Pyjamas as outerwear? Nobody takes any notice in this inner-west wonderland

On our first date, the man I later married showed me Footscray’s micro-economies.

It was a Saturday morning and unlicensed vendors sold herbs, leafy Asian greens, seedlings, yam fritters and rice parcels steamed in banana leaves on the street corner, retrieving their wares from polyester trolley carts.

For lunch, he ordered Hanoi spring rolls and wrapped them in lettuce and mint before dipping them in fish sauce. Afterwards, we wandered around a Polish festival on the banks of the Maribyrnong River where stalls served pierogi and cabbage rolls.

He gave me a condensed snapshot of Melbourne’s inner west: once known for Greek and Italian migrants, as well as the slaughterhouses and factories spewing toxic waste into the putrid river, it became home to waves of Vietnamese immigrants who opened bakeries, pho restaurants and hair salons on Barkly Street, and Ethiopian and Sudanese immigrants who congregated in the African quarter on Nicholson Street. For a transplant from Perth’s desolate limestone suburbs, here was a multifarious wonderland where the Anglo heteronormative presence was a side dish.

Footscray Park provides a sweeping view of the floodplains and Flemington Racecourse, where picnickers can glimpse the Melbourne Cup and a parade of inebriated, dishevelled racegoers stumbling up the heritage-protected lawn.

Near the Nicholson Street shopping precinct are desecrated pillars to municipal revenue – parking meters subjected to public outcry and frequent vandalism and culminating in councillors being assaulted. Shoppers wend their way around the regulars – a Vietnamese man, usually shirtless, sits atop a plastic stool on a bench and blasts a backing track to his solo monologue, a rambling ad-libbed rap delivered with conviction and a fluttering fan. A lady shakes imitation red envelopes adorning the Lunar New Year installation, hoping for a cash freebie while performers on stage belt operatic tributes to love, dreams, lost lands and changing seasons.

At Footscray Market, cash is still king, and alongside the Savers Megastore and Cheaper Buy Miles, which stock surplus produce past their “best before” dates (and where I once acquired a giant wheel of brie and a vegan ham), make up the holy trifecta for inflation avoidance.

At our wedding picnic in Footscray Park, we converted an empty fridge into an esky by lying it flat on the grass and loading it with alcohol from Costco. My husband plugged up the glory hole in the now-demolished, occasional gay beat of a bluestone public toilet block, booked musician Jali Babu with his stringed kora (a West African harp lute) to serenade the party, and enlisted caterers from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. His extended family cracked half-serious jibes about the need to wear bulletproof vests in the wild west of “Footscrazy”. The air grew more humid and oppressive until the rain clouds burst over guests dancing in furry animal onesies and throwing themselves down water slides set up on the nearby hill.

The picnic morphed into an inebriated evening. Sudanese families gathering for a barbecue began to merge with ours until I was surrounded by a group of children asking me to adjudicate their cartwheel competition. “I didn’t realise you could set the bar so low on weddings,” said a friend, with a kind of admiration.

The grungy, patchwork architecture of the neighbourhood veers from renovated cottages to brick veneer residences with gardens cobbled together from succulents and Asian market greens sprouting in polystyrene boxes. We settled in a dilapidated, heritage-listed double fronted Victorian terrace. When we first moved there, my husband chased away users shooting up in the alleyway behind the garage, concealing themselves from street patrols; but in front of our house, a man parked in a car overdosed and died. Now the street is occupied by young families lured west from Albert Park and Prahran by smaller mortgages and larger yards.

The student share houses are being replaced by pristine renovations. Whippets and greyhounds abound. Our rental is one of the last relics on the street, the kitchen floor slowly sliding into the dirt, awaiting a restump – the kind of house which is ramshackle and charming for children, and prompts a welfare check from a friend perplexed by my perpetual inability as an elder Millennial to meet adult milestones. It’s hard to leave a place where we can trade backyard chicken eggs with neighbours for baked goods, Filipino condensed milk jelly trifles, Hanoi mung bean cakes, citrus, chillies and avocados.

This is a place layered with lore. Alice Pung’s memoir Unpolished Gem inspires an afternoon search for her father’s electronic goods store where she spent teen years wrangling customers and wheeling prams of polyester-fleece-clad siblings. Writer Tom Cho speaks fondly of a stint working for the Footscray Community Arts Centre – a place where one could watch the annual Inflatable Regatta float down the Maribyrnong River among the usual congregation of black swans and ducks and fishermen. Jinghua Qian maps the secret histories of Footscray in an online audio walking tour, including that of the benevolent goddess statue at the site of the Heavenly Queen temple, her side profile gently rotating as you take the metro train towards Flinders Street.

Andre Dao meditates on the Vietnamese diaspora as his narrator traverses familial memories in autofiction work Anam. Sarah Ritchie exhibits her smoked and layered hand-drawn acetate prints at the Five Walls gallery secreted in the second floor of Trocadero Arcade, once an art deco cinema frequented by Footscray’s working class.

I want to buy a founding brick in the establishment of the community gay bar, Pride of our Footscray. They are inundated with so many requests that the expression of interest closes early. I visit with my then seven-month-old baby in a carrier to watch the drag show of the evening, their sheen of sweat and glitter through dry ice.

This is a place where pyjamas can be passed off as outerwear, which is to say that nobody pays any attention. But some people never make it in. My friend disembarked at Footscray station to inspect a rental, ducked to avoid a plastic chair hurled in a street fight on the platform, and took the next train back to the eastern suburbs.

The street vendors on Saturday mornings survive periodic attempts at ejecting them to activate the precinct-coded language for gentrification. One vendor sold us a pot of galangal which, when transplanted to our vegetable patch, grew wild and thick like a cluster of bamboo. We didn’t know what to do with its earnest proliferation. We just watched it grow and grow, braiding bulbs and stems over each other like some intricate weaving.

Lily Chan is a Melbourne writer.

This piece is part of The Age’s Life in the ’Burbs series.

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