Seaview Ballroom — St Kilda, Melbourne

The Seaview Ballroom in St Kilda was one of the central venues of the Melbourne post-punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s — a large, decaying ballroom in a suburb that was itself decaying, St Kilda having shifted from seaside resort to cheap inner-city neighbourhood by that period. The Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party played there, as did the Go-Betweens, the Laughing Clowns, and most of the significant Australian bands of the era. The venue's size, its run-down atmosphere, and its St Kilda location — in a neighbourhood of bedsits, sex workers, junkies, and artists — made it the natural home for music that was confrontational and extreme.

St Kilda in the late 1970s was one of those urban environments that produces intense creative energy precisely because it is disreputable and cheap. The beachside suburb had cheap rents, a transient population, and an atmosphere of licentiousness that suited the Birthday Party's aesthetic perfectly. Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, Phill Calvert, and Tracy Pew — the Birthday Party in its various configurations — inhabited the St Kilda and Fitzroy share-house world that the Seaview Ballroom served. The music they played in these venues was not polished or commercial; it was confrontational, physically intense, and connected to the physical environment of the suburb in ways that Melbourne's more comfortable inner-north neighbourhoods could not have produced.

The Seaview Ballroom no longer operates as a music venue. The St Kilda area retains something of its character from that era, and the suburb is still a point of connection for Melbourne's music heritage — the Espy (Esplanade Hotel) on the beachfront has operated continuously since the nineteenth century and remains a live music venue. For Birthday Party and Boys Next Door history, St Kilda and the streets between the beach and Fitzroy Street are the primary geography.