This was published 2 months ago
The suburb that lost its grunge, but kept its cutting-edge cool
By Alex Crowe
Frank Apostolopoulos has been cutting hair on High Street in Northcote for almost 50 years.Credit: PENNY STEPHENS
There’s a new shop setting up next door to Frank’s Hairdressing in Northcote.
“Since I’ve been here it’s probably changed hands about 10 or 12 times,” barber George Karmis says over the buzz of clippers.
Karmis has watched them come and go through the barbers’ window near the busy Separation Street intersection for 20 years – practically a Northcote newbie compared with his father-in-law Frank Apostolopoulos.
“The only one to remain the same in this street is me,” Apostolopoulos confirms.
Aussie boys sported Beatles’ dos when he set up shop among Melbourne’s largest Greek community in 1975.
Northcote Plaza hadn’t opened at the former Northcote Brick Co site. The billionaire who built the platform for its 17,000 Facebook fans – on The Northcote Plaza Appreciation Society page – was not even born.
“Short back and sides” – think buzz cut, but with a blade – or “egg haircuts” were preferred options at Frank’s this week.
At $20 for a cut or traditional-style shave– “we don’t believe in inflation” – it’s no surprise Karmis is too busy to stop and chat.
“That’s why we’re getting some of the young kids come in,” he says. “They don’t want to pay the hipster prices.”
Across the street, the Northcote pub that replaced the working-class Commercial Hotel is busy.
Northcote Social Club manager Emily Ferris has worked for the same hospitality group for 20 years.Credit: Wayne Taylor
The Northcote Social Club turns 20 next year, still under two of the same three owners who transformed the Commercial.
Manager Emily Ferris, who was there at the start, greets a man in his 60s wearing sandals and nursing a midday pot as she sits down.
“The reason it’s stuck it out for so long is because it is such a part of the community,” Ferris says.
“People have a lot of ownership over it, and it hasn’t really changed that much.”
Inspired by the original Punters Club in Fitzroy – once owned by a Northcote Social Club partner – the High Street band room has been the big stage for many homegrown international stars.
Danzal Baker, aka Baker Boy, performed there on his debut headline tour in 2018. Indie rock legend Courtney Barnett worked the bar and performed songs from her EP I’ve got a friend called Emily Ferris there in her early 20s.
Lady Gaga even partied with staff on American Independence Day on her 2012 tour of Australia. If it weren’t for a few, since deleted, photos of a leopard-print Gaga, that night might have lived on only in memories.
“It was fun,” Ferris says. “They were pretty loose.”
The Northcote Social Club underwent renovations in 2015, a spruce up not exactly embraced by regulars.
The pushback against change – and recognition of it – is perhaps why it has survived gentrification.
From an over-50s crowd for a Toto cover band on Sunday to 18-year-olds packing out the venue for Wet Denim the night before, Ferris says there’s no typical customer.
“I worked a shift once where we had a baby shower function on the deck and a death metal band playing in the band room,” she says. “It’s such a melting pot.”
In the past two years, High Street has received two big cash injections from the state that predominantly benefited live-music venues.
The Eighty-Six festival debuted last year and was heralded a success by live-music operators.
And, pitched as a return to “Melbourne’s best street party”, the Northcote Rise festival was held on High Street in 2023 after a 13-year hiatus.
Northcote Theatre booking manager Ben Thompson ahead of a mid-week gig at the revamped venue.Credit: PENNY STEPHENS
“We have lost the High Street festival – when everyone would just go out on the street and get loose and have a good time,” music venue booking manager Ben Thompson says.
“But I think we’ve gained a lot more.”
Thompson is inside the grandiose Northcote Theatre, across the road from the social club, just up Ruckers Hill towards the city.
For decades the more than 100-year-old building sat largely unused in the heart of Northcote, the dust swept away for the odd wedding reception, after it stopped operating as a cinema.
Having moved north from Fitzroy 15 years ago, Thompson was once among the passersby who peeped through the closed double-door windows at the auditorium inside. The top mezzanine, where Thompson sits above the theatre stage this week, had become a boarded up home for pigeons when he stepped inside for the first time four years ago.
“I love seeing people’s faces as they come in here,” he says.
“So many people have walked past with no idea it opened up into such a great, big, wide, beautiful, old theatre.”
Thompson says the social club showed patrons, promotors and artists that gigs sold out in Northcote.
“A lot of the artistic community moved out to Northcote and Brunswick and the northern suburbs when Fitzroy and Collingwood and Richmond all became a bit too expensive,” he says.
“I think they realised after a while that it has that population.”
In 2020, the Darebin Council – perhaps surprisingly – approved a licence for the 1500 capacity live-music venue, smack bang in the middle of a dense residential area.
Opening with a sold-out Spiderbait show in July 2022, the Northcote Theatre has since put on about 200 shows.
“I’ve seen Northcote grow in the last 20 years into a really dynamic, exciting centre for artistry,” Thompson says. “It’s really buzzing.”
Northcote sits on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri-willam people, a clan of several extended families that were the original occupants of what are now Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
Despite the federal electorate of Cooper being held by Labor in all but two elections in the past century, the suburb is likely named after a British conservative. Henry Stafford Northcote, a conservative member for Exeter in the House of Commons, was sworn in as governor-general of Australia in 1904 and served until 1908. Back then Cooper was known as Batman – but the seat swapped the name of the man who founded Melbourne, and massacred Indigenous Australians, to the name of the Indigenous man who led the fight for Indigenous rights, William Cooper.
The first government land sales were for farming in 1839. South of Westgarth Street, the land reserved for the township, was not sold until 1850. By the 1880s Northcote had become the second-largest municipality for brick production in Victoria, making use of large sedimentary clays beds that lay just below its surface.
Shops and houses began appearing on High Street after it became the main transport route to farms in the Plenty Valley.
Nowadays along High Street, you’ll find real estate agents. Fewer cake shops, but lots of real estate agents. If you visit their websites, you’ll see them spruiking Northcote’s “top-performing public school zone”.
Former Northcote High School principal Kate Morris has helped make it a selling point.
“A really good public school is worth a lot of money,” Morris says. “You can buy a more expensive house if you don’t have to send your kids to private school.”
Northcote High opened as an all-boys school in 1929 and while girls were accepted in the 1980s, male students still outnumbered them when Morris took the reins in 2008. Families’ concern over the gender imbalance was self-perpetuating: parents opted to send their girls where they wouldn’t be outnumbered.
Former Northcote High School Principal Kate Morris at Tinker cafe.Credit: Penny Stephens
Morris says the school struggled to shake its all-boys reputation.
“That was more a vibe … more folklore than fact that we weren’t a school for everyone,” she says. “The world was changing rapidly and we needed to change with it.”
And so began a community engagement project that sought buy-in from Northcote families.
“My goal was to get the confidence of the community in the fact that our school could deliver a really top quality education for their child, no matter girl, boy or anything else,” she says.
It hasn’t been all smooth sailing. In 2016, the school was accused of attempting to rebrand itself as an elite state school when it responded to dwindling numbers in its Greek and Italian classes by phasing them out.
Morris was forced to backflip after a backlash from the Greek Orthodox Community. She can laugh about it, now.
“We had a lot of argy-bargy with the Greek community,” Morris says. “At which point everyone rallied, signed up for Greek and Greek continues.”
The City of Darebin’s Greek community remains the second largest in Victoria, but the 2021 census showed only 3.5 per cent of Northcote residents were born in Greece. The wave who arrived after World War II reached retirement age, and many of their families have been priced out during Northcote’s seemingly boundless boom.
Jane Morton purchased an old boarding house for $45,000 on a rundown street near Merri Creek in the early 80s. At the time, more than 40 per cent of Northcote houses sold were in the lowest Melbourne price quartile.
“The houses on this side were all nice Edwardian and the houses on that side are all California bungalows,” Morton says.
Jane Morton at her home in Northcote. Credit: Wayne Taylor
“It was all Greek and Italian, pretty much and people like me ... just starting work.”
Morton saved a deposit after two years working as a psychology graduate at what was then the Mont Park Psychiatric Hospital. She paid it off a few years later with one of Jeff Kennett’s redundancy packages.
In the past 10 years, Northcote’s median house price rose from $820,000 to $1.66 million. Just as the children of the Italian and Greek settlers of the 60s have been priced out, so too have the children of the hippies who arrived in the 70s.
In the 2000s, after being shown a graph of the Arctic ice melt, Morton became a climate activist. Throughout her 50s and 60s, Morton has blockaded Adani mines, climbed atop trucks to stop Melbourne traffic and been arrested seven times.
Looking out over the yard that first attracted her to the house that became a home for her blended family’s five children, Morton considers what they think of her activism.
“Well, they think I’m wasting my time because we’re already f---ed, and they don’t think I’m going to change it,” she says. “Sometimes I’m not sure either, but on the other hand, I think you never quite know.”
Morton was part of the reason Darebin was the first council in the world to declare a climate emergency.
Her climate action group had been active for eight years by then but, other than change, weren’t clear what it was asking for.
The idea of the emergency declaration came just ahead of a Darebin council election. The group pressured candidates to declare publicly their stance on declaring an emergency. Many candidates signed on, several were elected.
Credit: Matt Golding
“An activist was in the car park as they were going into the first council meeting, and just said, ‘Well, right, you guys are going to declare an emergency then’,” Morton says.
“They just did and it was the first in the world.”
The idea spread through local councils, state and federal government in Australia, and has reached thousands of countries around the world.
Beginning in the 70s, the restoration of Merri Creek took it from an industrial dump site to its current glory. Flowing the length of the border with Brunswick, the Merri Creek’s bike and walking trails near Morton’s house have made it a Northcote landmark.
While Northcote is clearly quite white and fairly rich, it’s known to be a bit gay.
The number of same-sex couples living in Northcote on Census night in 2021 was 4.9 per cent, well above Greater Melbourne’s 1.6 per cent, with lesbians amounting to 2.9 per cent, making Northcote one of the suburbs with the highest percentage of lesbians behind Brunswick, Collingwood and Brunswick East.
Northcote Social Club manager Scout Tester says the queer community in the north is welcoming.Credit: Wayne Taylor
Back at the Northcote Social Club, manager Scout Tester is not surprised.
“The queer community is definitely vibrant here,” says Tester, who prefers the gender-neutral pronoun they. “It sticks out like a beautiful sore thumb.”
Tester puts the high percentage of queers in the north down to a natural migration process. They said seeing people you recognise as like you in the streets is a drawcard to members of any community.
“There’s something about Melbourne that we’re lucky to get to live freely.
“People naturally gather and I think Northcote has that vibe … it has a piece for everyone, not just the queer community but the Greek community that has been here forever and the Italian community that has been here forever.”
Get the day’s breaking news, entertainment ideas and a long read to enjoy. Sign up to receive our Evening Edition newsletter.