St Kilda revisited

Impermanence, again. 

Suddenly, back in noisy St Kilda. Back in town for one last night before catching the plane home in the morning. F says, “I could never live in the city”

D, F and I all feel the same. We didn’t want to leave our little mudbrick house among the gum trees thismorning. 

I went for a walk by myself in the long, luminous southern  twilight, down Acland street, along the Esplanade, onto the beach and out onto St Kilda Pier, then back to M’s apartment via the back streets past half a dozen places where people I knew used to live twenty years ago. 

It’s my old stomping ground. Memories ambush me at every turn. The first kiss with N, at the end of the pier. 1981?  His dingy Deco flat up behind the Esplanade Hotel. Rooms full of wire sculptures and old newspapers & views of sunset over the ocean. Downstairs there was a Hungarian hunchback and a wild-eyed Czech astrologer and an ageing burlesque queen.

All vanished now, replaced by shiny architect-designed apartments with security gates and no mystery. Interminable cafes, hubbub. 

The 1940s flat where K lived - you could hear the Big Dipper roller coaster at Luna Park rattling up the tracks to the top of the hill, then plunging down in a rush of clattering wheels and screaming  passengers - all this while you drank tea in her kitchen . 

The Sea Baths, pre-renovation, where you could have a Turkish steam bath then dash out and plunge into the sea. The ancient, unnaturally-tanned old Jewish ladies who use to flick through magazines there,  while lying on dilapidated sun-lounges.

...Etcetera. Too many wearying memories of  times & people long  gone.

Acland Street in ’my day’ was a meeting place - old Polish men in cloth caps chattered in Yiddish outside their shops.  Often you glimpsed a blue concentration camp tatoo. Art students and filmmakers ate at The Red Rock. Now it has become a rowdy strip of bars and sunburnt backpackers and cheap clothing shops. 

Though the  European cake shops are miraculously still there! Earlier, we ducked into “Le Bon”, seeking refuge from the pumping music and jostling summer crowds, and discovered the same family behind the counter, still making the same spinach pies I used to buy  twenty years ago. The son looking middle-aged now. The mother still peroxide blonde. The same buttery smell. 

I must be getting old. I’m getting nostalgic - for green trams and St Kilda’s old arty grunge, and  the days before every surface was covered in advertising . 

And the days when the pier was made of chunky grey timber planks, and there was a cavernous wooden shelter, a waiting room for ferry passengers. All gone now. Another ( less hospitable, nowhere to sit down)  shelter has been and gone since then. I’ve lost track of dates. Mirka Mora’s mosaic  - it was part of the new shelter  - now exposed to the elements, cracked and discoloured. 

Down along the waterfront, a whole new ‘vibrant’  scene. People sitting at new outdoor cafes as if it is the only possible thing to do.

I think of the word ‘dispossessed’. The St Kilda I knew is gone. These new people think it is theirs. Actually, it is theirs now. As much as it was ever ‘mine’, anyway. No doubt previous succesive  generations saw their  versions of the place swept away too. 

Which of course leads me to think about the original, indigenous occupants of the land, and how their timeless ancient world with memories and stories sunk deep into the earth, was obliterated.

Everything changes.

All roads lead to thoughts of  impermanence....

P.s. I also must mention that other parts of Melbourne have changed in good ways - diversity and originality look to be thriving in Fitzroy & High St Northcote.