My suburb attracts a cult-like loyalty, despite the grit and the gangsters

As a North Melbourne resident, I could never decide if I should boast about Mick Gatto being a regular at my local cafe or never mention it in polite company.

His preferred cafe on Victoria Street was on the West Melbourne side of the street the two suburbs share – the famous workers’ hangout, Don Camillo. I can only imagine the “Don” bit in the name proved irresistible to those blokes who keened for a life plucked from The Sopranos.

But we haven’t had a gangland funeral across the road at St Mary’s Star of the Sea for years, and most of the Italians and Greeks who grew vegetables in the front of their North Melbourne gardens are gone.

Now, young Japanese hipsters have replaced the swaggering wannabe crims, and the streets are filled with small, fluffy dogs and queues around the block for exclusive, bespoke pastries. It’s almost unimaginable, but just as the shark-toothed real estate agents had been predicting for years, North Melbourne has finally become desirable.

I’ve lived here, on and off, since my university days, sharing a terrace on Capel Street, then moving above a shopfront on Victoria Street, before we built our family house where one of Melbourne’s first kit homes from the 1860s stood.

That old house was caught in a classic Melbourne planning conundrum: historically protected because it retained its old slotted, Huon pine construction, but condemned and uninhabitable after it had been used as a shooting gallery by the local addicts.

With the help of a clever architect, we solved the problem by donating the house to the architecture department of the University of Melbourne. They’ve rebuilt it somewhere. But I don’t need to visit it. Like most citizens of the 1859 Municipal Borough of Hotham, home remains here.

North Melbourne is where the Melbourne grid breaks down. This is one of the oldest settled suburbs, taking in the high land to the north of the Flagstaff, in an oddly shaped wedge running up from the Queen Victoria Market past the Arden Street oval and North Melbourne footy club out to the commission flats near Kensington.

We are a suburb of two identities: heading down to Peel Street, the streets are filled with the slum cottages of the Victorian workers, but high on Hotham Hill are the boom-time terraces of the well-heeled.

It’s always been an in-between place: ridiculously convenient to the CBD, the airport, freeways and parks, yet, with its gritty edge, never as coveted as our better-regarded neighbours, Parkville and Carlton. Unless you were coming to the Vic Market or cutting through to the airport, you might not come here at all.

The North Melbourne Kangaroos at their Arden Street home base.Credit: Getty

But from its earliest days, it’s had a sense of neighbourhood that is almost cult-like in its ferocity: you see grit, we see charm.

Mind you, that charm can be elusive. Our tram, the No.57 to West Maribyrnong, is the filthiest one on the network, with dirty streaks of graphite tears running down its face from the pantograph overhead.

Away from the lush gum trees and streets of mature plane trees, some areas remain brutally underplanted, and there are few places as arid as North Melbourne on a 40-degree day. Except Brunswick. Just saying.

You have to make your peace with a noisy streetscape. Households live cheek by jowl with businesses and industry: dog walking must weave around delivery vans, and you can’t get too upset about 3am rubbish collections. Better that it’s picked up at all.

Our streets have what you might call colour. We are home to a major men’s shelter, and we still hang on to some of the astonishing number of pubs that used to be here – North Melbourne was once famous for having a pub on almost every corner: the Courthouse, the Sir Robert Peel, and the Central Club have all had recent facelifts. The guys from the shelter humbug you out the front of the IGA, seemingly in shifts, and they don’t hesitate to give you a hard time if you don’t fork out. The kids from the local primary school have learned to dodge them on their way home if they get particularly vocal.

The local youth hostel is a gift. From my window, I will hear every language on earth drift up from the street as flocks of young travellers from all points of the globe traipse past. I love how the languages change with the seasons: German and French during the Australian Open; Italian in the winter months; Nordic accents year-round.

Happily, the youthful visitors have become a permanent demographic shift, with a generation of younger Japanese, Korean and Chinese Australians moving in or making North Melbourne their preferred place of play. They queue for the latest Charlie Duffy pastry from Small Batch and compare dog-grooming notes out the front of the cult pour-over cafe, Path.

The grassy median on the lower side of Errol Street continues past lockdowns as a weekend picnic site to consume pastries from Bread Club (the original was born here) and coffee from Auction Rooms. On a sunny day, it’s a wonderful sight.

The view from one of North Melbourne’s public housing towers.Credit: Scott McNaughton

You could argue all this change was sparked by the success of one small, sweet corner shop: the now-legendary Nat Paull’s cake store, Beatrix. It’s almost ridiculous to think that cake could lead a suburb’s revival and herald a pastry boom that we are still riding. Every other month, a new shokupan (Japanese bread) or baguette or cake or pastry shop flings open its doors here, and we are yet to see the saturation point.

The next great shifts will undoubtedly be the opening of the new Arden Street Metro Tunnel station and the West Gate Tunnel exits, and we are bracing ourselves for what they will release into our busy suburb.

But I do love that I can step out the front door and the streets are full of pedestrians and students and workers, and dogs on leashes and bolting toddlers and babies in prams.

I go to the so-called leafy suburbs of Melbourne to visit friends and wonder: where are you all? Why don’t you walk down your streets?

My suburb thrums with all the life of this diverse city. It keeps me alive.

Virginia Trioli is the presenter of Creative Types, 9pm on Tuesdays on ABC TV and iview from April 9.

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