My little-known suburb was an inner-city swamp known as ‘Worst Smelbourne’

When I say I live in West Melbourne, people sometimes think I mean “west of Melbourne” and that I’m perhaps embarrassed to say where. But it is indeed an actual suburb, although it’s not traditionally been regarded as a residential neighbourhood.

Much of what is now West Melbourne was once an abundant saltwater wetland, stretching from Flagstaff Gardens to Docklands, and thriving with birdlife that sustained the local Indigenous population. Now you’ll see more iterations of Pam the Bird – a local graffiti artist’s trademark artwork – than any of the wild geese or swans that once inhabited the area.

That beautiful blue lake didn’t last long. Within 20 years of colonial settlement, the suburb’s proximity to the city meant it rapidly became a cesspit of run-off from the abattoirs, fellmongers, tanneries and evocatively named “bone mills” that sprang up in surrounding areas. The lake became the West Melbourne Swamp and the suburb was for a time known colloquially as “Worst Smelbourne”.

Eventually, the swamp was drained to make way for the railway line. By the 1920s, while a bustling home to flour millers and other light industry, West Melbourne also housed some of the last slums in the inner city – Dudley Flats – comprised of shacks cobbled together from rubbish. It remained a homeless camp from the Depression until the 1950s.

These days, you can look out over the valley of industry and curved metal from a delightfully obscure railway viewing platform, which is most crowded during fireworks displays and lunar eclipses.

There were always some residential properties in West Melbourne – terrace houses and workers’ cottages remain today – but the suburb remained largely industrial for years until the 1990s, when some of those factories and warehouses were converted into apartments (my first address in postcode 3003 was in a building that I had once worked in during the early ’90s), or razed to make way for clunky townhouses that stick out like crooked teeth among the terraces.

But even then, despite its inner-city location (you can’t get any closer to the CBD) West Melbourne has never posed a threat to Fitzroy’s hipness.

For years, the area flew under the real-estate radar, but the secret is well and truly out. As well as the burgeoning Arden precinct, which ambitiously reimagines part of the old swamp as an “innovation hub” and promises that Spencer Street will become “the new Lygon Street”, new apartment buildings are rising as fast as house prices.

Technically, it’s a huge suburb – the boundary extends past Coode Island to the Maribyrnong in the west, but residentially, it feels small. The southern side of Victoria Street (although not as far as the Vic Market) counts as West Melbourne, and was for a long time the only retail in the area. Now there are multiple choices even in the part of the suburb south of King Street.

The most West Melbourne of all, with its industrial interior and faded ghost signs, is the Apollo Cafe. Housed in a heritage-listed former gymnasium, it’s where legendary Melbourne strongman The Mighty Apollo, known for feats of strength in the 1940s – such as pulling trams full of passengers with his teeth – used to train.

I’m not sure who said “all life is there” (Henry James? Jesus?), but it’s applicable to West Melbourne. If you believe, as some adherents of the idea of psychogeography do, that places can hold “memories” and identities despite the changes wrought by years, it’s definitely at play around here.

For more than 60 years from 1851, the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum, a huge complex of buildings on a four-hectare site at the western end of Victoria Street, provided relief to “the aged, infirm, disabled or destitute”.

More than a century on, troubled souls walk a well-worn path from the train station to one of the area’s crisis accommodation centres, which now butt up against shiny new builds. There’s no shortage of “colourful” incidents, especially near the busy station (more than once, a small wall near my meter box has provided an ad-hoc toilet for passers-by caught short).

Contradictions, as in other inner-city postcodes, abound. At one end of my street sits the Melbourne Assessment Prison; at the other, a new apartment complex (on the site of, naturally, a former factory), where some of the “warehouse-style” pads are asking as much as $1.8 million.

Midnight at the Embassy Cafe in 2007.Credit: Meredith O’Shea

You can still pinch lemons hanging over back fences of houses once/still (increasingly the former) owned by Italian and Greek immigrants who settled here post-war, but you might have to shimmy past a Tesla to reach them. Hillsong has set up its HQ here, just a short walk from a clutch of brothels (including one of the best named in Melbourne: The Main Course), up past the Witches in Britches theatre restaurant.

You can get arguably the city’s cheapest steak sandwich at the 24-hour institution that is the Embassy Cafe, which hasn’t closed its doors since 1962 (although, like many older buildings, it’s up for sale), serving generations of shift workers, cab drivers and post-gig Festival Hall revellers. Or you can find dainty Korean-influenced dishes at Moon Mart, a tiny cafe in a side street, or fresh shokupan from a Japanese bakery just off Spencer Street.

It’s often noisy – there are a few “rat runs” in the area; distant sirens fill the air more often than not and North Melbourne station (yes, it’s in West Melbourne) provides a steady stream of foot traffic. But on weekends, the wide streets are surprisingly quiet, mature gum trees quivering under the weight of parrots and wattlebirds.

There’s a sense of community among the dog walkers, the neighbours, the parents and the guerilla gardeners (even if it’s sometimes sharing commiserations of front-step mail theft).

You can stroll to the city, to the greenery of Royal Park, or up to Flagstaff for a game of lawn bowls. It’s not far to walk to Carlton, or Kensington. But for the best industrial sunset view, you’ll want to head back to West Melbourne.

Kylie Northover is deputy editor of Spectrum.

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