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It is late afternoon in Travancore. The light is soft and flattering, and the heritage facades of stately homes are showing off their best features. The front lawns glow a mellow golden green, scattered with the confetti of fallen elm leaves. If you’re off the main road, and you edit the Land Rovers and Audis out of your mind’s eye, it could easily be 1953. Travancore has that place-out-of-time look. It is like a very polite time capsule someone has lost in the inner city.
When I was a child, my father would sometimes drive me down Mooltan Street so I could stare at the art deco apartment buildings with their rounded Juliet balconies. I thought Travancore must be the fanciest place in the world and I was determined that one day I would live there. Years later, it became my neighbourhood and has retained that allure from my childhood. If ogling old houses is your thing, you can’t beat Travancore.
I used to think old Trav could do with an injection of youth and cultural diversity. Sometimes I would even call it Melbourne’s last white enclave, in the sense that it has historically been a stronghold of retirees in beautiful, heritage-listed homes who have no desire to leave until escorted out by time. The houses, often rare examples of the 19th-century Arts and Crafts style, are less like real estate than like long-term relationships. You don’t sell them; you are eventually separated from them.
But old Trav has developed a second personality. You can see it most clearly along Mount Alexander Road, where apartment buildings have begun to sprout. One of the first big apartment buildings emerged on the site of the old Lombard paper factory, destroyed in 2004 by a huge fire that took more than a week to extinguish.
It was that advent of the new apartment buildings that caused Travancore – at that time a hidden place with a tiny population of just 839 – to change, in a process less of gentrification and more of “youthification”. An influx of university students, young professionals and city commuters means that Travancore is now more culturally diverse and younger than the average inner-Melbourne suburb. The median age of a Travancore resident is now 33. I know, I was shocked too. It’s still small, but its population has grown to more than 2100.
Travancore, a wedge between Mount Alexander Road and Moonee Ponds Creek, used to be a place where nothing much happened except for the annual Travancore Dog Park calendar, where locals display their pooches to raise money for the Lost Dogs Home. The new apartments brought a new demographic: younger, busier, frequently dogless. These New Trav residents expect a certain level of amenity, which is how Travancore has found itself home to good cafes like Phat Milk and So&So. None of these places is trying too hard to be cool, they are just about good coffee, which is why they work for all ages.
The eastern edge of Travancore is the natural wonder that locals call “the drain”: a much-graffitied piece of infrastructure that was a creek until someone decided in the 1960s that it was a good idea to concrete a full eight kilometres of it, creating a giant gutter. The drain used to be the exclusive domain of graffiti taggers and stormwater run-off. These days it is also an athleisure runway: a place for people with enough cartilage to run on a hard surface and show off while doing it.
The drain terminates in a shallow, murky pool just on the edge of the city. If you look up, you can see that icon of public art, the freeway’s soaring cheese stick, and its adjacent red sentinels, looming above you. Did you know that the cheese stick celebrates Victoria’s gold rush history? Personally, I am all for the correlation of cheese with gold.
Parts of the drain, up the road near Strathmore, are becoming “re-naturalised” in other words, the concrete is being dug up to reinstate the natural creek. The drain at Travancore still retains its brutalist look, but it could be next. I am ambivalent about this possibility, having grown attached to the concrete ugliness.
Then there are local quirks that never lose their capacity to fascinate. The Melbourne headquarters of the Church of Scientology, adds a surreal edge to the borough. (Technically, that side of the road is Ascot Vale but let’s not split hairs). The property is an imposing former convent in the Gothic style and was once a campus of the Australian Catholic University. It seems to be the first thing that visitors ask about, though locals never talk about it, for some reason.
Old Trav, meanwhile, is still very much present. You see it in the immaculate topiary work, the cautious driving. A few years ago, a friend and I went on a scenic walking tour of Travancore’s historic homes. We were the youngest people there by several decades, and yes, the scones in the church hall at the end were excellent. On that tour, I identified a particular Travancore walk: slow, deliberate, suggestive of a person who is enjoying their stroll while quietly assessing society.
On that walk, I learned that Travancore was designated as such in the early 1900s by Henry Madden, a Victorian chief justice and horse breeder, who named the suburb after the former Indian kingdom due to his business exporting horses to that region. This gives Travancore an air of colonialist, British Raj exoticism that it has historically done absolutely nothing to earn. You almost expect Poirot to pop up and start investigating a murder. For decades, the most multicultural thing about the area was the street names: Lucknow, Delhi, Mangalore. It was like living inside a geography lesson delivered by an Oxford don.
But what is a geography lesson, if there are no young people to hear it? Modern Travancore has brought the new pupils, and the energy, the place long needed.
Bianca Simpson is a writer and policy officer.
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