Bondi’s finally done it. The powers that be that run Australia’s most famous beach have put up the metaphorical “closed for business” sign and jacked up parking fees to deter the Westies.
(View The Punch - Poser suburbs of Australia in a larger map)
The local council is not even pretending there’s another good reason for the latest fee hike to $5 an hour, with Waverly Mayor Sally Betts saying she wants to “protect residents from visitors.”
“We don’t want people from western Sydney coming here and parking - we want them to take public transport. But I don’t think the 50c is a disincentive,” Ms Betts told yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph.
Bondi residents have become very protective of their little strip of bikini shops, fruit juice bars and cafes where the staff are much too beautiful do anything as beneath them as, say, get you a glass of water.
Sam de Brito recently posted about the trauma of being one of those Bondi residents Betts thinks need “protecting” from the rest of us.
This has happened pretty quickly, considering 15 years ago (if that long) Bondi Beach was considered a cockroach-infested doss house for unemployed Kiwis and a good place to get your feet wet, even if your swimmers didn’t cost $380.
And it’s got The Punch to thinking that the most up-themselves places in Australia have mostly become that way within the last generation. North Adelaide has always been posh. Hunters Hill was always chocked full of mansions, and Kew has never, ever, been working class.
But our list includes a whole heap of places that used to be somewhere normal people could afford to live, eat, drink, swim and spend time. No longer.
Sometimes a suburb’s evolution can be tracked by the changing names of the pubs, others by the exponential increase in the number of patisseries.
So here’s our list of the biggest Poser suburbs and towns in Australia. You’ll see the pattern - poor to pretentious in just a decade or so.
In no particular order: Bondi, NSW; Balmain, NSW; Byron Bay, NSW; Fortitude Valley, QLD; Noosa, QLD; Northcote, Vic; St Kilda, Vic; Burnside, SA; North Hobart, Tas; Kingston, ACT; Cullen Bay, NT; and, Subiaco, WA.
Lets start, of course, with Bondi. The suburb’s transformation began with James Packer’s multi-million dollar, high-visibility bachelor pad he had built on Campbell Parade about 10 years ago, continued with the conversion of the Diggers club into an exclusive apartment block and was well and truly complete when the Icebergs club house was re-opened after a massive renovation in 2002.
No more sticky carpet and chicken schnitzel - just oversized sunglasses, boutique beer and now, a parking regime designed purely to keep out the riff raff.
Sydney’s other contender for the suburb that has totally turned its back on its roots is Balmain.
Colgo, who admits he spends quite a bit of time on the Balmain peninsula writes:
On Darling St in the heart of Balmain is a grungy little pub called the Unity, where one of the oldest branches of what would become the Australian Labor Party first met in the 1890s. The suburb has a long association with the working class – at one point in the 1930s, its unemployment rate was almost 40 per cent. The association with activist politics survives, but it’s now more about cashed-up locals taking up trendy causes like opposing cruise ships docking at the local wharf because it brings tourists to the area. Some years ago there were angry protests when the ultimate symbol of global consumerism, Starbuck’s, opened a store on Darling St. Anyone seen drinking a latte in there identified themselves as a blow-in – real Balmain people order their coffee from independent Italians who preserve the suburb’s treasured “village feel”. (There’s a café opposite the Unity where most of the seats are milk crates, everyone has a dog, and it’s not unusual to see Lote Tuqiri or Bryan Brown standing in the queue, being studiously ignored by the other customers.)
The heart of Balmain’s pretentiousness is in the tendency to dress down and support right-on, trendy causes while living in and thereby sustaining one of the most rabidly capitalist corners of the property market in the entire country. I find it particularly pleasing that the time I spotted Philip Seymour Hoffman, a darling of urban right-on culture, on Darling St he was tucking into a burger from the chicken chain, Oporto’s.
Punch columnist Joe Hildebrand said the two biggest poser suburbs of Melbourne are Northcote and St Kilda.
Many years ago I wrote that there were more lesbians from Perth in Northcote than there were in Perth. Well those lesbians have grown up now and are all either straight or gay parenting activists but they still need their chai-lattes and to interact with people who write screenplays in wine bars. For this precise purpose God created Northcote, where one can marvel at the ambiance of passing trams from the comfort of an all-wheel drive people mover while trying to explain to young Rama why he has two mummies.
St Kilda is opposite to Northcote in every way: The levels of pretension are equally high but of a very different kind. For example, where everyone in Northcote is a struggling art history student or lesbian quiltmaker, everyone in St Kilda is a cokehead with oversize sunglasses who works in marketing or a wannabe DJ whose “signature” is novelty hats. They secretly want to live in Sydney but are too stupid to know which direction it’s in.
Our northern correspondent Sam Strutt says in QLD Fortitude Valley and Noosa compete for the top poser prize.
Fortitude Valley/New Farm – the home of Sin Triangle - once the centre of sleaze (The Fiveways building, better known as Sin Triangle in The Valley, has a shabby history. Now with a sex shop on its ground floor, it once housed the illegal brothels which helped sparked an inquiry that brought down a government and forever changed Queensland). The various knock shops and peep shows are now in danger of being overrun by trendy restaurants and bars, yuppie home wares stores and big name designers, like Sass & Bide and Easton Pearson along the James St precinct. Even the dodgy old pubs have now been replaced by grand nightclub precincts with door bitches clutching clipboards containing lists of A-listers. Renovated workers cottages, unrecognisable with their landscaped courtyards and Miele-applianced kitchens, regularly sell for around a million dollars.
The other big wankfest in Qld is Noosa – the land of raffia hats and pewter slingbacks. I think you’ll actually still see a scrunchy if you walk down Hastings St at brunch time. It used to be all laid back hippies. Now it’s all expensive restaurants and real estate agents. Sure, it’s pretty, but there’s NO BEACH!
Back in NSW, but still up north is Byron Bay, which the Punch’s own Penbo says has lost its Kombi Van charm.
Byron is a fascinating case study in the monetising of the counter-culture – a place where the 60s dream of tuning in, turning on and dropping out now comes with a multi-million-dollar price tag. Unless you’re the CEO of a major corporation there is no longer any point thinking about buying anything in Byron – not just real estate but at its ludicrously overpriced shops and restaurants. But despite this Byron remains convinced that it’s a laidback hippy paradise when it is in fact unaffordable and exclusionary, and you’ve got more chance of bumping into someone who earns more money than Bill Gates than a wandering folk minstrel. The rabid local green politics has created an unusual local crisis where waterfront properties are currently being washed away by the sea but the council is refusing to do anything for interfering with the will of Mother Earth.
Penbo’s also qualified to report on the Pru and Trude haven, otherwise known as Burnside in Adelaide.
It’s a source of confusion that with one of the longest stretches of suburban coastline in Australia, the toffier residents of Adelaide chose to settle not along the 40-odd km of western beaches but inland at the eastern base of the Mount Lofty Ranges. There, they created a painfully English bourgeois monoculture, the capital of which is Burnside. Reviled by Adelaide columnist Peter Goers as the gold lame handbag capital of Australia, life in Burnside centres around the Burnside Village where ladies in resort wear and pearls line up their Saabs and spend the morning nattering about whether they’re going to enrol their six-year-old son at Princes or Saints. If you’re thinking of moving there you will need at least two surnames and a voice like Alexander Downer. In a city where summer consistently delivers a month of 40 degree days, Burnside remains convinced that it’s part of the Lakes District, with its cottage gardens playing their part in leeching what little water remains from the Murray.
Even Bass Strait couldn’t protect North Hobart from poserification, according to our Hobart mole Vince.
North Hobart, once ground zero for working class people, underwent a significant wankerfication with the growth of its trendy restaurant strip in Elizabeth St replete with large numbers of serious tryhards and nouveau riche latte sippers. Street by street, modest workers’ residences have been added on to, demolished and rebuilt, and the suburb was dragged into a modern gentrification similar in ways to Sydney’s Newtown. Emblematic of the change: the transition of local pub names - The Eaglehawk Inn became Trout and more recently, Alley Cat. And the Empire Hotel, infamous for having its window shot out in the 90s, became The Republic Bar.
The Nation’s Capital is in a unique position, considering the definition of gentrification in Canberra is “doing up a nice little guvvy (ex-Government house)”.
Our man in Canberra Leo, however, says you can’t go past Kingston to find a poser.
To call Kingston a suburb is not entirely accurate. It’s more façade of a suburb. A large abandoned film set of a suburb that producers then on-sold to developers who convinced people it was like living in a better version of the real world. Kingston actually used to be quite a nice old Canberra suburb with real houses built in the 1920s. After knocking down almost all those old houses Kingston is now block after block of soulless badly designed and made apartments that look dated about 10 minutes after going up. It’s not only Kingston’s apartments that should be on set, as long as the show is The West Wing. This suburb is densely populated by political staffers, advisors, public servants, journalists and politicians themselves who seem to live under the permanent delusion that their life is this TV show. Walking the streets of Kingston you will often hear its populace ask each other “what West Wing character would you say I am?”
Posing in Darwin is a little different to posing anywhere else in Australia. Our Darwin sources tell us Cullen Bay was designed with posing in mind, with all the buildings looking back onto the marina so you can see who’s getting into which boat. But Cullen Bay is given a run for its money by Bayview, which has grown up out of reclaimed swamp to provide big flashy housing to cashed up beneficiaries of the mining boom. Pity about the mosquitoes.
And the verdict from across the Nullabor was resounding: Subiaco.
Formerly filled with rail yards and workers’ cottages, Subiaco is now home to a zillion cafes and restaurants, filled with people who vote Green. Subi got a run for its money from Cottesloe, the formerly faded beach-side suburb which is now home to Twiggy and Bondy.
Anyway, this is just our list. Which suburb or town do you think has the most posers?
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