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.

On the other side of the road is the less scenic tyre place, where huge tyres sit out the front of a brick garage, and where trucks pull in and out and beeping little vehicles reverse like busy insects and where the pavement is subsiding under the pressure of all this work. On the first floor of an adjacent warehouse which sells cleaning supplies, there must be a music studio. I see young people with guitar cases and amplifiers arrive there and go up a narrow flight of stairs.

Further down the road is the beautiful Brunswick South Primary School. I went inside when they had an art show, and was entranced by the beautiful interior of the school hall building. Stained glass windows with Art Nouveau motifs, decorated ceilings and a vast coolness combined, again, to trick my sense of space.

Opposite the school there is an old building which was a clothing factory once. A faded painted sign on the side wall announces the direct sale to the public of rayon clothing. It has beautiful Art Deco brickwork on the front and along the roofline, and I wonder what is behind the locked rolladoor front entrance. I have walked all the way around it, again on the cobblestone laneways, but it is still a mystery to me. Possibly its fate may be that of many other old buildings along this stretch of road – to make way for gleaming new apartments or townhouses.  

On the corner of Lygon Street and Brunswick  Road, there is a funeral parlour with a beautiful Italian name and lovely white rosebushes in front. Giannarelli. Diagonally opposite, a giant crane swings like a weathervane of the Titans. A huge apartment complex is growing out of the earth.

This is my stretch of Brunswick Road and as far as I will take you today.