Venture with me on a walk in Balmain and I will offer a completely unsolicited catalogue of cultural references about this storied harbourside suburb in Sydney’s inner west. It is a compulsion. You can’t fight it.
Just go with it. There’s the spot in Balmain East near the water, populated with terraces, that Anthony LaPaglia, sporting a Balmain Tigers jersey, jogged past in the brooding 2001 film Lantana . Anthony LaPaglia, playing detective Leon Zat, running up a Balmain East street in Lantana (2001).
Credit: Jan Chapman Films Limited, Twentieth Century Fox There’s the pub, police station and doctor’s surgery from iconic Australian soap opera E Street . Oh, you didn’t ask? Here’s my E Street oeuvre, published this year to coincide with the 35th anniversary of its premiere in the summer of ’89 . The 1996 film adaptation of Louis Nowra’s Cosi featured half the country’s leading actors – including Ben Mendelsohn, Barry Otto, Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths – and made the most of filming locations in Balmain and the hauntingly beautiful, sprawling Callan Park in nearby Lilyfield.
Obviously, the long-running series Water Rats offered Balmain glimpses, and the real-life water police moved their headquarters to the neighbourhood in 2004. The historic White Bay Power Station, then in disrepair and now with a multimillion-dollar restoration and a Biennale under its belt, stirred pride in the bosom of Balmainians in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013) a.