Hair Lady epitomises what I love about St Kilda. Every day on our way to school, my Mum, brothers and I would keep a look out for this vision of eccentricity, and often we were rewarded. ‘It’s Hair Lady!’ we would cry. There she was, walking briskly up Princes St towards St Kilda Rd - a petite woman dressed in tasteful business clothes, dark glasses and a huge, red, curly wig. It was nearly half the size of her small frame, and we marvelled that she didn’t crumple beneath it. Who was she, we wondered, and where was she going with all that hair? Was she a prostitute? Or a businesswoman who admired Fran Drescher? We never found out.     

I used to be terrified of St Kilda. My Dad once dropped me at a choir rehearsal at the church near the corner of Robe St when I was 13. ‘Isabel,’ he instructed me, ‘do not under any circumstance wait outside for me when you’re done. Robe St is the most dangerous street in Melbourne. There’re prostitutes and drug addicts everywhere, you’ll probably be murdered. Wait inside, and I’ll come in and get you.’ For years after that, I was convinced that setting foot in the street meant certain death. I now live there, and though the through-traffic makes for interesting people-watching, I have never once feared for my life.    

When I left school, St Kilda took on two new roles in my life – love and money. Saving desperately to move out, I took a job at The George Cinema, every student’s dream. If I really pushed myself I could ride there in 10 minutes from Middle Park, racing past the tennis courts, under the gloomy conifer trees lining the path, standing up on my pedals as I pumped up the hill behind St Kilda Park Primary, threw my lock around a pole and leapt up the stairs to begin hours of popcorn shovelling and choc-top scooping. The job itself could be mundane – the novelty of constructing a choc-top wears off by the time you get your first thumb callous from the scoop – but the free movies at any Palace cinema almost made up for it. One of my favourite jobs was ‘The Run’ which I did every Thursday. This prestigious task involved walking around the suburb distributing movie session flyers to various businesses, and this was how I discovered that the hard-nosed Mikoshi owner is always up for a deal, the gentle, curly haired man in Chronicles really is as nice as he looks, and the manager of the Oslo Hotel spends most of his time slumbering.

Love took the form of my Gurner St boy, who is now my Robe St roommate and general partner in life. We met at Melbourne Uni, both Arts students, both directionless, disillusioned and looking for something to make things more exciting. Our first kiss was at the GPB, and in those early months I spent many Mondays tagging along with the boys to trivia at the Snake Pit. This was a place I had thought of as a haven for drunks and nair-do-wells, glancing down at it from my Quinces bus on my way to school, wondering what sins people committed in there. Now here I was, drinking beer and making up rude team names under the crude instruction of Michael Carmen. Who had I become?    

The St Kilda of the present is a complex place. It is the man next door at the hospice who, every morning at 9am, launches into a tirade at some poor wretch. “Ya fuckin’ BAAASTARD!’’ he roars, like clockwork. Later I see him wandering down Robe St in his grey suit with pink carnation in the pocket, eyes staring blankly ahead. I try to smile at him but he doesn’t seem to notice.

It is my old primary school principal working at the Mission Op-shop, spending her retirement sorting people’s junk for resale, keeping a strict but kindly eye on her customers. And it’s my old primary school classmate standing across the road on the Burnett St corner, and me not knowing if I should say hello or pretend not to recognise her when I walk past.

It’s the backpackers sitting on the street outside the Coffee Palace, tapping away to their families in Princey’s, reading their Australian Lonely Planets in bikinis at the beach. I wonder how they’re feeling, so far from their home in this strange suburb. I remember how I felt backpacking around the UK – excited, lonely, free. I see them in phone boxes blubbering, maybe to their long lost partner so far away, exactly as I did on the opposite side of the world.

You can say St Kilda is grotty and dangerous, and parts of it are. You can say it’s full of latte sipping wankers, and there are more than a few of them around. You can say it’s crawling with backpackers, full of young families with Labradors, groups of drunken people sitting on Fitzroy St in front of 7/11 or the Gatwick, the dude doing bike tricks at 3am for drunken crowds, pissed up slappers tumbling out of that-place-on-Grey-St-that-constantly-changes-names with their boobs tumbling out of their tops, strange memorials to wars and mayors, veggie gardens full of flowers, the beautiful girls at Di Chirico serving raspberry tarts, groups of boys with chiselled stomachs standing on the sand begging to be looked at, to be desired by everyone. And you’d be right.