The world where I live — self-love
I’ve been enjoying playing with photos the last couple of posts, so I’m going to mix things up and devote January to a pictorial thread about the area in which I live.
I checked my web site statistics and there seem to be about five real people or spambots who live outside Australia, so to explain, I live on the Mornington Peninsula region in Victoria. I was born in Frankston Hospital and lived in the nearby town of Baxter until I turned 18 and got the hell out of the area — the quiet, horse-riding, underage Frankston pub corner-dwelling world wasn’t big enough for me and my Reebok trainers, baby! I lived further bayside in the Sandringham and Elwood areas before living in Sydney for three years and returning to the peninsula; years away had made the heart grow fonder (and housing hadn’t been made entirely unaffordable by the property boom like suburbs closer to the city).
My relationship with the end-of-the-train-line suburb of Frankston has always been one of conflicting love/hate. I loved spending Friday evenings after school with my girlfriends in the pedestrian strip in the car park between the old Myer building and a group of other shops. It was the place for teenagers to hang out in the mid-1980s to show off appalling blow-waved (or rat-tailed) hair, skin-tight jeans and white sneakers. We were hot. But we were always well-behaved and our parents picked us up at 9pm.
My ongoing disappointment with Frankston is that a dedicated council and locals try to improve amenities and make the area a friendlier place to work, shop and be entertained, but three of the streets bordering the business district are shitfights. This is an example of the old Dimmeys store on Nepean Highway, the main arterial. Why would you stop here unless you had to — it’s like wearing dirty clothes on a first date.
Numerous attempts have been made to clean up the street that fronts the railway station: classical music might have moved the druggies on but the rowdy feral folk hang around in clusters, and keeping rents cheap enough for numerous discount shops to proliferate still gives the gateway to Frankston a cheap and tatty first impression for people stepping off the train Then again, shops filled to the brim with cheap crap are popular, so perhaps the majority is just ruling in the way it chooses.
But I have to love a town that loves itself. Step onto the train station and hear the wind happily billowing the ‘I Love Frankston’ flags. Hey, if we read the message in them often enough we just might believe them!
The ‘I Love Frankston’ trend started years ago with cars sporting mysterious bumper stickers professing their love, and I never knew if they were attempts at post-modern irony or the real lovin’ deal. Looking at the web site devoted to selling Frankston merchandise, I think the love is real. Sometimes I feel it, too, but I’m not ready to go public.
Crank-o-meter: try parking there on a friday afternoon
January 4th, 2010 at 8:31 am
I know and feel and see the irony of I Love Frankston, but Funkytown has many faces and appreciations and I know old folk who love it to bits (and don’t want to change a thing) and late night clubbers who like your youthful self still love the place as a hang out for whom the I Heart Franga message is also very real.
By the way, if you saw my place (in Frankston) you’ld understanding that I’m giving it my least effort to help keep housing affordable around here. My front fence isn’t so much crumbling as eroding.
As for Friday arvos, well, I’m glad I walk to work in Frankston and back; I can still walk faster than the cars can drive down Playne Street.
You should have joined Frankston Blogs!
January 4th, 2010 at 6:49 pm
I thank you for the compliment regarding my youth, but it’s been years since I stepped foot in a dance club. And now the 21st Century is gone, I have no desire or reason to sully the grotty steps of any establishment on pub corner (particularly the black building) ;-).
Frankston Blogs was ahead of my time!
January 5th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
I went to 21st Centuary once, and to quite the bard of such things:
There’s a club, if you’d like to go
you could meet somebody who really loves you
so you go, and you stand on your own
and you leave on your own
and you go home, and you cry
and you want to die
That was the night that Jeff Kennett won an election.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:54 am
Oh no, 21st Century has gone? Was that the club with the revolving dance floor? I think I went there once or twice, however the fake fog stuff was so overused I could’ve been anywhere!!
I’ve got a couple of friends who live in Franga, the closest I get to it is Seaford however
January 6th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Wow, comrade. My most eloquent tale of a night there was when the place was decorated in faux tropical mode and Huey Lane fell over an inflated plastic palm tree and was kicked out by Lucifer the bouncer. Did you want to die because of the venue or that it was the first day of the Kennett years?
It’s gone, Fen! Still there in building, but some other form of entertainment has taken over the place. An extension to the Irish bar or something. I wonder who bought the rotating dance floor with the lighting bolt ball thiny in the centre?