"As you can see, I dress crazy," says Chitra Mangma cheerfully. "I like to ride my bike to work, in my high heels and my feathers. No one judges me."
Today the fashion designer has forgone the feathers but has put together an ensemble that includes a velvet shrug with fur collar, an ankle-length skirt, and court shoes with six-inch spike heels. No doubt she looked like a kind of glamorous Wicked Witch of the West cycling from her home in Brunswick to her studio a few blocks away in Victoria Street, and, more recently, to her new shop, Chitra's Closet, in Sydney Road. But she's right. No one would have given her a second glance.
For the four years that Mangma, 39, has made that brief commute, dressed however she damn well pleased, she has just been one of the increasingly eclectic crowd populating the lower reaches of Brunswick's Sydney Road, a thoroughfare that was until recently a utilitarian, slightly depressed stretch best known for its cavernous Turkish restaurants, not its vibrant artistic community.
A few blocks east, around the intersection of Glenlyon Road, Lygon Street undergoes a similar transformation as it passes from Carlton into East Brunswick. Goodbye red "gingham" plastic tablecloths; hello cafes offering milk crates as seating. Further east, in High Street, Northcote, you see the same phenomena: fur, feathers, high heels, Blundstones, black T-shirts bearing the names of obscure bands, hippy hair, elaborate tattoos, $20 pizzas, bookshop cafes and retro junk shops.
Down in Brunswick Street, Marios cafe is often over-populated with people talking earnestly about the novel they'll never write. Brunswick and surrounds is quietly bubbling with creative people getting on with it, whether that's a single shopfront fashion label, a plywood cubicle housing an emerging artist, bands gigging regularly with no expectation of a top-10 hit (or even a record deal), or a nondescript weatherboard in which someone is actually writing that novel.
For actor Isabel Lucas, returning home to Melbourne, and the scene in the inner north, has been a creative breath of fresh air after a long stint in the soapie factory Home and Away, filmed in Sydney. "I don't get anything from the stardom side of things," she says in a typically Melbourne style. "If it's not creatively stimulating it's not really satisfying. I'd like to do more than just act. I do a lot of writing anyway.
Script ideas, story ideas. That's something I'd really like to pursue." Lucas is also passionate about environmental issues and recently made news by joining a protest at sea against whaling in Japan. She might pursue that instead, she says. "I'd do a degree. Environmental science. Fine arts. I'm not sure. Just to enjoy what I'm doing, that's what matters." Call it Melbourne's new bohemia. We used to see these crazy kids (and kids at heart) in Fitzroy and St Kilda, but the location-location-location of those erstwhile alternative enclaves has forced a diaspora of Melbourne's artistic types northward in search of cheap rent and like-minded neighbours.
They epitomise the group that US academic Richard Florida identified as the "creative class": people not just strumming guitars or writing crap poetry, but acting as incubators of innovation and economic development in the wider world. And that next tier of northern suburbs - Brunswick, East Brunswick, Northcote - epitomise the perfect environment for nurturing the creative classes, ticking all the boxes of Florida's "bohemian index". "We liked the feel of the area, the diversity," says Andre Drezga, who started an arts and crafts co-operative in an abandoned warehouse in Brunswick with three partners back in 1999.
Now, badged with the name of its largest tenant, Cantilever (high-end joinery and furniture designers), it provides working space for a variety of local artisans including furniture designers and makers, eco-builders, ceramicists, a guitar maker and a painter. "It's become greater than the sum of its parts," says Andrew Gibbs, who uses his little piece of the warehouse to make unusual street furniture. "We all feed off each other." Indeed, when his neighbour, Australia's foremost guitar maker, Phil Carson Crickmore, sectioned off part of the space, he left a little window so he and Gibbs could chat, or just keep an interested eye on each other's projects. "And there's a connection to the wider community," Gibbs says. "There are a lot of like-minded people around here. Everyone's serious about getting on with it."
Across in Northcote, two blocks of what was until recently a depressed part of High Street have blossomed in just the past six months: cafes, an organic grocer, an organic chocolate shop, independent boutiques, funky retro stores, and at least three art galleries. The catalyst was the Northcote Social Club, a pub and live venue that opened in 2004.
"Things are changing rapidly," says Richie Ludbrook, one of the crew behind the venue. Ludbrook, Andrew Mansfield, Mat Everett and Tim Northeast were refugees from Richmond, Fitzroy and North Melbourne, where they'd previously run music venues.
"There's a real concentration of musicians (in Northcote) and when I grew up, that's what Fitzroy was," says Ludbrook. "It was close to town, the rents were cheap, and there was space - old factories and warehouses. Now, that's what Northcote has. Cheap rents, space for artists of all kinds to do their thing, whether you're a painter or a musician. But still within touch of the city."
The artists, he says, "have been here forever" and further down High Street, in the village commonly known as Westgarth, there had long been a mini-alternative scene: the Westgarth Cinema, bars such as Kelvin and Nancy. "But we felt this area really lacked a focal point, there was no natural meeting place for locals. Now you've got that steamroller effect. People know other people, word gets around, and eventually you reach a kind of critical mass and then you start to see the services appear." Six months ago, Marc Girotto opened his very glamorous florist, Entwine, on High Street after five years in Footscray.
"It's the same business, but worlds apart," he says. "I don't sell irises. I don't sell gerberas. That's all I could sell in Footscray." Girotto grew up locally, in Preston, and still has family ties to the area. But he also chose the location because of its vibe. "Here you still have the Italians and Greeks from the 1950s, students, young people, artistic types. It's just such a mix. And it's very down to earth. There's good foot traffic but people aren't unpleasant or overly demanding. They have time to stop and smell the roses. And so do I."
Across the road, the Book Grocer opened in July. Owners Tony and Jen Sidebottom and Karl Slotte have another store in Brunswick, in Sydney Road, but the Northcote store is the "new model"; offering coffee and wine as well as paperbacks. "There's amazingly eclectic buying in this shop," says manager James Alamanos. "Philosophy, cookbooks, New Age stuff, literature, popular fiction. Everything sells. We have students, we have young families, mums like to come in here with the pram for a coffee. A lot of lesbian couples. Young couples. And two new shops have opened up next door since we moved in. It's creating a real little community here."
While the blossoming of bohemian enclaves is by its nature organic rather than manufactured, The Man does have a role to play. In Brunswick, Moreland City Council (or the People's Republic of Moreland, as it's colloquially known) is very aware of the riches it harbours, and is quietly trying to nurture them. It supports everything from inter-faith gatherings to a gay and lesbian "mothers' club"; a gallery space in the old Brunswick Town Hall; and the Moreland Energy Foundation, a council initiative to promote eco friendly households, businesses, schools and community groups.
The council also helps fund the Brunswick Business Incubator, housed in an old secondary school. "There are about 50 businesses in this building," says CEO Anthony O'Brien. "About half-a-dozen fashion designers, a couple of photographers, a couple of graphic designers, a lot of environmental type businesses, psychologists, bookkeepers, pet minders, you name it. A lot of people with a creative flavour to their business." The Incubator provides cheap office and light manufacturing space, good-quality broadband and tech support, and in house training to local micro-business. After three years, the businesses graduate into a more commercial environment - often out into Sydney Road.
"The development along Sydney Road is a great environment for us," O'Brien says. "It's very cosmopolitan, very diverse, a mix of residential, retail, light commercial. There is a buzz about the area. And it's a young population that works well with creative-type businesses."
"I think it's a working-class area, left-wing, multicultural," says John McAuslan, who's been running the Brunswick Music Festival for 15 years. "These kinds of artists like that. A lot of them are from non-Anglo Celtic backgrounds themselves, they have ties to the area. You're mixing with peers. But it's never been a 'groovy' place and I think that's part of the attraction." Indeed, north of Victoria Street, Sydney Road shifts into old-school ethnic villages: Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic.
"And to be honest, that's probably one of the things I like most about the place, it's one of the things that made me move here," McAuslan says. "I like hearing six or seven different languages spoken on the street. And I think the other aspect of a neighbourhood being multicultural is it's tolerant - to strange artistic types as much as other races."
Like its neighbours Brunswick and East Brunswick, Northcote was traditionally blue collar, with a big migrant population working in factories. When those factories closed down, the local retail scene collapsed. "There aren't hard ABS figures but there's lots of anecdotal evidence of artists living in Darebin," says Kevin Breen, general manager of city development for the City of Darebin. "So we started to think about nurturing that to bring economic vitality back to Northcote."
The flourishing of Northcote Hill - the strip of High Street that roughly lies between the town hall and Separation Street - is something close to his heart. Breen speaks with enthusiasm about the way the area has developed, driven by an unlikely collaboration between the owners of grungy nightspots and the City of Darebin's finest. "One of the benefits of that, though, is that rents become affordable," Breen says. "Which means more marginal activities, like small art galleries and bars, become viable. And those are the kinds of businesses that started taking over those shopfronts."
The fact that it was galleries and bars that took over those shopfronts - rather than, say, two-dollar shops - reflected an existing residential population: musicians, painters, writers, and artisans of all kinds drawn to the neighbourhood by empty factories and big old homes at bargain rentals, close to the city.
Years before Richard Florida published his influential work on creative communities, Darebin Council figured out for itself that the key to reinvigorating the neighbourhood was to encourage what was already there. It supported the establishment of the Darebin Music Festival and its associated street party, High Vibes. Further research by the council found the other thing local people really, really wanted was good coffee. So, in an unusual move, the City bought a derelict arcade and found a tenant to set up a nice little cafe there, Stuzzi. (It's still there, although these days facing fierce competition.)
They planted some trees. And they undertook a major refurbishment of the old town hall, recently completed, to provide exhibition and performance spaces for the local creative community. "In 1999, I came back from Europe, inspired, and Tom Abud and I started looking for premises in Brunswick and Northcote," says Jack Moynihan who, with Abud, opened the well-loved Northcote bar 303 in 2000. "We love the area, we had a lot of contact with musicians, artists, theatre people in the area. And we found this place."
They've always had great acts there - Cat Empire were early regulars - but the crowd consisted mostly of their friends, and their friends' friends. "I thought initially this spot would be the next big thing but it seemed to take forever," Moynihan says. "But then came Salty Dog. Then he Northcote Social Club. Now it's changing rapidly." And Moynihan and Abud have been central to that process. They joined the local traders association, attended council meetings.
"They asked us what the area needed," Moynihan says. "We said, 'We need trees. And a festival.' And we got both." It all may have been a little slower to get started than Abud and Moynihan would have liked, but now there's no stopping it. That feeling of community and diversity is the cornerstone of the new bohemia. Sure price matters. A lot. You can buy a Delfin house-and-land package for half the cost of a house in Brunswick.
What money can't buy is the ability to cycle to work in a feather boa and high heels without being stared at. Artist Gillian Warden and her partner bought in East Brunswick two years ago, after renting first in North Carlton and then in Clifton Hill. "You can see the progression! And I'm glad we bought when we did, I think that was really the last chance. We just made it in."
She tends not to wear high heels to work but she does cycle to her studio in Brunswick with a large-ish dog on the back of the bike. (Comfortably housed in a roomy basket she found on the nature strip.) "I love the variety of food around here. Merri Creek - how good is that? We have wonderful Greek neighbours on one side, musos on the other. We all have dogs. We all share food over the fence. The local pub (Lomond) is good for live music. It's very bike friendly. And there's great coffee!" "I remember discovering Small Block, I couldn't get my head around the fact that you could come to East Brunswick for coffee," says Joseph Abboud, who opened his middle-eastern restaurant, Rumi, lat year.
"I was brought up in Coburg. I felt like I knew the place, knew the people. I had looked at places in North Melbourne and Richmond but they just didn't feel as comfortable," he says. "I think we just came at the right time. It was a bit of a wasteland. But that's also why we felt it would be a good area for us. All romance aside, it's a business decision. There just wasn't much around. Plus, I thought if I buggered it up, no one would notice."
At the same time, Abboud moved his family back to the old neighbourhood, buying in North Coburg. "Couldn't afford Brunswick. And we actually looked at a place in West Coburg overlooking my old primary school, and it was way out of our price range. I couldn't believe we couldn't afford to buy where I grew up." Indeed, the same dynamic that has led to the rebirth of Brunswick, East Brunswick and Northcote inevitably holds the seeds of their demise.
"In Melbourne, it's certainly the case that increasing gentrification and the preference of both young childless professionals and baby-boomers for the inner city is putting increasing pressure on housing prices," says Professor Mike Berry from the Urban Studies faculty of RMIT. "Many people in the creative classes are highly skilled but not well remunerated," he says. They need inexpensive spaces to live, work and hang out; and bring with them the energy and diversity that drives urban renewal.
"Those northern suburbs have provided those nooks and crannies, the niches where creative people gather," he says. "Those accessible spaces colonised by under-resourced but value-adding businesses are crucial because an awful lot of the innovation in an economy starts there." Unfortunately, the "tipping point" tips both ways. Almost as soon as there's a critical mass of both creative residents and creative businesses, things start heading south.
"Diversity attracts well-heeled people who immediately start to undercut the very thing that drew them to the neighbourhood in the first place," Berry says. "Suddenly you look around and everyone's like you. That's the contradiction of the process of urban renewal." "It's almost passed already," says Michael Hole of Small Block.
"I'm already thinking of my lifespan in this area. This area's going to become another eat street, another Chapel Street, another Brunswick Street. And I'm not interested in that." Hole started working in Small Block, the first "cool" cafe to colonise East Brunswick, in 2003 and bought into the business in 2005. "We've gone from being the first on the street to just one of many," he says. Now, just two blocks in either direction, four more cool cafes have sprung up, a CBD-style bar, a funky vintage store, and a couple of independent boutiques.
Abboud's restaurant, Rumi, is right next door. Hole says that originally the cafe felt like "a community space". "It was a place people could walk to. It used to be a lot of students, it seemed like everyone was in a band, it was people who had moved up from Fitzroy. Now a lot of them have moved out. They can't afford to live here any more. The rental properties go on the market and someone from Elwood buys them. So the demographic is more young professional. And Not From Here." (You can hear the Capital Letters as he says it.) "You just know it's people who have sold their apartment in St Kilda or Elwood and bought a house in East Brunswick." Hole and his family live in West Brunswick and he's looking in the area for suitable premises to start another business.
"The development has sped up dramatically just in the last 12 months. There are a lot of other options in the area now. That hasn't affected our numbers, but it has changed the kind of people who come here. There's a lot more tourists. Weekends are much harder. I feel like I'm in North Carlton. I want a place where I can spend my days chatting with my customers," he says. "It's not as good for the bank balance, but it's better for the soul." (m)"It's a great place to be creative" The actor Isabel Lucas "Melbourne's such a creative place," says Isabel Lucas, the Melbourne-born actress who recently returned to live in the northern suburbs after a stint in Sydney. "It's a great place to be creative."
That might mean belly-dancing classes in Sydney Road (truly) or just pondering her career options over coffee. "I like to spend time at Ceres (in Brunswick). I like to find a good coffee place, I like (the Brunswick cafe) A Minor Place a lot." At 22, after a peripatetic life so far, she is loving being back in her home town, and gravitated toward the inner north partly because that's where her boyfriend, musican George Byrne (brother of actor Rose Byrne), lived and often worked, playing such venues as Wesley Anne and the Northcote Social Club in Northcote.
Lucas may be best known as Tasha Andrews from Home and Away, but her heroes are more Cate Blanchett than Bec Cartwright. She's just finished two weeks' filming on the sci-fi film Daybreakers, alongside Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, and local luminaries Sam Neill and Claudia Karvan. It might be her big break - or not. "If I don't end up with acting as a career that's OK," she shrugs. "You can get a tub of yoghurt as big as your head for $3"
The musician Martin Martini "You know the best thing about Northcote?" asks Martin Martini. "The woman down in Westgarth with a second-hand goods shop. It's never open. Six till midnight. Who opens their shop at six o'clock? These areas are not driven by money. And people are a lot less self-conscious. If you want to leave the house in your pyjamas you can." He pauses. "I say pyjamas because I do that a lot." Martini currently heads the Bone Palace Orchestra, a kind of Kurt Weill-meets-Talking Heads cabaret-funk type outfit. He's writing with Chrissy Amphlett.
On Saturdays, he gives primary-school kids singing lessons. And a couple of days a week he stacks shelves to pay the rent. The 27-year-old was born in Northcote, where he frequently hangs out, lives in East Brunswick, and often drifts over to the top ends of Lygon Street and Sydney Road: "A1 Bakery. Awesome. You can get a tub of yoghurt as big as your head for three dollars." He will also hang out in Fitzroy, just to feel like an outsider. It gets his creative juices flowing. "I actually like hanging out in areas that make me feel uncomfortable."
