound like a place of nobility but its colloquial name tends to dampen notions of upper-class superiority.
My family always said we lived in Rosanna East,which my friends from Viewbank found funny. Were we snobs?