St Kilda is essentially a rich layer cake, baked to the beginnings of time. The hill of stone meets the sea, the shore, the sand and sky at the Esplanade. I have spent too much time in the wrong centuries and always meet their citizens as I walk. On the crowded promenade are men under cabbage and high hats, women in crinoline and children rolling hoops. Lining the north side of the street are the crowded palaces of entertainment: Pictureland, Lyric, Paradise, Follies, Le Boulevarde Corso, Jester’s Theatre, Sergios, Efftee Theatres, Taxi club, Palm Grove and St Moritz.

Opposite Robe Street the venerable Granny is serving customers in the fruit and sweets shop that our community built for her in 1864.  I have spent hundreds of hours with Granny and know and love her well yet Granny’s life was a mystery to her peers. One of the oddest things about being a writer and historian is that you know more about the dead than those who shared their lives. You know the children they never admitted to, their obituaries, the fate of their acquaintances, the feelings they secreted in their diaries.

Perhaps the essence or soul of St Kilda is in those who occupied it for ninety-nine per cent of its human history. The great crescent of Hobson’s Bay below the Esplanade borders the exquisite stolen territories of the Kulin or ‘the people’. Many times have my son and I floated on this marine wilderness seeking the tug of the pisces.  I have a love affair with The People and have followed their camps and dreaming places all over St Kilda and far beyond. The yalukit willam are hunting and gathering on St Kilda beach. A group of women, clothed in possum furs, dig ochre from the bluff below me while men sharpen their stone tools nearby. Sometimes I wrap my arms around their great red gum at St Kilda Junction and listen to the hum of wurrung and ngargee.

Present time looks out in four directions from the Esplanade’s clock tower above the bust of the diminutive native of Florence who designed the Mediterranean foreshore below.  Many would argue that St Kilda’s essence is immortalized in Carlo Catani’s carnival precinct and the legendary icons of hedonism: the Seabaths, St Moritz, the Palais, Luna Park, the Espy.  From the roof of the Seabaths I survey the land of the pleasure domes. I count thirteen Moorish domes in the byzantine sky. To the west Kilda Beach is the cultural essence of the Australian lifestyle, the corroboree place of millions of Melbournians. But Catani’s playground is not the essence of St Kilda for me. Perhaps I have been here too long.

To the north St Kilda Pier and Kerbey’s Kiosk beckon. I see Colin Kerbey dive into the waters to save his 400th suicide victim. After 53 years of life suspended over the salty aqua surely the man was essential pickled St Kilda?  Beyond the kiosk, St Kilda’s wildlife claim the ancient living lineage. The black breakwater was my universe during the long battle for gazettal of the penguin sanctuary. I miss Mike Cullen that great scientist and human being. I see the guano spattered Earthcarers drinking southern comfort in a stone cave at midnight into the bright new year of 1997. All the penguins that I knew then – Alfred, Guinness, Pavarotti, Beau - have gone like Mike to the Great Rookery.

I head south past the ancient teahouse and cross O’Donnell Gardens to Acland Street, the little Jerusalem where my mother and other yiddishkeit crowded Schezerade. But I prefer the ‘Mem’ built by the people of St Kilda for Jacka’s Mob after the Anzac debacle. Fifty returned uninjured from a thousand. It is our Shrine. I am the child of migrants but strangely my heart is not in bloody Poland but in this old picture theatre.

I walk up Acland Street towards Fitzroy Street. Mr Michaelis is stepping out of the front gate of his mansion Linden with his brood of innumerable children.   Today is not a day for his Maribyrnong abattoirs but for the Synagogue he created in East St Kilda. 

St Kilda’s oldest church and school rise up on the corner of Jackson Street. Many times have I strained to lift the ancient bell stored in the dungeon under St Kilda Library and ring the 150-year-old iron clapper. I love to share the sound that summoned miscreants 150 years ago.

At the end of Jackson Street punters and backpackers are crowding the great edifices of the George Hotel and the Coffee Palace. These Italianate giants survived the wreck of Grey Street and the rise and fall of St Kilda. The Wimpoles owned the fabulous George for a century. Thomas Munro, rechabite and wowser supplied coffee to his palace with horses wearing signs ‘We work hard all day just on water’.  Munro and his fellow robber barons destroyed St Kilda in the 1890s crash. It was a hundred years before the visionary Donleavy Fitzpatrick restored the George after Nick Cave and the bands were evicted from the crystal ballroom and dragged St Kilda into the light.

In the meanwhile it was gifted with the artists, criminals, the American army, the homeless, and the racially oppressed, the drug afflicted and the street workers. Grey Street is their Jerusalem and the real St Kilda for the old timers. The writers gave St Kilda a hundred detective novels from the Mystery of the Hansom Cab and the hard-boiled female private investigators of She Kilda. Truth however is more violent than fiction and the route up Grey Street follows the path of murder victim Molly Dean in 1931 and the brutal violence against street workers in recent years. Peter Walker, Dennis Tanner, Eddie Leonski, Dulcie Markham and Squizzy Taylor have all been fingered here.

I look west down Fitzroy Street towards Chronicles and Leos. A lot of coffee has been drunk since Georges Mora set up the Ned Kelly exhibition in Tolarno’s. There are traffic barriers up and the gay pride march is stirring. Perhaps the essential St Kilda is the energy and defiance that empowered this civil rights movement from a heartland of theatre and performance in the pubs of Fitzroy Street.

I walk up Grey Street where not so long ago I crushed into the Sacred Heart Church to commemorate Donleavy in the middle of the universe of the battlers and the angels.

Climbing Barkley Street I reach the peak of the St Kilda Hill where the girls streamed from Oberwyl private school on the Alma road corner. This is the home of the Hillites the financial powerhouse of wealth and religious righteousness. There are fourteen chirches and synagogiues running down the hill in line with Chapel Street - the street of chapels. Is Gods own ten acres the essential St Kilda? The Crimean war rages across the hill tracing the battles of Balaclava, Inkerman and Alma and the sieges of Redan and Malakoff.

It is easier to walk downhill to St Kilda Library and sit in the great book window and look  quietly out at the Town Hall built by William Pitt.  I smell bushfires. It reminds me of the conflagration in 1991 that left the Great Hall a charred wreck. That was a low point in St Kilda’s spiritual odyssey.

On the wall next to me is the historic, metre-wide St Kilda crest rescued from the commissioners during amalgamation. I supported its weight in 2008 while the curator banged in spikes to support it. It is a painted mandala of St Kilda’s history. The Lady of St Kilda schooner drifts in the foreground. Venus rises from a cockle shell - the goddess of love, beauty, sexual rapture, fertility as well as the protector of sailors. She is essential to St Kilda.

But St Kilda has already changed even in the brief two hours I walked her surface. The past is behind, there is no present and the future is ephemeral. Capturing the essential St Kilda – I might as well try to catch the stars.