The village next door

On what has changed in North and West Melbourne – and what never did.

The news that this masthead is finishing up set me thinking about change and its quieter companion: the things that refuse to change in our little part of the world.

These two suburbs have seen plenty of the first in the 17 years since I arrived. This is a short account of both, and of why the second matters more.

I signed a lease in North Melbourne in 2009 and wondered, briefly, whether I’d made a mistake. Errol St was quiet in a way that worried my accountant.

It took about a fortnight to understand that the quiet was the asset. People here didn’t pass through; they stayed put and made a difference.

Nobody would call the district quiet now. Arden Station opened last November on land many readers will remember as rail yards and factory floors, with thousands of new residents to follow.

West Melbourne, where the practice later moved, grew by nearly half in five years. Most of my neighbours these days are around 30, younger than my filing cabinet.

And some of that change has been borne by those with the least to spare: residents of the public housing towers, some of whom have spent decades in the same streets, now being moved out as part of the rebuild.

It would be dishonest to write a love letter to this neighbourhood without saying so.

But 17 years in the area has taught me where to look for the constant.

The village feeling everyone praises about these suburbs was never in the bluestone. It was made, daily, by people who decided to be useful and then kept deciding it for decades.

Gary Bohmer ran his pharmacy on Errol St the way a good publican runs a bar: he knew who was coming in before the door opened, and he knew when a question about sleeping tablets was really a question about something else.

Dr Margaret McDowell held three generations of the same families in her care. She was, in effect, part of the district’s memory.

Dr Alan Underwood could tell an anxious parent their child was fine in a way that made them believe it.

I had the honour of working alongside all three.

And they were never the exception. Every street around here has its own versions – people who have been doing small, useful things for so long that nobody, least of all them, would think to call it community spirit.

It is simply how they live.

The new arrivals are finding what I found in 2009. It took me a fortnight to work this place out; I expect it will take them about the same.

The same sort of people are still here to show them, mostly without meaning to.

Seventeen years on, the skyline is unrecognisable and the place, somehow, is not.

It has been a privilege to be part of it, and I know exactly what has made it so.

It was never the buildings.

It was the people.

Paul O'Keefe is the director of Premier Health Partners, located at 8 Wominjeka Walk, West Melbourne.