“He believes many people are still captured by the white-picket view of a home, the Neighbours and Kath and Kim model of suburban living.” (In The Dock, The Age, 17/3)
And there you have it, in one icecream headache inducing sentence, an insult and reason why I would never live in that windswept dive, a place made by men and women who don’t like people but love investment. A place as much a monument to the horrible world before our recession as are foreclosure Florida ghost-towns and $400 AMFM radios.
They’re built by men and women disgusted by my, my family and most of my friend’s suburban childhoods. Men and women who think we should prefer a chain shopping precinct to a family run milkbar. Men and women who reckon they can get away with selling a home without a kitchen (yes, they exist), or backyard.
I’m the hip young professional these men and women have failed in trying to coax into their speculative investment.
I’m sick of upstarts in The Age's pages dissing our suburbs.
So bugger Soho, Notting Hill and the Docklands and celebrate Mount Waverley, Knox and Preston because these are the real places of childhood and Melbourne’s soul.
