Melbourne's new hipsters are its sporting heroes: AFL footballers

I sneezed in my local café this morning and fell over an AFL footballer. Things in the inner north are starting to get ridiculous and I’m not talking about losing the through ways on St Georges Road, although come on Darebin Council. Seriously?

No, epidemic is a word that springs to mind, once only used over this side of town to describe bicycles with flower baskets and the inordinate number of children flipping plastic water bottles outside primary schools as their parents chat through the kiss and go time limit about carbon fibre bicycles and their last trip to Brooklyn.

I’ve lived in the inner north since before it became cool. So there. Yeah, I was here first. Well, actually I don’t know if 1986 constitutes being first in Fitzroy, and it was pretty cool before I got there to be honest, but still, probs pretty hard to dispute that it became cooler the moment I arrived from off the farm with a perm and acid wash denim.

Digress. The footballers. Actually, they’ve been here for awhile. Once, quite a few years ago, I accosted an Essendon player in Northcote Plaza and asked for a selfie. I’d publish it here except poor Brent Stanton likely doesn’t want a photo of him standing next to a mad old lady holding toilet paper plastered all over the shop.

It’s not that footballers have never been here. I mean, I imagine Hadyn Bunton lived pretty close to Brunswick Street Oval back in the day, but that day would have exploded if it had seen a bearded man on a scooter wearing a frock. Things are pretty different around here now.

As rents grew, I kept getting pushed back further north – first the ignominy of living in a share house in NORTH Fitzroy! The horror!! Then Northcote! The shame! Now I reside in what I like to call ‘The Genuine Inner North’ – sunny Thornbury. We even have a sign and a food truck park that Welcomes you here. Not me. I say get back to where you once belonged. Sharing? Pah! I was here first.

But back to the footballers. As soon as Northcote became the UN sanctioned area for the preservation of hipsters and single origin coffee, you couldn’t move for footballers rolling up in expensive family wagons and snapping up all the houses with swimming pools, which these days, is every single one. Not lying.

Footballers are the inner north’s new totem. If you don’t have one living next to you, you have to move. Seriously. I mean, it’s not enough to own the latest artisan brewery and have a kid in the accelerated learning at Hard-to-Get-into High. No, to be in with the inner crowd you have to be able to report conversations with footballers like, ‘I was talking to Bob this morning and he’s thinking of planting a dwarf Japanese maple’ or ‘Matty’s knee is still giving him trouble when he eats quinoa.’

These days, nobody even listens to what I have to say anymore. I mean, I just came back from a small, boutique, under the radar, criminally beautiful beach town on the Amalfi Coast and I have the 95 Facebook posts to prove it. Used to be people cared about such things in the good old inner north. Now it’s just all about the footballers. What about me? I was here first.