Brighton isn’t all Karens and mansions – but it would help if they locked their doors

In a series, The Age profiles Victorian suburbs and towns to reveal how they’ve changed over the decades.See all 43 stories.

Yes, crime, Karens and property are the reasons this wealthy bayside suburb hits the headlines, but this particular Brighton story starts several decades ago and half a world away on the road to Lebanon’s Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport.

There, in 1999, Hanna El Mouallem, a young man from the Kfarhazir village, was on his way to the airport with the nervousness of a man whose life was about to go around a corner.

Above the roadway a billboard spruiked Emirates airline’s weekly flights to Melbourne with a glorious photo of its brightly coloured Brighton Bathing Boxes.

“I had absolutely no idea,” El Mouallem recalled this week of the world-famous beach huts from his table at Brighton’s Dendy Deli cafe and restaurant, a mainstay of the Church Street shopping thoroughfare.

Hanna El Mouallem at the family owned Dendy Deli, named after suburb founder Henry Dendy.Credit: Joe Armao

El Mouallem boarded his very first flight to travel all the way to Melbourne to reunite with his sweetheart, Sally, whom he met while she was travelling, and to meet her family. Soon after he arrived, his prospective father-in-law, Fred Seoud, showed off nearby Dendy Street Beach. And waiting for him there were the beach boxes.

“In one way it was meant to be,” said El Mouallem, 47, who runs the family-owned Dendy Deli with wife Sally. The construction project manager is also a City of Bayside councillor and served a stint as mayor until last year.

Despite the suburb’s reputation as a rich white enclave, he said the locals were kind and non-judgmental.

“It doesn’t matter what your colour, your orientation, your sex, believe me. You come to this community, once you start knowing them they treat you very kindly. My English was pretty terrible, but they took me in,” he said.

“I grew up during the civil war. Sometimes I was going to school in bomb shelters. It was religion against religion.

“I come to this place and I am safe. I can be who I am. I’m sorry but not many people here understand how lucky we are. I have come here, to be honest, not just to the best country but to the best state and the best suburb. I came with absolutely nothing. Nothing.”

Brighton and crime

Supporters talk about Brighton as a village, or a bubble, or “better than Disneyland”, while detractors call it cliquey, or even superficial and fake. And they also talk about crime.

Theft and burglaries rose from 2022 to 2023 across the Bayside local government area, and campaigners on the crime issue include prominent local influencer Bec Judd, wife of ex-footballer Chris Judd. Bayside Mayor Fiona Stitfold wrote a letter of concern to Premier Jacinta Allan.

But Victoria Police says the Bayside area encompassing Brighton is one of Melbourne’s safest places, with the third-lowest number of criminal offences of all 31 metropolitan local government areas.

“However, we are seeing teenage offenders sneaking into unlocked homes to steal car keys,” Assistant Commissioner (Southern Metro Region) Chris Gilbert told The Age.

Church Street Brighton is a meeting place for young and old.Credit: Joe Armao

“Between February and March this year, 60 per cent of all aggravated burglaries in the Bayside area showed no sign of forced entry, with offenders simply walking through unlocked or open doors and windows. On top of this, another 18 per cent were failed attempts.

“Offenders are telling us when interviewed that they’ll walk up and down a street until they find a door or window that is unlocked.

“We urge the community to heed one clear message from this – if you don’t lock your doors and windows, the odds of falling victim to a home burglary increase exponentially.”

Police have run a dedicated night-time operation targeting burglaries and car thefts across Melbourne, including Bayside, since March 2023. Operation Trinity has led to more than 1400 arrests relating to burglaries and car thefts in the past 12 months and nearly 2550 nightshift arrests in targeted areas for other offending.

“Bayside Mayor Fiona Stitfold is scheduled to meet with the minister for police next month to discuss how council can work collaboratively with the Victorian government to proactively identify and respond to safety issues in Bayside,” a council spokesman said.

El Mouallem, whom Stitfold replaced as mayor, revealed to The Age he was nearly a victim of a robbery.

On August 26, he was at the deli when security cameras pinged an alarm to his phone. An intruder walking up his driveway and was attempting to break into his black Toyota SUV.

El Mouallem raced to his home to find the thief returning to his own car.

“I looked him in the eye and he tried to run me over. To be honest I should not have gone there and tried to apprehend him. I wanted to ask him what he was doing,” he said.

“I don’t see this in Lebanon. I actually leave my car when I am back. They don’t try to steal it.”

The two Brightons

Brighton has four train stations, two cinemas, the beach boxes, a stretch of astonishing beachfront mansions known as the Golden Mile and even a men-only members club that wouldn’t be out of place on Collins Street. The West Brighton Club hosts Friday night dinners at which the president is known to call on members to sing solos during club singalongs.

“There are two Brightons of course,” says chartered accountant John Rundell, sitting in the Royal Brighton Yacht Club, looking out over the Middle Brighton Pier and the marina where his 40-foot wooden yacht Why Not is moored.

“There’s the community that arrived recently and the families that have been here forever.”

The yacht club is the second oldest in Victoria. America’s Cup legend John Bertrand still races there occasionally and ex-premier Ted Baillieu is a member and is part of the Icebergers swimming group, where his nickname is “former”.

Rundell has his own unhappy crime experience. An Airbnb host, he is in dispute with the company after it asked him to host a guest at the last minute who then allegedly stole $17,300 from his home.

English landowner Henry Dendy founded Brighton in 1841 after purchasing more than 5000 acres sight unseen from authorities in England at a bargain price. Upon his arrival, the local governor was so alarmed he insisted Dendy be granted land miles away from Melbourne. The land was worth a fortune, but a financial crisis saw investment dry up and Dendy was forced to sell, dying a pauper. Land prices soon recovered. The first railway arrived in the suburb in 1859 and the first beach boxes in the 1860s. The 96 boxes can fetch more than $300,000 each but efforts to fight sand erosion are priced at $3 million.

In little more than three blocks, Church Street boasts about 70 retail shops, 18 restaurants and takeaways, nine cafes, six hairdressers, four banks, two supermarkets, two bookshops, a jeweller offering safety deposit boxes, a butcher and an organic dry cleaner. It does not have a McDonald’s. The old site was taken over in the early 2000s when Fred Seoud expanded Dendy Deli next door to take up a double frontage of Church Street, much like Brighton’s many mansions.

The village

You cannot have an unbroken conversation with a Brighton local. A friend or a neighbour or their offspring walk past, and they simply have to break off to say hello.

Patricia Ilhan is a prominent Brighton fundraiser. Credit: Simon Schluter

This happens in the Dendy Deli, when my conversation with El Mouallem is interrupted by Michael Klim’s dad, Wojtek, a Polish migrant who lives around the corner.

I am at trendy cafe The Pantry, also on Church Street, explaining this to Patricia Ilhan, 59. The Brighton rich-lister, widow, and breast cancer survivor who sold her beachfront garden for $20 million (that’s her garden, not her house) is listening intently when suddenly she lets out a hoot aimed behind my right shoulder.

“That’s my daughter!”

Ilhan has four children. Jaida Ilhan, 23, studying a university post-graduate degree, has arrived to catch up with a girlfriend at the next table.

Which means she sits within earshot listening to her mother describing herself and her siblings and life in Brighton. And how her mother bought her and stepsister, Makenzi, a nearby apartment when they moved out – before selling it at a loss when the pair decided they wanted to return to the family home. Ilhan does not seem to mind this.

“Brighton is such a beautiful place and everything you need is here, and you don’t need to go out of the bubble,” Ilhan says.

“I don’t want to offend anyone in Toorak but …” she continues, detailing that suburb’s traffic congestion.

Two years ago Ilhan married Chris Blackman, whom she had known since their daughters Jaida and Makenzi were friends at preschool.

In 2007 her first husband, John Ilhan, died of a heart condition while jogging near their Brighton home aged 42. The founder of Crazy John’s mobile phone chain was the richest Australian aged under 40. He was worth $310 million and the 126th-richest man in Australia when he died.

Ilhan finds the Karen from Brighton image “terrible, I think it is embarrassing”.

“It is not relevant to anyone in Brighton. Is Karen her real name?”

Karen was a nickname Melbourne bestowed on Brighton resident Jodi Grollo after she was quoted during lockdown saying she’d “done all of Brighton” during lockdown walks.

“No one here could understand what she was representing,” Ilhan said.

The rich-lister is raising money to fund the training of a 12-month residency in the Centre for Paediatric Allergies at Epworth (Jaida was diagnosed aged two with life-threatening anaphylaxis). There will be a $1000-a-head private dinner in June at a local home that remains a mystery until the week of the event. Plus she will embark with friends on a fundraising six-day walk in Tuscany in September to raise $200,000.

Susan Williams and Steve Hitchings, owners of The Finishing Touch. Credit: Joe Armao

“It is my life’s work. We have the highest rates in the world and here in Victoria we have the highest rates in Australia. I think it is our responsibility as we were given this child who is severely anaphylactic to tree nuts.”

Housing in the bubble

Many suburbs are grappling with the state government’s demand for more medium-density housing, but Brighton is already there, as Susan Williams and Steve Hitchings can attest.

The couple own and run The Finishing Touch, an expert packing and unpacking service about to celebrate its 30th anniversary that employs about 150 local women mainly aged in their 50s and 60s.

“A lot of high-end apartments have been built in Hampton and Brighton in the past five to eight years. Massive amounts,” Hitchings said.

“The demand has been from people who have massive big Brighton homes downsizing. They want to stay in the area but their houses are too big for them.”

In Brighton, houses make up 57.1 per cent of dwellings (compared to more than 65 per cent in Kew), while semi-detached properties make up 22.2 per cent and apartments 20 per cent. Much of the suburb is set aside for housing, but activity centres around the shopping strips and railway stations allow for apartment living.

In March, a social and affordable housing project on the corner of New and Rusden streets opened with a mix of 151 social and 140 market rental one two and three-bedroom homes. For the first time, Homes Victoria leased the land to a not-for-profit partner, Building Communities, to manage the flats for 40 years.

But a plan to build 82 two-storey townhouses on a 32,000-square metre former Xavier College campus site on South Road is controversial, particularly after Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny seized control of the approval process after Bayside Council rejected it. It looks set to go ahead.

The couple are stout defenders of local businesses and willing to pay extra at places like The Pantry, which charges $16.50 for eggs on toast.

“People are loyal,” she said, mentioning high rents and Pantry co-owner Daniel Vaughan’s local fundraising.

“And that’s why you would be paying an extra three dollars for the eggs. He’s part of the community.”

That community includes many residential streets having their WhatsApp groups, with upwards of 150 members.

“Basically everyone who’s on the street. People just pop onto this chat group all the time helping each other,” says Hitchings, who grew up in the country in the Western Districts.

“You see the better side of life. The stuff that you don’t see at 6pm or 7pm, which is not news any more it’s just a police report.”

“It’s better than Disneyland,” Williams concludes.

Patricia Ilhan says the suburb is like a small town. “It is therapeutic. It feels every weekend that you are going away for the weekend.”

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