boundary road

These are technically North Melbourne homes by which I mean they are right at the edge of NM in a part of NM that people probably don't think of as NM at all, but that's not the point. What interests me is what is it like living in a house on a very main road, where your main interest is surely protecting yourself from the sound (and pollution) of the traffic right outside your front door. I looked at these on google earth and I now realise that they do have some kind of rear access too, but no car parking space as far as I can tell unless that's incorporated into the main structure of the houses, which it might well be. I will have to wander down there sometime soon for a look. 

 

meandering, meaningless research

I've noticed this taijitu a few times, on a building on the corner of Haines and Macaulay in North Melbourne, and I have wondered whether this indicates that the place itself had some particularly interesting inhabitant at one stage but it looks from my meandering, meaningless research that this is probably unlikely, Or at least... 

This snippet from the Age 12 March 1997 p. 49 relates to the company that used to occupy that building, and they sold the building the following year for a figure that surprised everyone. 

The real surprise if you ask me is that the building hasn't been used for anything (as far as I'm aware) in the last thirty years. 

Well, anyway I'm not going to go into this any further and nor am I going to go into the details of Stokoe Motors though here's their first available advertisement when they were at a different premises and classy. 

Melbourne Argus 1 November 1929 p. 11

mound

Perry and I went to the dog wash place earlier today and we thought we'd just drop in behind these flats on Macaulay Road to check out the mound. I am interested in the mound and I don't really know what it 'means'. I could probably go in harder on the research but I lazily just went to that invaluable resource the Melbourne 1945 site. God bless that site but it just raised more questions. 

So I guess to the degree I thought about it, I thought that the gasometer on the site was probably set back a bit from the road and the mound in some way remediated the ground underneath it which probably couldn't be built on because, you know, a century of gas-related residue in the earth. But I see that the gasometer was at the road on the far southeast of the site and this is part that definitely has residential space atop it now. 

I am sure there's an answer to the question of the mound but today is not the day. I will say this: my reearcher tells me it is tasty. 

 

walkway to the hotham hub children's centre

 

 

what they call a photo du...

...mp

I just liked seeing all the maths on my banh mi. 

Gorilla in the mist

Community. 

This led to an unfortunate argument about whether Marmalade was just shitty jam. 

Someone from Jet lives in that house.* 

 * true

2 September, 2014: i'm leaving north melbourne

'Won't miss it that much' was the only thing I wrote on this post in 2014, but hilariously I was of course back with a vengeance seven years later, in 2021. God what a bizarre time that was (2014 I mean). Hard to believe I survived it, but I suppose, what else can you do. 

crap in the street

 

Seen quite a lot of crap in the street lately. I don't know what's bringing it on but perhaps with the warmer weather people no longer feel the need to keep their crap bottled up and instead feel like sharing it with the community. That's North Melbourne, what a town. 

flats opposite arden gardens

Honestly don't know how much longer these flats will still be in existence - though clearly they are still occupied right now. That notice in the first picture above is not exactly doing the area a huge amount of favours, reputationally. I don't know how I feel about the aesthetics of these towers but there are a lot of really nice 80s-90s Housing Commision/Office of Housing buildings in this area, and the excellent shops with flats above in Melrose St. So I hope it is all allowed to stay longer. 
 

a walk this evening in north melbourne

They are renovating the ice cream shop. What's that about?!