In my suburb a woman put a cigarette out on my head. It’s that kind of place

I used to think it was noteworthy that “my Collingwood” was divided between the one I haunted in my 20s, when I would make out with guys in a particular laundry room on Ballarat Street in a house that hosted kick-ons, and the Collingwood I lived in through my 30s, where my public life was spent mostly buying groceries and other daylight business.

More recently, I’ve realised that psychic division is a normal condition of life in Collingwood – the suburb of Melbourne that most closely realises the communal image of a dense, layered inner city, and the conflicts of meaning that go on there.

A mural by Matt Adnate on the walls of Wellington Street public housing tower.Credit: Chris Hopkins

On a political map, Collingwood looks die-cut by machine: an almost-perfect rectangle, bordered on the west by Smith Street, the south by Victoria Street, the north by Alexandra Parade, and the east by Hoddle Street.

This north-east meeting point is where the trouble begins, with Hoddle Street giving to a service road – in the rectangle, it’s a divot – which shields a string of nature wedges from the edge of the freeway. All of these are disused save for violent swooping birds, or child-created memorials for departed pets, some of which can tend towards the darkly creative and make you worry for the children behind the craft projects.

Here, where the suburb meets Abbotsford and Clifton Hill, there’s a clutch of homes that stood to be demolished in the early 2010s to clear a pathway for the East West Link – something the Coalition still threatens to build, if they’re ever in a position to do so. In the 1970s, this same north-east corner is where locals protested the Eastern Freeway, a fight they lost despite constructing an actual brick wall and, later, a coffin that read “R.I.P. Collingwood”.

Closer to the present, it’s where several houses that had been acquired for demolition and left vacant by the government were occupied by squatters, to protest a public housing crisis that has only worsened.

Perhaps because it’s neat and small, Collingwood absorbs the energy of the suburbs that so tightly surround it. Think of the bars on the stretch of Johnston Street that’s been rebranded as “LoJo”; the Hoddle Street sniper; and the only two physical stores in the inner north where you can buy amyl nitrate, if that’s the kind of thing you’re after. These things are not quite in Collingwood yet ineffably belong to it, and influence its character and its people.

This is particularly remarkable when you consider the density of meaning that lies in the suburb proper. The corner of Stanley and Smith Streets hosts a Glenn Romanis sculpture that maps nearby places of Aboriginal significance in wood and stone, on a corner that for many years was the central site of the Smith Street Dreaming festival.

There’s also the iconic black-and-white football club, which is called the Pies, though I am living proof that you can live for years in Collingwood and still have to fact-check their nickname and club colours. This is because the ’burb makes room for many styles of devotion; depending on who you are, you might be powerfully drawn to the Peel, the 86 (the bar or the tram), the Wellington Street towers, or even the Smith Street Woolies, with its low one-storey ceiling behind a crazy-high façade – although supposedly, this is finally set to be developed.

The Sites of Significance sculpture on Smith Street.Credit: Chris Hopkins

The “G” word is as destructive here as anywhere else in Melbourne. But gentrification, and other forms of change, make strange and staggered motions. I once threw a gig at the Tote right before it closed, but it’s been brought back to life since then, and then re-closed and resurrected again – in other words, that was two whole life cycles ago.

The Keith Haring mural at the old Collingwood Technical College is so rarely defaced that when it happens, it makes the news. It’s an aspect of the suburb that feels fixed and sticky, even though the mural itself is occasionally repainted, which is how you conserve a work of graffiti that is exposed to the elements.

I miss the avo toast at Cibi before they zhuzhed it with red peppercorns, and I liked the greasy pizzas from Angelos – the family-size “tropical sunshine”, with mushroom and pineapple – even though Thin Slizzy, which took on the shopfront when it closed, has been serving brilliant pies for several years now.

“New Collingwood” is achingly satirised on the Instagram account, innernorth.ai – which shows fleets of himbos marching out of the Coles, obedient staffies fanning out before them. Collingwood is also arguably at risk of satirising itself, through newish-build apartments whose facades are stamped with huge designs of people who look vaguely urban.

But the Moon might be the only bar in Melbourne with nice indoor reading lights, and there’s still a step outside the eerie Easey/Budd St substation where you can cop some northern sun and eat a banh mi from Trang Bakery (eggplant tempura).

The truth is, I no longer have much of a claim to Collingwood – I lived in a tiny apartment with no outdoor area; there was a global crisis and the friendship got a bit stretched; I did my share of five-kilometre walks and post-pando, I left. Actually, I moved about 10 minutes north, but please allow me to make a massive deal of it.

The week I moved, I was locking my bike on Smith Street when a girl walked towards me, smoking and singing and still obviously rolling from the night before.

My helmeted noggin must have been too good a target. She put her cigarette out on my head and carried on her way, singing a song of history and change.

Ronnie Scott is a novelist. His last novel, Shirley, was set mostly in Collingwood. His next novel, Letter to a Fortunate Ex, is forthcoming.

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