Can’t really describe the true essence of the place I just know it is infused with every blood cell that runs through my body.  Its streets, like veins, crisscross my memory.  As Jimmy Barnes sings in his classic “Flame Trees,  … we share some history this town and I.”

I have already requested in my will (seriously!) that my ashes be placed in a bucket and sent around once on the Big Dipper at Luna Park, nestled in the soon to be “developed Foreshore”. Why? Two reasons. Because, life as I have known it growing up in St Kilda is just a series ups and downs. The headiness of rushing to the top and the folly on charging down is the pulse of the town. The other reason and probably the one closer to my heart is because my Dad’s remains are scattered in the nearby Peanut Reserve alongside the iconic amusement park.

Our mob poured out his ashes there one hot summer’s day six years back. “See ya mate.”  He liked a beer my Dad. I bought a cold bottle of  “VB” at the nearby Village Bell Hotel in Acland Street, one of his early drinking haunts and poured them over ``Noelly’’.

Indigenous Australians says it’s all about the land, the place; your place. This is my scared turf, big time, as it was for my Dad and his Dad.  My Dad lived with his father opposite the Peanut Reserve, in a still standing, old Edwardian weatherboard on the corner of Chaucer and Blessington Streets after his mum died young.  The house had something of a famous history in itself, being the one time residence of World War 1 Victoria Cross winner and legendary St.Kilda resident Albert Jacka.

Dad enchanted me as a kid with stories about the World War 2 years in the park. How 4,000 US Marines Pacific-bound, were off loaded at Port Melbourne and marched along Beaconsfield Parade, only to be ordered to pitch a tent city in the park opposite his bedroom.

Dad told me my grandfather was more a “Temperamental Bloke” than a “Sentimental Bloke.”  How one war time night he had objected to a large black US Marine taking a drunken leak up against a tree in the park opposite and this subsequently ended up with Grandpa taking on six or seven visiting GIs.  He also told of the battle for the girls’ attention at nearby Luna Park. In the red corner you had the suave cashed up Yanks with neat new uniforms and in the blue corner the broke Aussies, dressed in rough cut Khaki, “pissed off” with the one-sided battle for the ladies’ attention. I was assured that some of the bloodiest fighting of the war was in the local laneways between the Aussies and the Yanks.

Another story he told about Grandad Jack was the time when he was driving down nearby narrow Fawkner Street, which only accommodated one and half cars, and coming in the opposite direction was two local infamous hoods “Bradshaw and Harrison”, in a flash car. They challenged him to “Back Up mate” and of course Grandad said “No.” Bradshaw walked to his driver’s side window lent in and requested again. Grandad felled the bloke.

Grandpa Jack uncompromising stance probably came in handy in his role as Vice President of the St. Kilda Football Club in the sixties.  Dad used to watch “The Saints” play at the nearby Junction Oval at the St.Kilda end of Albert Park Lake.  There’s a classic photo of him standing alongside the team of eager hopefuls, chewed up veterans, fakes and failures in front of the old Grandstand.  He told me how the club colours were once yellow, red and black but as these were the same colours of the Imperial German flag, our then enemy during World War 1, the colours were subsequently changed in 1915 to the now familiar white, red and black. Dad followed the Saints all his life despite the fact they only ever won the won flag in 1966.

The other sphere of influence for Noelie was going to school at the Sacred Heart Mission in Grey Street.  Years later, I would play in the first year of the annual Community Cup Aussie Rules fundraising game which raised much needed funds for the Sacred Heart Mission. I actually won the award for the “Most Knocked Out” player on the ground being presented with my prize by organiser Jason Evans. Dad scratched his head confused not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed.

My father courted my mother at the Palais De Dance on the foreshore back in the 1940s.  He also amazed me by recalling how he would buy his “sly grog” in prohibition era in St Kilda during the fifties off old Dutton Fox the father of now trucking magnate Lindsay Fox.

Apart from being born and educated in St Kilda my Dad worked as a “Bottle-O” setting up a bottle yard in Woodstock Street. His work involved basically collecting old beer and wine bottles from around St Kilda and then trucking them back to Carlton United Brewery in Abbotsford.  It was back breaking, filthy work and he would go on to employ a host of somewhat “unusual characters” in his yard. One of my favourites was a local guy called “Lurch” who would consume two VB Stubbies and a Polly Waffle each morning tea.  It was seen as a low class job and my Dad, who raised five kids off the proceeds, thought it funny years later when he was hailed as a visionary ``Recyclist’’ years before anyone had taken up the sustainability cause.

While Dad lived opposite The Peanut Farm, I on the other hand was brought up and raised on the other side of St Kilda where it meets the border of North Caulfield along Orrong Road.  My first childhood memory was of how the old Jewish lady who lived opposite our house would scream into the night every time an ambulance rushed through our suburb.  Apparently the ambulances had the same siren that the Gestapo vehicles would blare when the Nazis used to go to pick up their terrified victims during World War 2 across Europe.

I can recall many of the old people in the area bore strange looking tattooed numbers on their arms, later finding out St.Kilda had one of the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors of any suburb not only in Australia but the world.  My best friend’s mum was a Dutch Jew who had been buried for three days in the rubble when the Nazi’s bombed Rotterdam.

Another neighbour was the renowned English born comic Jackie Clancy, who according to mum was so paranoid about the Japanese invading Australia during the war, that he seriously contemplated planting a rice paddy in his back yard.  You see he wanted to get on well with our new rulers.  Clancy was one of the first people to have a backyard swimming pool and local kids would know when they were allowed in for a swim as he would run a flag up a pole in his front yard.  My brothers would go there regularly. Mum said it was so they could check out the poster of Jackie’s wife a former stripper that was plastered on the back of his toilet door.

It was “different” growing up a Catholic in such a predominately Jewish neighbourhood. On Saturdays when I wanted to kick a footy with my mates they would be up at the Inkerman Road Synagogue. While on Sundays I would be acting as an altar boy at the Assumption Church in Orrong Road hearing them muck around outside much to my frustration.  Visiting friends from more sedate suburbs would marvel at some of my neighbours who would get around in long black coats, black hats and support long curled sideburns and beards. I was accustomed to it however and never batted an eyelid at such attire.
Acland Street’s Jewish restaurants, which would serve `Motser Ball’ soup and delicious pastries, would have to rank as one of Melbourne’s first true examples of multi culturalism at work.  Gee, I loved those Vienna slices. Still do in fact. 

At one stage my Dad’s great mate Dennis Farrington ran a Barber’s Shop in Acland Street.  One of Melbourne’s best loved Big Band leaders; he cut hair to supplement his income.  A musician undertaking other work to make a living? Some things never change.  Dad used to laugh when he remembered how Dennis never had a phone in his shop and how the Chinese guy who ran a restaurant next door, would have to take bookings for him.  This apparently lead to some interesting on the line exchanges.

For a year the Christian Brothers at CBC tried to educate me at their school in Dandenong Road.  I can distinctly remember watching with my then classmates, mankind’s first walk on the moon in 1969.  Eddie McGuire, who attended the same school, told me years later he always fancied my little sister Jane who went to school at the Presentation Convent opposite CBC in Dandenong Road.

As a treat Dad would march us all down Alma Road and take us to Leo’s Spaghetti Bar in Fitzroy Street, which always thrilled me with its pictures of celebrities who had dined there, particularly during the 1956 Olympics.  For this young kid, for some strange reason, I acquainted the place with Melbourne’s version of The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas with its little bit of VIP glamour.  I always half expected to see Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Junior dining there. I did see Saints star Nicky Winmar in there one night dining with his family, which only reinforced the status of the place in my mind.

I would end up taking my own kids on walks through St.Kilda, often along Marine Parade to Point Ormond where we would scale the local mount and check out the passing action on the Bay.  It was only years later I discovered that Point Ormond could have been a lot bigger if crook local politician Tommy Bent (a fitting name apparently), hadn’t removed much of its to build the Brighton Railway line embankments which he owned.

Nearby, Fitzroy Street was to play a huge part in my teenage and early adult years as it was in the many pubs along its length that (me and my mates in our punk band The Painters And Dockers) cut our teeth. At “gigs” along Fitzroy Street like “The Ballroom” and “The Prince” and around the corner in the Upper Esplanade at the world famous “Espy” and at “The Venue” (the sight of the old Saint Moritz Ice Skating Rink). Good old St Moritz - blazing skates, cigarettes, “pashing girls” and fear. Don’t fall on the ground or the “Sharpies will get ya'”.  Years later I was set to tour East Timor with another band, The Dili Allstars, when someone asked me if I was scared “Listen mate,” I told the inquisitive enquirer “if you can play the front bar of The Espy on a Saturday night you can play anywhere.” They say “Balmain boys don’t cry well, “St Kilda boys aren’t shy.”

The Dockers played in St.Kilda many a night on our own and with some memorable international visitors ranging from television sixties favourites The Monkees and Mexicans Los Lobos, through to L.A’s Gun Club and Manchester’s punk poet John Cooper Clarke.  Our band launched the national youth radio network JJJ at The Palace although truth be told local St Kilda station 3 PBS, once located in Fitzroy Street, gave us a lot more airplay and support.  I myself witnessed many a memorable performance at Melbourne’s home of punk rock “The Ballroom” including shows by Iggy Pop, The Dead Kennedys, I Spit On your Gravy, Shower Scene From Psycho, Corpse Grinders and Grong Grong.  During the Grong Grong show the masked lead singer of the band proceeded to feast on raw meat torn from a huge bone. Great stuff.

Another memorable performance was the night Jamaican reggae legends Toots And The Maytals played at The Venue on the night of the infamous 1983 Ash Wednesday fires.  The place was filled with smoke, not only marijuana. But also burning trees.  In the eighties at the height of the punk music scene many of these old hotels were in a state of ill repair. This was before they were renovated within an inch of their lives.  Most of these venues had once been part of St.Kilda’s grand design, which saw the wealthy of Victoria’s new colony move into the area in the 1880s.  In Grey Street many a “working girl” would plie her nightly trade, which outsiders say gave the place a risqué nature. I always considered most of these ladies “more sad than sexy.”
It was in nearby Robe Street that on one of my first assignments as a cadet journalist was to interview a young Nick Cave.  I had memorably first seen the now internationally acclaimed musician in action when I walked into The Ballroom one night and had seen him being passed half naked above the heads of the crowd, all the while belting out a tune.  I knew then that Nick Cave was destined for big things.  In those days, same today, every young band was desperate for some publicity.  Nick insisted however when we interviewed him in his grungy abode that should we run a story on him, he would have to pick the photo that accompanied the piece.  Such a request was unheard of but it showed an artist in tight control of their image.  Years later when I mentioned this to him he sighed “Wish I still had that control.”
For a time I shared a flat with three girls in Robe Street on the corner where it meets the Upper Esplanade. The Spanish styled block would later be used in the television drama series “The Secret Life of Us.” When I lived there it was a crazy little household with just as much drama. 

Last big St Kilda show stamped in my memory was the occasion of a 2006 benefit gig at The Palace for one time Painters And Dockers manager and music legend in his own right, Lobby Lloyd.  At one moment during the evening I found myself in a semi circle with Lobby, fellow Aussie rock legend Billy Thorpe, noted punk Ian Rilen and Jimmy Barnes.  Six months later Lobby, Billy and Ian were dead, Jimmy Barnes would have open-heart surgery and I a liver transplant.  Must have been something in the water that night.  Leading a life full of sex, drugs and rock and roll comes at a cost.  Would I change a thing? No way.  Sadly a lot of the old music venues have been closed down. Unfashionable they were made redundant, as were many of the Koori drinkers moved on from their favourite drinking spot in the little park at the end on Fitzroy Street. 

I had a weird experience once in the back blocks of East Timor during a visit to the former Portuguese colony north of Darwin.  I was walking along a rough bush track when I ran smack into the then Lord Mayor of St.Kilda Julian Hill.  “What the hell are you doing here,” we simultaneously shrieked at each other.  I was up there after visiting the hamlet of Balibo, where my brother Tony (another St.Kilda boy) was killed along with four other journalists by invading Indonesians forces in 1975.  Mayor Hill was up there doing his duties and overseeing and contributing to the relations between the St.Kilda and Suai sister cities group.  This unique agreement has seen the group become one of the most successful of all the East Timor Friendship Groups, which makes me damm proud.  It was actually in St.Kilda that I first met the now President of East Timor Dr Jose Ramos Horta, who was then a poor diplomat with a battered old suitcase, who was staying on the couch at a supporter’s flat near the corner of Wellington and Chapel Streets. 

St Kilda is tattooed on my soul. Melbourne’s most colourful suburb no doubt. Writing this yarn comes easy to me and fills me with feelings like no other chemical can. I honestly miss the place, but, like I have said, one way or another I will always be there. You can take the boy out of St Kilda but not St Kilda out of the boy.
Despite the fact that I am currently living up north in the capital of New South Wales, the words of a classic Paul Kelly song spring to mind, “… I’d give you all of Sydney Harbour all that land and all that water, for that one sweet promenade.”