How I made Rezza cool

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I take responsibility in making Rezza cool. In 2004, we moved into Reservoir, a migrant working-class suburb.

We bought a three-bedroom house on a 475-square-metre corner block. It cost $235,000 and now I have realtors calling me almost fortnightly wanting to “evaluate my house”.

We bought a house in Reservoir in 2004.

Last time, one said it was “close to a mil, the deck you built is amazing, it’s a real surprise, don’t worry about the bathroom. People want to entertain, and it’s a corner block.”

I won’t sell, and if I did, I couldn’t afford to buy a townhouse nearby half the size.

Before moving to Rezza, we lived in a one-bedroom flat in Northcote. Our three-year-old toddler had just begun his mission to bust out by bashing at the flyscreen door with his plastic hammer, sagging nappy on, and the vocal range of a chimpanzee.

The flat had become a jail and in summer was a hotbox. But we could not afford a house in the same suburb.

The move to Reservoir caused me much status anxiety. “I live in Preston”, I’d say when asked. Now I am proud of Rezza, full of new restaurants, breweries, tattoo parlours, bars, arts spaces, young families, schools and uni students. Less than 300 metres from me is the best Indonesian joint, My Asian Neighbour; of equal distance is AriPizza e Pinsa – the owner studied how to make the pinsa (square pizza) in Rome. It’s porno for foodies around here.

I am also happy to have the odd ice addict screaming into the dead of night or walking shirtless in winter talking to themselves.

As low-earning middle-class creative refugees it seems we had become adept at gentrifying ethnic working-class suburbs – even though my wife and I both emanate from them in the past.

My wife a dancer, me an arts manager then (whatever that is), knew that working in the arts is a great way of having the edifice of status without cash. And it’s fun. You just cannot be as cool as a realtor, a developer, banker, dentist or finance wiz – regardless of the mountains of money you can make. But money, as we found out, was imperative.

I blame my parents. They were middle-class, well-read and not rich. Instead of the migrant work ethic of thrift with a focus on property, they liked parties, dancing, books, cinema, theatre and politics. No amount of Kafka or Theodorakis pays off a mortgage.

Worse for them, as post-war migrants they dropped in status and became “wogs”, undistinguishable from all other “wogs”.

I lacked the right sort of aspiration, but had all the lifestyle desires and tastes of the middle class. I left Adelaide for Melbourne in 1992 and lived in Collingwood. The Greek owner of a one-bedroom flat on Easey Street, Collingwood, was selling it for $60,000 at the height of the recession.

My old man who was dying of cancer called me once in a breathless voice, “My child, let me help where I can, I don’t have much, but whatever I have, you can buy a flat.”

“Are you serious, man, I will not be shackled by a mortgage, I will be living in Vienna or Athens soon anyway.” Yep, I was a wanker.

Reservoir’s Broadway shopping strip.Credit: Wayne Taylor

“Whatever you want, my boy,” he rasped and died a month later. I wasted years of rent across Collingwood and Fitzroy, and there was no Vienna or Athens. My mother gave enough of a deposit from the sale of her house in Adelaide to buy what I could afford in 2000, the one-bedroom flat in Northcote.

As a pioneering gentrifier when I moved to Rezza, there was a comfort zone of being with “my people” – Greek, Italian, Macedonian, Chinese, Albanian, etc. Lemon and olive trees in large front yards and grapevines adorning pergolas.

By 2018, many postwar immigrants had either gone to Hades or were in purgatory aged care. Their kids, my peers, began to flatten their houses and build townhouses, only to sell them off for just under an icy million dollars each.

Our bungalow with the now massive palm and lemon trees (that I planted) is one of the few houses left standing on my street.

Thankfully many more South Asian, Vietnamese, Chinese, African, African and Arab speakers have arrived over the last 15 years. They are giving the area the type of energy it once had when the Greeks and Italians were young and had settled in the ’burb after they left what were damp, old and poor Carlton, Fitzroy and Collingwood.

The hipster barrier of Broadway – that separates north and south Reservoir – once full of shops abandoned by the 2000s, has been revived with Indian groceries, Vietnamese bakeries and Lebanese bars.

Young “woke” professionals, same-sex couples, lots of blue hair, tattoos, students, artists and cafe owners, mix with the Italian, Greek, Macedonian and Balkan and Irish Catholics and their middle-class kids, in houses once worth little and now worth too much.

Broadway in Reservoir.Credit: Wayne Taylor

I hope that not too many more gentrifiers come and that many more migrants do. Because when I smoke a joint in the evening on my wraparound deck and ramp up King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s The Dripping Tap or Radio Birdman’s Man with the Golden Helmet, my Chinese neighbours don’t mind as they are competing with karaoke versions of Chinese pop songs. When we argue, we all argue loud. I dread when enough gentrifying newcomers arrive and tell me to be quiet.

I finally had an epiphany at Summerhill chemist last week. The Assyrian chemist with his Chinese partner, and me, along with the Indian customer, could have been at any number of the great points in history, at the juncture of civilisation, Baghdad or even Constantinople from 450AD to now. Instead, we are in suburban Reservoir.

Fotis Kapetopoulos is a journalist for the English edition of Neos Kosmos, a leading Greek-Australian masthead.

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