It’s full of gangsters and footballers’ wives, someone quipped when I said I’d bought a place in Essendon. It made me laugh – there was some truth in the idea. Essendon is considered one of the posher western suburbs, thanks to city views, the wide, tree-lined streets, and stunning Marvellous Melbourne-era mansions later commandeered by private schools.
That landscape is changing dramatically as period homes are knocked down to make way for massive, contemporary builds; it’s shocking to see long-standing grande dames razed to the ground in a single day. Jokes about old money and new – the said footballers and gangsters – have been a thing since the 1980s. Back then, the Morans were the notorious local family of note, a couple of suburbs away in Ascot Vale (and later immortalised in the TV series, Underbelly) .
I heard a whisper that the priests in this parish have media training, as a result of the many crime-related funerals conducted locally. Truth be told, I didn’t lose any sleep over the underworld connection. Years later, I would meet someone who did: a mum at my son’s kinder lamented living so close to Roberta Williams – then still married to drug kingpin Carl.
She worried about drive-by shootings going wrong, not without good reason . Essendon has an abundance of green: Woodlands, Lincoln and Montgomery Parks, and is on the cusp of Strathmore’s Napier Park, with its magnificent river red gums. Nearby are Queens Park and the not-much-changed-since-.