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?
If you can get past the assumptions people make when you say you live here,Toorak really is a wonderful place to live … when you’re not at your beach house.
I once disembarked the tram at Bridge Road to wafts of Cussons Imperial Leather soap from the factory. But times have well and truly changed.