Nick Cave childhood home

Nick Cave grew up in Wangaratta, a rural city in the foothills of the Victorian Alps about 240 kilometres northeast of Melbourne, where his father Colin taught English at the local high school and his mother Dawn worked as a librarian. The family home was on Murrell Street, a quiet residential address in a town that Cave has described with the ambivalence of someone who needed to escape it to understand what it gave him. He was born in Warracknabeal in 1957 but moved to Wangaratta as a small child and lived there until leaving for Melbourne in his mid-teens to attend Caulfield Grammar School as a boarder.

Wangaratta -- its wide main streets, its pubs, its proximity to the mountains and the river flats, its particular country-town mixture of the ordinary and the strange -- runs through Cave's imagination as a kind of foundational landscape. His father's death in a car accident while Nick was in his first year of art school in Melbourne was a defining rupture; Cave has written and spoken about it often as the event that drove him into poetry, music, and the extremity of feeling that characterises his best work. The Wangaratta years, the schoolboy choir, the classical piano lessons, the father who read him Lolita at bedtime -- all of it surfaces in his songs.

The house on Murrell Street is a private residence. Wangaratta has embraced Cave's connection with pride -- a large mural of him painted on a railway bridge near the town centre is one of the most striking pieces of provincial public art in Victoria -- and the town sees a steady stream of fans who make the trip to understand where he came from.