Coburg suburb profile

I live around the corner from the Coburg house I grew up in. Some might think it indicates a lack of ambition, but it’s a decision I’ve never regretted. My parents still live in the red-brick home that my kids treat as their second home, snuggling up on the Franco Cozzo couch after school and on sleepovers. As an adult, however, I’ve forgone the white pillars and balustrades, and olive and pomegranate trees at the front, for the modern Coburg dream of an unrenovated 1920s Californian bungalow, with rose bushes, a silver princess and lavender.

It’s a well-worn path for new families moving in around us: my partner and I, priced out of Northcote, where we were renting, and wanting more space than we could afford in Brunswick, in 2011 moved back to the neighbourhood where I grew up. “North or south of Bell Street?” we were frequently asked. As we waited for the property to settle, we laughed when characters on the TV show Offspring announced they were moving to Coburg, boasting to their Fitzroy friends that they’d now be able to keep chickens. We don’t have chickens ourselves, all the way out here in Coburg, but our kids were delighted when a neighbour’s runaway chook camped out at our house a couple of years ago, brazenly touring our living room before roosting on our front deck for the night. We reunited the chicken with its owner via the Coburg Good Karma Network page and were gifted a dozen eggs for our troubles.

As any other young professional with kids in the area, I covet the latest cafe opening, Saturday farmers market at the local primary school or new playground with soft-fall rubber, but I do feel sentimental when markers to my childhood are torn down: most recently the house of my parents’ late neighbour, a fiercely independent woman who’d occasionally babysit us until one day, as my father recounts it, she called my parents “bloody wogs”, complaining about the smoke whiffing over the fence early on a Saturday morning as they boiled tomatoes in a massive cauldron for the annual sauce-making day.

Over the decades I have watched factories north of Gaffney Street that my mother worked in until I was a young adult, a machinist in the area’s then-booming textiles industry, shut down as production shifted overseas. The factories are now scouted by people like my artist husband for studio space – until the developers move in for much-needed housing. Pentridge, which used to house the state’s most hardened criminals, and where the occasional alarm warning us of prisoner escapes kept us locked down at school, is now where my family goes for school holiday movies, Easter egg hunts and birthday drinks.

I often cite the Coles Coburg deli (the “original” Coburg Coles on Sydney Road) as my first job, but years before that I was a child model for sample dresses my mum sewed in our garage. Before returning to work at neighbouring factories, she was an outworker while she raised us kids, and her boss – I dubbed “Mr Sheen” as he resembled the furniture polish icon – would send her the newest design, for me to be fitted for size. I was allowed to keep the dress. It was the same garage where my parents made – and still do – tomato sauce in March, homemade wine in April, and prosciutto, salami and pancetta in July.

For the most part, it felt like an idyllic childhood: playing tennis on the street before 40km/h zones were needed; helping my dad pick figs from his pride-and-joy veggie patch (“all organic” he still boasts); watching Rocky movies at the Coburg North drive-in or Italian videos borrowed in the now-vacant Tempo Video on Bell Street, feeding ducks at Coburg Lake on Sunday afternoons and being snuck a free lolly at the O’Heas Bakery & Deli on O’Hea Street.

There were occasional ripples that opened my eyes up to the wider world. I recall schoolmates from Middle Eastern backgrounds raising their fears in the playground when the west invaded Iraq in 1991 and what it meant for family overseas, and embracing a new student as a friend, while learning about what her family faced in Burma before coming to Australia. Friends from Greece, Lebanon, Turkey, Croatia, Burma, Vietnam, Sri Lanka. Only in adulthood would I get a chance to travel to some of these countries, but for years before, I was exposed to their foods, languages and customs.

As house prices increase, so does gentrification and less diversity. When I survey the current crowd at school pick-up, it is something I worry my children are missing out on. And so I coax them out of bed on tomato-sauce-making day to take their place in the production line, Italian storytime at Coburg Library, Chinese New Year celebrations at the Victoria Street Mall, and pizza topped with halloumi down Sydney Road.

While I also went to high school in Coburg, my parents’ choice of an all-girls Catholic School opened up my world a little more again: the school drawing students from neighbouring suburbs: Fawkner, Glenroy, Campbellfield, Pascoe Vale. I embraced the encouragement of committed teachers, going on to be the first in my family to attend university. One teacher, far more worldly than us – she lived in North Melbourne and wore a “kill your TV” badge – tried to prepare us for encounters we’d have in university and adult life: “You’ll tell them you come from Campbellfield, and they’ll nod in recognition, ‘Oh yes, Camberwell’.”

A visit by Bob Hawke – our local member despite never living in the area – to my primary school to present a Mac computer we earned by collecting supermarket dockets was life-changing. Security scoured the school grounds ahead of his visit, journalists arrived with huge tape recorders strapped to their sides, and then I met the prime minister. The experience encouraged me to engage in politics from an early age: I saw our electorate of Wills sensationally won by independent Phil Cleary, before becoming a safe Labor seat once again – only to watch the area’s changing demographics turn it into a marginal seat due to the challenge of the Greens.

In the 1990s, when my parents occasionally toyed with moving to Taylors Lakes or the latest developing suburb, where a fourth bedroom, a double garage and a second floor beckoned, my sister and I would always lobby hard for Coburg. High on the “stay” list was Coburg’s proximity to the city (inside the coveted 10-kilometre radius of the CBD), and public transport options (trains, trams and buses!). Think about when you’re older, we’d implore.

My suburb may never be as cool as Brunswick, or as highly sought-after as Northcote, but I’m grateful for my life in Coburg. My husband and I recently dragged the kids to a few house auctions out of interest because our friends were selling, and my eight-year-old son grew suspicious. When I cleared our mailbox of realtor pamphlets offering free appraisals a few days later, I explained to him what they were: he scrunched one up in a ball and walked away in a huff, “they’re not selling our house”. A sentimental soul too, it seems.

So there’s no sign of me leaving Coburg yet. Instead, we’ll look ahead to the latest instalment of the Coburg dream, saving up to renovate the California bungalow.

Orietta Guerrera is the deputy editor of The Age.