I Fell in Love With a City I Thought I Hated

“You couldn’t pay me to live in Sydney.”

I’d said those exact words growing up. It was the kind of place I’d visit on the weekends with my friends, but you couldn’t, wouldn’t get me to live there. I didn’t want to live in crowds, unable to know anyone for the hordes of people inhabiting the landscape. Rent prices loomed large in my mind, and I cringed at the thought of being within two hours of my hometown. 

Until, of course, life had its funny way and I moved to a little suburb in Sydney’s Inner West. Fresh from carving a home in a regional town for two years, and looking for a change after the 2020 lockdown experience (oh what was yet to come), I faced up to living in the city I’d sworn I’d never pay rent in.

A year later. A Thursday night. I find myself running down King St after three girls I just met at a gig. Destination: Webster’s Bar.

The traffic on King St sits quiet at 11pm – just a few cars and the occasional bus. We approach the road with little caution, running in zigzags across what is usually a busy highway.

Growing up south of Sydney, I’d been to the city plenty. The suburb of Newtown – specifically its main road, King Street – was the place I’d go on weekends with my friends when we wanted to seem cool. Close enough to the inner city to be accessible by trains from our hometown, but a little more interesting than the CBD. So, when I moved to a suburb next to Newtown, I thought I knew all about it. Overpriced vintage stores, street vendors selling cheap jewellery, Thai restaurants as far as the eye could see, all set to the soundtrack of the roar of cars and buses following the literal highway running through the suburb.

“Newtown’s overrated,” I’d tell people. I thought my visits during high school qualified me to know what I was talking about. “Marrickville’s way cooler.”

Yet, to assume that Newtown is nothing beyond the shopfronts that line King Street is missing the true heart of the place. Cared for by the Gadigal people for millennia, it’s a suburb built on weird and wonderful, it’s a suburb built on the back of migration, grassroots activism and queer houses. Oft quoted as the iconic Oxford Street’s successor, or ‘alternative’ option for an inner city ‘gaybourhood’, King Street still stands on its own as an important part of Sydney’s queer history, and current crowd.

The suburb has experienced much gentrification in the past 20-odd years. I’ve never really known the suburb in the grungy-alt way my parents experienced it in the ’90s, and they’ll never know the suburb as it was in all its working-class glory of the ’70s. If you dig deep though, get to know the right people, step foot into the right places – you’ll feel that spirit that’s never really left.

The longer you walk around, the more you notice the little things that give Newtown its character. Around the back streets, the parks, there’s something in the air. Newtown’s history as a grungy, alternative scene has been lost somewhat to the gentrification affecting Sydney’s Inner West, but communities that have thrived here are not willing to give it up just yet.

I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine who moved to Newtown in her early years of uni –  finding her place in the suburb slinging beers at a local pub and getting to know the guts of the queer scene. I asked her what Newtown meant to her.

“I can really feel the history of it every time I’m going on my little stomps around King Street,” she explained. “Although the rent is fucked, I feel privileged to be and live out my early twenties in a place that was built and strengthened by queer kids who were kicked out of their homes and came from bigger struggles than I’ll ever know.”

And over time, just as my friend had, I fell in love with Newtown.

It’s not overrated. At surface level, though, perhaps it is. The op shops and vintage stores are overpriced, and I’ve come to find out the best coffee is actually a few suburbs over. But Newtown doesn’t exist solely for the purpose of vintage shopping. It doesn’t exist solely for the property developments that have bedazzled the suburb. It exists for the community, and it exists to be a place where you can simply be, without fear.

I fell in love with the quiet backstreets, lined with deciduous trees and cracked sidewalk, and the people I could recognise just from walking along King Street so often. I fell in love with the bus that trundles down Enmore Road, the fact that I know what times it’s going to be the most or least busy. I even came to love a double-storey vintage store (or maybe just the people who work there).  I fell in love with the rooftop bar at Webster’s, watching the sun set over the slanted roofs of the Inner West. I love that the history of the place is so oral. The more I get to know people, the more I learn about what the suburb used to be and now is.

In 2016, a campaign started with the slogan “Keep Newtown Weird and Safe”. It began as lockout laws were introduced in the inner city, which saw more people came to the area to party. There was an increase in violence, and a reported gay-bashing got the locals to the streets. The people of Newtown didn’t necessarily want all of these new partiers to leave: they just wanted them to respect the culture of the place. So Newtown opened its arms to Sydney and asked the city to love it, asked Sydney to be weird with them.

That’s what Newtown is about. Being a bit weird, being a safe place to be weird. It’s a place to dress in neon green, head-to-toe. It’s a place to hold anyone’s hand. My high-school eyes could not have seen that. Weekend trips could never have revealed the layers that hide along King Street. If you dig a little deeper, chat to a few people and look beyond the building facades, you’ll find a weird little suburb hell-bent on being itself.