Suburbs

I had dinner last night with A and as well as dinner we had a bit of a cultural safari. A owns a business in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and I was staying with my kids at my mothers' house, not far from there. So we we decided to abandon our South Yarra/Elizabeth Bay milieu in favor of something much more exotic: we had a dinner in Vermont South (!!??!)) and then a drink at the Burvale.

The Burvale, for those who don't know it, is an iconic 60s suburban beer barn, on the corner of Springvale Road and the Burwood Highway, in outer suburban Melbourne. It's massive and graceless, but also very much of its time, and for me quite evocative. I hadn't been there before but I had spent a lot of time in similar establishments. If you've been to the Village Green and the Mountain View, you've been to the Burvale.

I hadn't been in one of these pubs in 20 years and there were a few changes. The rear of the place had been turned into a gaming lounge, with the usual dead-eyed suburbanites playing poker machines. The front bar was a lot less blokey than it would have been 20 years ago (I'm guessing the area that's now the gaming lounge was originally the ladies' lounge, so the hotel is now less differentiated along gender lines). Going in, A and I had joked about the likelihood of being beaten up, and I promised not to be too Elizabeth Bay (If anyone asked, I was going to say that I'd been to Glenny High, which is true).

The biggest shock was the opening hours. The Burvale's open til 5am! We were trying to imagine what it would be like at, say, 430 on a Satuday morning.

A grew up in South Yarra and finds the outer suburbs quite bewildering ("I get panicky if I get past Glenferrie Road") but to me it's both familiar and exotic. In winter I take my sons to their football matches, which are sometimes way out on the fringes of Melbourne and as I stand there on the boundary line with the other dads I feel a strange amalgam of horror and fond nostalgia.