MELBOURNE

While one book is an extremely detailed look at one specific suburb and the other spans not just the city, but beyond, a strong sense of place and home grounds both Fitzroy: The Biography and Walking: New and Selected Poems.  

Both collections examine change broadly looking at  gentrification as it slowly changes the character and communities of the inner city of Melbourne. This is highlighted by the selected poem by Brophy ‘As Fine as Railyard Dust’.

Fitzroy: The Biography is an epic, 700-page poetry collection centred around the inner city Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. Drawing on famous figures of the past who both worked in or visited the area, as well as his own experience growing up in the suburb, author PiO paints a picture of the sometimes-sordid but always colourful history and culture of a storied part of Melbourne. 

Walking is the sixth collection by Melbourne poet Kevin Brophy, and though its words sometimes travel beyond the city and over the seas, it is always clear at its core that Melbourne is home. At the book’s launch, poet Ron Pretty described Brophy, as “a poet who [knows] the city and its people and [can] portray them with love, unflinchingly”. 

It’s more than just Melbourne that links these two volumes – it’s a keen eye for observation, for people and place, and a creative lens through which these poets view both the past and the everyday. 

As Fine as Rail Yard Dust 

In my street 

There are fig trees and grape vines in back yards 

And stone lions guarding front gates. 

Last week a woman staggered from one house 

With blood on her face. 

She washed at the garden tap  

While someone watched from behind a front window blind. 

A woman from the flats next door  

Stands on the street with her mouth open for hours. 

I sweep broken glass from the gutter 

Before I drive my car away. 

The council planted trees along my street  

And on the next morning they were lying uprooted 

As though they had tried to fly away during the night.  

There are three hotels in my street. 

One is the place for quiet, solid-drinking locals, 

One is a pink nightclub, 

The middle hotel has a bistro lounge 

With French Impressionist reproductions on the walls.  

It is called the Café Society Café. 

No-one eats there. 

No-one believes in it.  

So this hotel now has topless barmaids, 

A different topless girl each week, 

As though their breasts are worn away in seven days of staring.

My neighbor has covered the wooden front of his house  

With cement, his front garden with ceramic tiles, 

The side walls with vinyl weatherboard look-alikes. 

An air-conditioner duct snakes out of his walls, 

Over his roof and back in again.  

He has had his new tin roof covered  

With even newer plastic coated tile shaped cladding.   

He asked me if I minded having our shared fence  

Pulled down for a day while he poured  

A truckload of concrete into his yard. 

When my trees lean over the fence, over his concrete, 

He tears the branches off  

And throws them back into my yard. 

In my street there are three hotels and one milk bar. 

The milk bar is run by Sam, a Lebanese, 

And it has not been bombed  

Like the one a few streets away.  

Sam has despaired of ever making his fortune out of me  

Or my street.  

He sends children away without cigarettes and milk, 

Telling them to tell their parents 

To send the money next time. 

In my street, some mornings there are ten or twenty people  

Out repairing an epidemic of punctures. 

Opposite me is the terrace house with iron bars 

Across the front ground floor. 

This is where the ex-cop lives, I’ve been told, 

Dismissed from the force for being too violent. 

There are parties in this house that spill onto the road, 

Men and women stagger out and laugh at the traffic.  

In my street we have graffiti, 

‘Sid Vicious’ is scrawled across my reproduction Victorian pickets, 

‘Fuck’ is tucked into the corner of any new cement, 

And on a factory wall, food for thought, 

‘Was you dog eaten by a Vietnamese today?’  

When my nephew visits from Doncaster 

He asks me why there is so much broken glass on my footpaths.  

‘This is Brunswick,’ I tell him, 

‘Where life is as fine as rail yard dust.’   

Kevin Brophy