SATURDAY BREAKFAST #7; ST. KILDA ROAD, ST. KILDA (BETWEEN ST. KILDA JUNCTION and ALMA ROAD)

Visited 17 September, 2011

The way things were. 

These sentiments are undoubtedly a frequent element in the thought processes of the ageing.  This is not to decry the fact of being older, or the propensity for recalling the past; and it doesn’t imply that the present is empty, or compares unfavourably with the past.  It’s simply part of the human condition to remember; and memories are an integral part of Pieces such as this.

St. Kilda was settled very early in the (white) Melbourne experience.  Today, with wall-to-wall suburbs we think of the metropolis as uniformly spreading out from the central business district.  It wasn’t so in the early days.  I remember, from my time as an adherent and youth club member of the Methodist Church (now Uniting Church) in Church Street, Richmond, barely three kilometres from the centre of Melbourne, that among the church records was the report of a preacher visiting from Melbourne township who went missing with his horse on the return journey.  He became lost in the bush between Richmond and Melbourne!

So it was with St. Kilda.  The rise of Melbourne had been rapid indeed.  Hume and Hovell explored overland from Sydney in 1824, ending up at Corio Bay.  Edward Henty, seeking new grazing opportunities, brought sheep across from Tasmania - then Van Diemen’s Land - to a spot near present-day Portland in 1834.  In June 1835 John Batman, representing a group of Van Diemen’s businessmen – the Port Phillip Syndicate – talked the aboriginal people into “selling” him some 600000 acres of land around Port Phillip.  Wasting no time, in September he returned with a group of settlers, only to find that John Pascoe Fawkner had arrived with the same intention less than a month earlier.  There was enough land for all.  Accepting the inevitable, the Governor in Sydney, just one year later, declared the town to be the capital of the Port Phillip District; and in March 1837 officially named it Melbourne.  That same year the “Hoddle Grid” laid out the plan of the town, the same CBD we know today.

About six kilometres down the Bay from Melbourne there was a grazing lease as early as 1839; and in 1841 the area was officially named St. Kilda - after the schooner Lady of St. Kilda, which was moored for some time off the main beach, and which in turn had been named after the Scottish islands of St. Kilda.  The first local sales of Crown lands occurred in December 1842. The first allotment sold was bounded by tracks that later became Fitzroy Street, Acland Street and The Esplanade.   [Incidentally, being a crusty old coot, I get annoyed at the continual misuse of terminology.  The official name is Port Phillip, although it is colloquially referred to as “the Bay”.  I have no problem with this.  But it is not Port Phillip Bay.]  Although St. Kilda grew rapidly after 1842, as with Richmond there would have remained a degree of isolation from Melbourne town.  The railway was not opened until 1857.

St. Kilda has seen as much change over time as any of the early Melbourne suburbs.  Early on, the higher ground above the beach was a fashionable and affluent area, as the many remaining mansions attest.  Later there was modest housing further inland, including housing on the site of the former St. Kilda West swampland.  In later years of decline the suburb became Melbourne’s vice and red light district.  And later again there has been a comprehensive revival of fortune, and a return to “desirability”.

Areas close to the centre of the older Australian cities undergo the most change.  We have seen the “grandification” of so many inner suburbs once classified as slums, but there’s the infrastructural change as well.  The CBD is the heart, and the outer suburbs can be likened to the lungs; and between heart and lungs are the arteries – the travel corridors that have necessarily become more intrusive and disruptive as the population increases.  And so many of them have to pass through the close-in districts.  St. Kilda has been spared a major freeway running through, but it has suffered the complete make-over of St. Kilda Junction, and the opening out of St. Kilda Road to the south-east.

This stretch of St. Kilda Road was today’s destination.  It used to be named High Street.  The Melway directory lists more than 40 High Streets in the Melbourne region.  This popularity is not particularly due to a deficiency of imagination, the name has resonance and meaning.  The use of the word “high” probably doesn’t connote an elevated street (although, buried in the mists pre Australia, I wouldn’t be so sure) but it has certainly come to mean “main street”, the street where “superior” businesses and people are located.  Certainly, that’s where it sits in the Melbourne imagination. 

There are several important roads that traverse St. Kilda, but one was considered to be - and so named - the High Street, suggesting that, at the time, it was regarded by the authorities as the main business street.  Maybe, too, there was in the early days acknowledgement of the street being a conduit thoroughfare between the boulevard of St. Kilda Road, and the grand Brighton Road leading to all points south-east, and therefore “main” in that sense .  Anyway, High Street it was until 1975, when it was massively widened, and renamed as the continuance of St. Kilda Road.   In the street-widening process some 150 business and private buildings were demolished.  One side of the Street was sliced away.

This was not necessarily a bad thing.  The present sweep of the street, with its spacious tramway reserve, is quite impressive.  It is undoubtedly very functional, and it all looks right – so right in fact that I couldn’t remember the way things were.  We traversed the strip between St. Kilda Junction and Alma Road.  The Victorian-era shop premises on the north-east side are largely intact, but the south-west-side premises are all new.  Did that side of the street originally mimic the “old” side that remains?  No doubt it did, but the re-modelling has been so complete that it’s impossible to envisage the former streetscape.

So too with the Junction itself.  There are two notable six-ways junctions in the Melbourne suburbs – Camberwell Junction and St. Kilda Junction.  Camberwell has new (post-19^th Century) buildings on some of its corners, but the roadway configurations remain unchanged.  But St. Kilda Junction has been enlarged, to a staggering degree, to accommodate the re-structuring of the roads and to facilitate traffic movement; and some of this blends into the new stretch of St. Kilda Road.  Many buildings were lost to the Junction re-modelling, including the wedge-shaped Junction Hotel with its imposing tower.   And the much enlarged cross-roads, courtesy of imaginative engineering, barely look like a six-ways any more.

It was interesting to walk along our strip of St. Kilda Road, and to ponder on its condition had it not been widened.  There were no retail shops, strictly Monday to Friday businesses only, and pretty forlorn to boot.  In a side lane, parked outside what for those inclined to blush I might discreetly term a house of ill fame (what a quaint old expression!), there was a stunning convertible, with the name of the establishment decalled on the driver’s door - a 1964 Lincoln Continental, flaunting bright red duco, a limousine so spacious as to hold a double bed in the boot.  Ah, the way things were!

We retreated to Fitzroy Street for breakfast at 2 Doors Down.  The lattes were excellent, requiring seconds, and the muesli although not Bircher was good and was served with yoghurt and strawberries.   The décor was cute, all the walls being lined with assorted second-hand doors rescued from wreckers’ yards.  A further reminder of the way things were.

Gary Andrews