Forget geography, a new social divide is splitting Australia's biggest cities

Australia’s most fascinating border isn’t straight at all – it’s the circular ‘Goat's Cheese Curtain’ that reveals how our biggest cities have become battlegrounds between different tribes.

In some respects the Goat’s Cheese Curtain is a modern incarnation of the Wallace Line.

In April 1854 a 31-year-old British naturalist by the name of Alfred Russel Wallace stepped ashore at Singapore harbour to begin a grand adventure by exploring the flora and fauna (especially the beetles) of southeast Asia. Indeed, Wallace is reported to have collected 83,000 beetles!

Wallace never set foot on the Australian continent and yet within a decade he would be responsible for identifying a line, a schism, that separates the Asian and Australian faunal regions. The so-called Wallace Line defines the northern extent of native plant and animal life in our part of the world. More than a century later the geological theory of plate tectonics would explain how the Australian Plate and other plates move, carrying flora and fauna.

How apt that modern Australia, founded as a penal colony, should be isolated not just by the extent of the ocean blue but also by a fracture within the sea floor.

But the lines of Australia neither start nor end with the Wallace Line. Australia’s eastern seaboard is shaped by a mountain range aptly named the Great Dividing Range. It separates Australia’s lush east coast from the grazing lands that spill west into our rust red interior.

And then there’s the Brisbane Line, a notional line stretching from just north of Brisbane to just west of Adelaide that gallant Aussie diggers were to fall behind (to protect the “heartland”) should the Japanese invade our continent in 1942. However, the rumoured Brisbane Line was always more a story of panic than a product of military planning.

Scientist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913).

Ron Barassi played 204 games for the Melbourne Demons from 1953-1964.

I also like the Barassi Line invented by historian Ian Turner in 1978 to explain the territory commanded by rugby league as opposed to Aussie Rules. The Barassi Line is said to stretch from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Cape Howe on the NSW/Victorian border, with Aussie Rules dominant on the west side and league dominant on the east.

I am a quiet admirer of Western Australia’s eastern boundary that runs north-south for 1900km (or thereabouts) along the 129ºE meridian; it dissects our continent in a line that connects the Timor Sea with the Great Australian Bight. Imagine this: someone somewhere conceived of an imaginary line that would divide a continent. Who was that person – a politician, a surveyor, or an anonymous bureaucrat in Sydney or London?

Surely the best dividing line in Australia is the Goat’s Cheese Curtain.

But surely the best dividing line in Australia isn’t Wallace’s or Barassi’s or the 129ºE, and it certainly isn’t straight, it’s circular. It’s the Goat’s Cheese Curtain. It is my observation that in the central core of Australia’s biggest cities there clusters a distinct type of person. There was a time when the inner city was the home of battlers – places like Collingwood and Balmain – yet today this territory is inhabited, generally, by the young, the educated, the childless, and often by the well-to-do.

If Wallace were to step ashore today at any Australian ciy, I’m sure he would note a line that separates the lifeforms, the habitats and even the belief systems of the inner city from those of suburbia. There’s not much difference, really, between the natural world and the human world, especially when it comes to organising ourselves into big communities. In some respects the Goat’s Cheese Curtain is a modern incarnation of the Wallace Line.