Opinion: It takes a village, and I'm missing one now I've moved to the 'burbs

Hopefully I’m not alone in being stupid enough to think that the phrase, “It takes a village,” was coined by Hillary Clinton. It turns out it’s an African proverb, which refers to the fact that raising a child isn’t just the job of parents, or even immediate family, but a whole community.

The phrase resonated with me recently when my 10-year-old daughter moaned, for the umpteenth time, that I have ruined her life by forcing her to move from the funky, fun and communal inner-city loveliness of Sydney’s Balmain to The Burbs (where she has a much larger bedroom, a bigger house in general and something she’d never seen before, called “a backyard”).

When I asked her to explain what she missed the most her answer was swift and sharp: “Everything.” 

Personally, I miss the pubs most of all, but I have deduced that what she longs for is the sense of community, inclusivity and friendliness engendered by the fact that Balmain (and Rozelle, where we’d lived previously) is a village.

So what is it about this village lifestyle that makes it so great, and why is it that a small set of local shops – such as the one we live near now (it’s called “Boronia Park”, so it even sounds a bit village-y) – is not the same at all?

Well, it’s not just having what you’d expect – all the amenities in one place, all within walking distance from your house, and everyone else, from banks to butchers and bakers – it’s also the candlestick makers, if you will.

What makes a proper village, like Balmain, so wonderful is the scale and the unexpectedness and the shops and services that you might never use, or even enter, but which provide the kind of colour and variety that make life a delight.

Our old high street was packed with stupidly expensive clothes shops that I would tackle my wife around the ankles if she approached. It had pop-up art galleries, boutiques that reeked of patchouli and soap, restaurants which had food I didn’t really want to eat but at least I liked the idea of visiting, and about 48 different hairdressers. 

It had not just one book shop but two, and both of them thrived, and it had a real, boundlessly bright fruit and flower shop, instead of the Harris Farm we have now. 

I grew up in Canberra, which was basically a village at the time, and has grown to become, much like America but without the exciting people, a collection of brightly coloured and savagely soulless shopping malls, all of them surrounded by huge car parks. 

I did live in a Canberra suburb called Kingston for a while, however, which does provide a village feel and, vitally, is the sort of place where people walk to, and stroll around, the shops. 

England is, as the famously warm and friendly Margaret Thatcher said, “a nation of shopkeepers”, and it really is made up of villages, proper ones, with history baked into their cobblestones. Even in London, each suburb tends to have a high street that people will walk to, because driving in that clogged city is truly awful and a waste of time.

What makes all of those places, and Balmain in particular, so great is that they encourage people to take to the streets on foot, to wander from one end to the other and, in doing so, over the years, come to recognise the faces around them, pass their neighbours in the street and even, occasionally, speak to them. 

There’s a sense of belonging, of shared space, that you just don’t get when your trips to the shops are only about needs rather than wants. At our local strip, you’re going for groceries, medicine or to frequent our strangely popular purveyors of barbecued chicken; you’re not going to peruse book shops or boggle at expensive shoes through a shop window.

In short, those shops have everything that your body needs, but nothing that your soul requires.

And it is that, I think, that my daughter is missing. Or, quite possibly, it’s the Balmain gelato shop.