Footscray, Melbourne
We asked three local experts to choose the hottest neighbourhood in Melbourne for eating, drinking and hanging out. They nominated a working- class suburb with a multicultural soul.
The film Romper Stomper, circa 1992, isn’t the best advertisement for Footscray circa 2018. Although the movie is set in the same inner-western Melbourne suburb, its stale vision of a roaming gang of Neo-Nazis warring with Vietnamese immigrants bears no resemblance to the thriving cultural and social hub the neighbourhood is today.
Footscray has always been the beating heart of “the west”. But it’s true it was not always somewhere you’d recommend to visitors to Melbourne.
The suburb came to prominence during the 19th-century gold rush when hopeful diggers flocked across the Maribyrnong River (also known as the Nong) en route to the goldfields. A pub, The Punt, sprang up and the rest is very colourful but mostly hardscrabble history.
That same river became the lifeblood of a thriving Victorian capital. The bluestone that built Melbourne was quarried from its banks. Industries sprang up along its length – chemicals and munitions, sugar refineries and slaughterhouses, tanneries, woolstores and glue factories – all dumping their toxic waste into the Nong. Footscray was soon known as Stinkopolis for its foul industrial pong.
As the industries died off, the original British immigrants moved out in search of greener pastures and new immigrants moved in. Footscray has always welcomed outsiders – hundreds and thousands of them.
At first they came from Southern Europe, from Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia. In the 1970s, the Vietnamese and Lebanese arrived from their war-torn homes. Lately, its broad tree-lined streets and Victorian workers’ cottages have provided refuge for exiles from the Horn of Africa and AngloAustralians seeking affordable housing and a vibrant community.
Few suburbs are more vibrant than Footscray. Just five kilometres from the CBD, it’s home to a university campus, a water polo club, a leading hospital, an African choir and Australia’s largest Chinese temple, the Heavenly Queen.
The suburb’s industrial infrastructure is being reimagined as hidden bars, chic apartments, microbreweries and creative hubs. At the former Drill Hall, an anarchic theatre company called Snuff Puppets has reinvented marionettes as outsize body parts that have just toured Hong Kong and Europe. The old riverside meatworks is now the Footscray Community Arts Centre (footscrayarts.com). And tucked in among the fishmongers on Whitehall Street is Hop Nation (hopnation.com.au), a brewery and taproom where you’re welcome to BYO food. Nowhere else in Australia does the post-industrial vibe like Footscray.
The soul of the suburb is the market (footscraymarketvictoria.com.au), directly opposite the railway station, which is still mostly Vietnamese-run but also has Pinoy kiosks and a Calabrian poultry and egg shop called Chooks ’n’Googs (03 9687 1037). Leading chefs and local gastronomes shop here for the cheapest Thai sweet mangoes and pipis for just $17 a kilo.
The Little India precinct in Barkly Street lights up for Diwali each year. Little Saigon on Hopkins and Leeds streets has the best pho this side of Ho Chi Minh City. And Little Africa on Nicholson Street, with its shop signs in Amharic and Arabic, is Melbourne’s go-to spot for injera (a sour flatbread) and tibs meat stew.
It’s still gritty, sure, but Footscray has so many diamonds in the rough that it really pays to have a fossick.