In my suburb, it’s easy to tell the locals apart – just look at their legs

Rosanna is an in-between place. It’s a card-carrying member of Melbourne’s middle suburbia but still gives more than a whiff of the farming country it was in living memory.

Growing up here in the 1970s and ’80s, the newly built housing estates were surrounded by paddocks. I could see cows grazing on a nearby hill from my bedroom window. For the first few years of my life, milk was delivered by horse and cart – a fact my children refuse to believe.

Humans outnumber livestock these days, but it’s a place where you can feel Melbourne suburbia click into a different headspace. Out here, just past Ivanhoe and Heidelberg, the neat geometric clip of inner-urban blocks finds a more languid groove. Even the air is different. It’s fresher, the light is softer. The sun setting over the rewilded Banyule Flats wetlands is a thing of golden beauty.

Some of my favourite parts of the Rosanna I grew up with are no longer Rosanna – in 2006, the south-east corner was cruelly sliced off and given to Heidelberg. It’s further proof that Rosanna’s bigger neighbours have always had better PR agents. Heidelberg got its famous School of Art, but poor old Rosanna got erased from the illustrious history of McCubbin, Roberts and Streeton, who painted around here too.

Eaglemont gets the kudos as the canvas for Australia’s experimental modernist architects, but Rosanna has its own heritage-listed Robin Boyd, with its tell-tale window wall peeking above a mysterious curved brick compound. It’s close to my nana’s old 1950s home, which is far more representative of a ’burb where simple weatherboard and brick veneer constructions didn’t have much chance of alarming the Joneses.

It’s changed now, in the way of all places 12 kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD. The old houses are reaching the end of their natural life, and their replacements are bigger and flasher. It’s gone up in the desirability stakes, but even still, Rosanna is the quiet achiever of the north-east: an unshouty suburb for unshouty people. For years, the closest thing to a bar was Aagaman Indian Nepalese Restaurant on Lower Plenty Road. Even these days, the only thing resembling nightlife is Margarita Wednesdays at Mexican Taco down near the station.

It’s no coincidence Rosanna is the first zone 2 station on the Hurstbridge line. Heading toward the city, the next stop is Heidelberg – aka “the big shops” on Burgundy Street. Turn the other way and there be dragons (or at least Macleod). And woe betide any commuter caught out by the tyranny of the express trains hurtling through Rosanna. I remember a woman in the afternoon peak hour rush berating the carriage for not waking her in time: “You know where I get off, you bastards!”

No, Rosanna wasn’t named after the early ’80s Toto pop hit (obviously) but derives from a farm named after a 19th-century resident, Elizabeth Anna Rose.

Rosanna is pretty. Its residents are garden-proud, and its parks – semi-wild swathes of habitat – fire the imagination. But to a restive Rosanna teenager, it felt like life was elsewhere. There was plenty of time to ponder its inherent uncoolness on the half-hour walk to the station and the 30-minute train trip to Flinders Street.

A flat gradient is a rare occurrence in Rosanna. Like the sherpas of Nepal, Rosanna locals stand out for their well-formed calf muscles, the result of trekking up and down endless hills. Banyule, the name of a swath of the ’burb near the river and the local council, apparently translates to “big hill” in the Woi-Wurrung language. The connection to country is less obvious in the Banyule estate where I grew up, where a virulent case of Anglomania resulted in street names dripping in nostalgia: Buckingham Drive, Sussex Court, Shropshire Street.

Mum’s still there, in a house on a court near the Banyule Homestead, which is best described as an 1846 approximation of an English castle. Formerly a part of Rosanna before the border redistribution, it had its moment in the sun as the home of Shaun Micallef’s fictitious Andrew Dugdale in The Ex-PM.

Down the hill, my old Banyule High School was closed by the Kennett government, but its theatre, where the Dubecki family marvelled at the year-10 talents of Ben Mendelsohn playing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, still remains.

New Rosanna is all about upward mobility, in its most literal sense. The freshly elevated Rosanna station, its level crossing consigned to history, is barely recognisable to anyone who stood every weekday grimly waiting for the 7.17am to the city. It’s as flash as metropolitan transit has a right to be.

The North-East Link is about to swoop in like a white knight to save residents from the traffic snarls on Rosanna Road. The unassuming low-rise library, where I graduated from Beatrix Potter to Judy Blume before matriculating in S.E. Hinton, is being moved to a three-storey extravaganza currently under construction. Its site is being turned into a Woolworths, which to some locals represents a macho Big Supermarket muscle-in of a sweet shopping village that cascades down the vertiginous gradient of Lower Plenty Road and the end of days for Rosanna as they’ve known and loved it.

Dog owners still have to look out for the tiger snakes that dispatch beloved pets each summer, but the land of 1950s and ’60s subdivisions has matured into middle age. It’s still quiet and, dare I say it, uncool. But like my dad used to say, that’s just how people in Rosanna like it.

Larissa Dubecki is a Melbourne-based writer.

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