Nicholson Street

It is Christmas Day Mass in Our Lady Help of Christians church on Nicholson Street. This church celebrated its centenary earlier in 2011, and its story is very interesting and you can read about it on their website. The most striking feature of the church is certainly the golden statue on top of the church tower, of Our Lady holding her child. She faces East, towards the sunrise and looks down over busy Nicholson Street, which, along with Sydney Road, is one of the grand routes leading into the city of Melbourne.

I have a recollection of being told that my father lived in a room of a house somewhere on Nicholson Street. That was in 1948, when he and my mother arrived in Australia from Czechoslovakia as displaced persons. After a short time in the Bathurst migrant reception centre, they were brought to Melbourne to work off their 2 year bond to the Chifley government which had opened its doors to this wave of Europe’s “tired”, its “huddled masses”.

Brunswick Road

A man is fixing up his house. The dimensions of the dwelling seem to be about three metres across and from what I can see of the roof line, not much more deep. It is almost like an oversized cubby house. He is stripping paint on the front porch, and the wooden plank juts out over the pavement. The front door is less than a metre away from the black bitumen of the footpath. Not far away, however, behind the row of houses that front onto Brunswick road, there is a large slate roof, and two tall palm trees. I have not been able to find an alley way which leads to this house. I am curious about what it looks like. It must be one of the oldest dwellings around here, and all the other jumble of buildings have grown up around it.

The laneways between Brunswick Road and the linear park which forms the southern boundary of the City of Moreland, exist in a dimension of their own. Unlike the long back lanes of Carlton, where the view is channelled onto the city skyscrapers in the distance, these small lanes lead you past a series of gates, doors and fences in unexpected twists and turns. A morning glory creeper covers an old chimney. A fig tree breaks through palings and a passionfruit vine trails over a wall. Walking down the bluestone cobbles, turning the corner, I get the same feeling as in the medieval alleys of Prague. Except that all of a sudden you come across a weatherboard house that, were it in the Australian bush, would scream “rural poverty”. But it is probably worth a small fortune.