Introduction

From the time of its occupation Australia has been home to people from all over the world. Melbourne is considered the most ‘European’ of Australia's major cities and is one of the most culturally diverse. About 35% of metropolitan Melbourne's population was born overseas. The postwar inner-city population in particular was a social and cultural melting pot, with immigrants, artists, students, hippies and a solid working class connected mainly by economics and geography as the middle classes gradually abandoned the city for the ever-expanding suburbs.

But just as the white settlers decimated Australia's original peoples in the interests of diversification, so their successors engineer their own form of cultural cleansing in a context of increasing ‘social mix’. This chapter tells the story of a city so diverse in cultural, social and economic terms that when a discourse of social mix appears in the public arena to explain a particular policy initiative, those with a genuine interest in diversity have reason to be concerned.

Melbourne's gentrification and its effect on diversity

Melbourne's gentrification is described well by Hackworth and Smith's (2001) three waves. The first wave came to the disinvested, deindustrialising and socially diverse inner city in the late 1960s in a context of ameliorating urban decline. Government strategies such as restoration grants and easing access to home ownership stimulated interest in the large areas of Victorian workers’ cottages and terraces (Jager, 1986) that had been a source of cheap rental housing where they were not the subject of slum clearance projects (Logan, 1985; W.S. Shaw, 2005). Gentrification began in the inner city and spread unevenly through the east and south of the inner urban region (Figure 10.1), drawing people apparently attracted to the cultural diversity. The second wave in the 1980s was market-driven and fuelled in the latter part of the decade by a local property boom that followed the global stock market crash. Rapid increases in property values, changes in built form and displacement of the most vulnerable tenants generated significant opposition and a period of left local governance in the city. With support from the Labor government, inner-city councils were able to introduce heritage controls and low-income housing projects that succeeded in tempering the gentrification of some areas, delaying displacement, and maintaining the inner city's social and cultural mix for a while.