Ashfield is the pop culture mecca of Sydney. Here’s why

In Ashfield Park, right in the centre of the children’s playground, usually with her umbrella covered in dirty pigeons, stands a statue of Mary Poppins, a tribute to the character’s creator, author P.L. Travers, who lived around the corner “at 40 Pembroke St with her mother and sisters from 1918 to 1924”.

Some might say six years of residency in her teenage years is a bit loose to qualify for your own local landmark, but Ashfield’s like that. This is a place where an escalator upgrade at the local mall can attract such a sizable crowd that police intervention is required.

The Mary Poppins statue at its unveiling at Ashfield Park in 2004.Credit: 2004

I once heard an eccentric (drunk) old lady yelling on the train about the indignities of “Trashfield” – which was a bit rich for someone who disembarked at Slummer Hill – but I laughed with her. Ashfielders have an ironic sense of humour about our logical standing in the inner west (we know we’re not Newtown or Enmore, but at least we’re not Croydon). If you lived here for even a week and you’re somehow inadvertently responsible for bringing something like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” into the universal lexicon, you deserve a statue in Ashfield Park.

Geraldine Brooks probably deserves a statue in Ashfield Park. The Pulitzer-winning author of March might now live on Martha’s Vineyard, but she was born and raised down the road from the dumplings at Shanghai Night, a period she writes about in her nonfiction book Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over. I can’t imagine there are any other Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction from my neighbourhood, so she gets a statue.

There should also be some sort of statue of a rap cypher in motion, considering pioneering local hiphop acts including Def Wish Cast and Maya Jupiter had roots in the area. And a statue that somehow depicts indie sleaze, since Ashfield’s unofficial anthem is the 2003 cult cut 2131 (Ride Wit’ Me) by local legend Spod. I’d always just assumed Spod’s song was an obvious shout-out to Ashfield’s postcode but, in the interests of journalism, I had to confirm.

Writer Geraldine Brooks spent her formative years in Ashfield.Credit: Randi Baird

“Yeah, it was,” says Spod, real name Brent Griffin. “Like a little fantasy love letter to where we lived at the time. My friends and I lived there and were both making albums and wanted to talk up Ashfield to pretend there was some kind of cool scene there, so we littered some references in our records. They were in the band Further and had a song called Charlotte Street which is the street we were on. I love songs that call out postcodes and Ashfield’s postcode is eerily close to Snoop Dogg’s 213. Had to happen.”

I’d also give a statue to the mysterious bedroom producer Hyche, real name Andy Chen, whose 2022 album Exhaust, supposedly inspired by “monotonous visits to Ashfield Mall”, remains a minor masterpiece. It makes me wonder how many more artists are toiling away silently in their two-bedroom Ashfield apartments, lucratively selected because of the relatively cheaper rents in relation to the rest of the inner west and its proximity to Newtown (still only one stop away on the express train). I mean, half these people could probably be playing live nightly at Miss Celie’s, the late-night jazz and blues club halfway up Hercules Street, which is very convenient.

Spod, who talked up Ashfield “to pretend there was some kind of cool scene there”.

Another statue should go to “Fat Punk” (it’s fine, he called himself that), who is a cool guy I once met at the 461x bus stop on Parramatta Road near Bland Street. Fat Punk had overheard The Cure’s Mint Car coming from my headphones and struck up a friendly conversation. At that exact moment, a bunch of bros speeding down Parramatta Road yelled out a homophobic slur and threw an open bottle of chocolate milk at him. Without a beat (but messy), he collected it off the ground and pegged it right back at the car’s back window, hitting it with a splat. The car stopped, as if its inhabitants were ready to jump out and throw down, but they smartly drove off when Fat Punk charged after them like a bull. It was a scene straight out of an ’80s teen movie – the outcast outplaying the jocks – except this was the early ’00s. Fat Punk wore spikes, played in a band indebted to GG Allin, looked scary even though he was perfectly kind and polite. This is Ashfield culture. He gets a statue.

Wolf Like Me creator Abe Forsythe and actress Isla Fisher on the set of the TV series, which was filmed in Ashfield.

Let’s also give a statue to Isla Fisher and Josh Gad, because I’ve been told their TV series Wolf Like Me – where Isla Fisher plays a reluctant werewolf – shoots on the streets of Ashfield (I’ve never seen it, but I support their choices).

Look, I understand that’s a lot of statues now but this is how it works in Ashfield. Also, Ashfield Park is very big and Mary Poppins is lonely.

What do you think the best suburb in Sydney is for pop culture? Share your thoughts in the comments section.