It is afternoon in Travancore. The light is soft and pleasant, and the heritage facades of the mansions show their best features. The front lawns glow a golden green, scattered with fallen elm leaves. If you’re off the highway, and you’ve put Land Rovers and Audis out of your mind, it could easily be 1953. Travancore has that out-of-time look. It’s like a very polite wreckage that one has lost in the inner city.
When I was a child, my father once drove me down Mooltan Street so I could look at the elegant apartment buildings with their circular Juliet balconies. I thought Travancore must be the most beautiful place in the world and I was determined that one day I would live there. Years later, it became my neighborhood and has retained that influence since my childhood. If wandering around old houses is your thing, you can’t beat Travancore.
I was thinking old Trav could do with an injection of youth and cultural diversity. I would sometimes call it the last white suburb of Melbourne, in the sense that it has historically been a bastion of retirees in beautiful, heritage-listed homes who have no desire to leave until they are pushed out by time. The houses, which are often rare examples of the 19th century Arts and Crafts style, are less like real estate than long-term relationships. You don’t sell them; you are finally separated from them.
But old Trav has developed a second personality. You can see it most clearly on Mount Alexander Road, where apartment buildings have started to spring up. One of the first large apartment buildings arose on the site of the Lombard paper mill, destroyed in 2004 and a huge fire that took more than a week to put out.
It was the arrival of new apartment buildings that caused Travancore – at that time a secret place with a small population of only 839 people – to change, in the process of decline and more “youth”. The influx of university students, young professionals and city travelers means that Travancore now has a culture that is both different and smaller than the average inner Melbourne suburb. The average age of a resident of Travancore is now 33. I know, I was shocked too. It is still small, but the population has grown to over 2100.
Travancore, the ridge between Mount Alexander Road and Moonee Ponds Creek, was once a place where nothing happened except for the annual Travancore Dog Park calendar, where locals show their wallets to raise money for the Home for Stray Dogs. The new apartments brought a new population: young, busy, often without dogs. These New Trav residents expect a certain level of service, which is how Travancore has found itself home to great restaurants like Phat Milk and So&So. None of these places are trying too hard to be cool, they’re just about good coffee, which is why they work for all ages.
The eastern edge of Travancore is a natural wonder that the locals call “the aqueduct”: a heavily carved piece of infrastructure that was a stream until someone decided in the 1960s that it was a good idea to lay a full eight kilometers of it, creating a huge aqueduct. Drains were the exclusive domain of graffiti and stormwater runoff. These days it’s also an athletic running track: a place for people with enough cartilage to run on a hard surface and show off while doing it.
The aqueduct ends in a deep, muddy pond just outside the city. If you look up, you can see that public art icon, the towering cheese stick of the highway, and its nearby red guards, coming towards you. What? Did you know that the cheese stick commemorates the history of the Victorian gold rush? Personally, I am for the ratio of cheese and gold.
Drainage areas, above the road near Strathmorethey become “re-naturalised” in other words, the concrete is excavated to restore the natural course. The canal in Travancore still continues its brutal look, but it could be next. I am ambivalent about this possibility, being attached to the ugliness of concrete.
Then there are interiors that never lose their power to impress. The Melbourne headquarters of the Church of Scientology, adds to the area’s edge. (Technically, that side of the road is Ascot Vale but let’s not comb hair). The property is a former monastery in the Gothic style and was once the campus of the Australian Catholic University. It seems to be the first thing that visitors ask about, even though locals don’t talk about it, for some reason.
Old Trav, meanwhile, is still very much around. You see it in the neat work of the topiary, the careful operation. A few years ago, my friend and I went on a long walk to the historic houses of Travancore. We were the youngest people there by decades, and yes, the scones in the chapel at the end were excellent. On that visit, I recognized a characteristic Travancore walk: slow, deliberate, suggestive of a man who enjoys his walks while quietly assessing society.
During the walk, I learned that Travancore was named as such in the early 1900s by Henry Madden, a Victorian chief justice and horse breeder, who named the township after the former Indian kingdom due to his trade in transporting horses to the area. This gives Travancore a sense of colonialism, a British Raj exoticism that historically has done nothing to acquire. You almost expect Poirot to show up and start investigating the murders. For decades, the most traditional thing in the area was the street names: Lucknow, Delhi, Mangalore. It was like living inside a geography lesson given by don Oxford.
But what is the lesson of geography, if there are no young people to hear it? Modern Travancore has brought new students, and energy, to a place where it was needed for a long time.
Bianca Simpson is a writer and policy officer.
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