My suburb is Melbourne’s smallest – and no, it’s not the one you think

See Gardenvale and die. Or, if you believe some accounts, live in Gardenvale and be dead.

The latter is all too likely a fate, judging by the lament for Gardenvale that journalist Guy Rundle uttered in his moving 2015 prose-poem Melbourne Interstitial. Rundle’s own words: “As close to an absence of place as you could get … Made out of, as the name suggests, old market garden areas, the last buffer between Brighton and the rest, Gardenvale was no sooner gazetted than it was eviscerated, with the new Nepean Highway driven through the heart of it.”

For a locale that has adorned Melbourne maps since 1966, Gardenvale (a mere 26 hectares in size, therefore smaller than any other Melbourne suburb) possesses not so much a brand-recognition problem as a serene unawareness that a brand-recognition problem might exist.

I moved here in 2003, after arriving in Melbourne from Sydney. One reason I cannot afford to retire is my abject failure to claim a dollar for every person – often Melbourne born and bred – who has asked: “Gardenvale, never heard of it, where’s that?”

If a week is (as former British MP Harold Wilson asserted) a long time in politics, two decades is a geological age in Australia’s real estate market. The early 2000s genuinely is another country; in 2004, after a year as a tenant in a Gardenvale unit, I could buy outright a one-bedroom flat in the same apartment block. I have lived there ever since.

The price for the flat in 2004: a grand total of $195,000. In today’s Melbourne, you would struggle to buy an outside lavatory for that sum.

Much of the problem in raising Gardenvale-consciousness is that officially speaking, the railway station identified as Gardenvale is now in Brighton. The same goes for the profusion of cafes, restaurants and clothing stores abutting this station along Martin Street. It’s like trying to settle the border wars over Nagorno-Karabakh. Minus, admittedly, the biffo.

One thing remains certain: when I moved in, both Gardenvale proper and “Gardenvale” as crypto-Brighton, had little for the shopper or the diner. They really constituted “an absence of place” with a vengeance.

True, Spink Street had its barber, Grant Ellis, still going strong 20 years afterwards, with eloquent and pungent recollections of his past clientele, including academic enfant terrible Frank Knopfelmacher (“the rudest man I ever met”). And Martin Street already had a laundromat, as well as a supermarket. But the supermarket remained dwarfed by what Elsternwick, Balaclava and Middle Brighton, on the Sandringham line, could supply.

Not so now. Veritable embarrassments of shopping and dining riches have emerged for Gardenvalians’ purses. No surprise, perhaps, in an electorate that rendered Tim Wilson publicly lachrymose by its solid teal vote in 2022.

Fears – my own included – that the lockdowns would doom these riches proved needlessly pessimistic. This might well be due to the locals’ penchant (which I fully shared) for ignoring the most draconian COVID laws.

Five-kilometre statutory limits or not, I kept up my almost daily walk from home to Elwood Beach and back again. From what I witnessed, 90 per cent of the locals behaved in a similar style. Alas, we lacked the publicity aptitude demonstrated by “Karen of Brighton”, whose defiant anti-lockdown ditties acquired her more than 13,000 Instagram followers.

A sporting goods store on the Nepean Highway, plausible gossip had it, stayed open amid lockdowns through having redefined its racquet-restringing subdivision as an “essential service”. I can well believe this, since the meaning of essential services had been attenuated to the point of farce. After all, I carried on my person a chit proclaiming the absolute necessity of my travelling via train and tram across the city to play the organ for Sunday Masses at Moreland.

Talking of Sunday Masses, “Greater Gardenvale” retains its Catholic girls’ school: Star of the Sea, the most celebrated alumna of which is Germaine Greer. Unluckier was the local Catholic church, St James, targeted by an arsonist in 2015.

Germaine Greer attended school in Gardenvale.Credit: Andrew De La Rue

Nearby Catholic parishes, like their counterparts throughout Melbourne and indeed almost throughout the Western world, have had to merge. They all come under the one “bayside” umbrella, with the usual concomitant of scarce, overworked priests. Presumably, these priests must now spend half their waking hours behind the steering wheel.

Thank goodness, though, Gardenvale continues to cater for those who, like me, have never managed to pass a driving test. Not only are the Sandringham line’s trains agreeably frequent – even late at night and at weekends – but so are nearby buses. The 630 bus stops almost directly outside my home and takes me to Monash’s main campus within half an hour.

Contrast this transportational luxury with (for instance) Rowville, residence of a taxi driver whom I met pre-pandemic. He assured me that he, his wife, and two children needed to own three cars just to cart groceries home and to hold down their jobs.

In short, if you must undergo the expense of living and working in Melbourne to begin with, you might as well be in Gardenvale as anywhere else. Overall, the suburb keeps much of its pleasant 1950s-60s character (my own apartment block dates from 1957). Gardenvale Park retains so much Menzies-era unpretentiousness, that one half expects to witness Mr Squiggle and Miss Pat rehearsing dialogues there for the juvenile contingent.

The whole suburb (even following the Brighton Empire’s annexation) has defied, so far, the worst of the growth-for-growth’s-sake mindset: a mindset which, far from being justified in economic or cultural terms, is nothing more than what American environmentalist Edward Abbey called “the ideology of the cancer cell”. Long may Gardenvale persist in such defiance.

Dr Robert James Stove is an organist, historian and the author of Kings, Queens and Fallen Monarchies, scheduled for publication by Pen and Sword (Yorkshire) later in 2024.

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