St Kilda — Melbourne's post-punk neighbourhood

St Kilda is a beachside suburb three kilometres south of Melbourne's CBD that has functioned since the 1970s as the city's bohemian and artistic quarter — a neighbourhood of cheap rents, Victorian terraces, the foreshore, and the particular density of pubs, clubs, and coffee shops that sustains creative communities. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was the centre of Melbourne's post-punk scene: the Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party came out of this neighbourhood's venues, as did a generation of Australian musicians who were listening to the Velvet Underground, Television, and Patti Smith and trying to make something from those influences that reflected Melbourne's own particular version of alienation and ambition.

The Crystal Ballroom at 60 Bourke Street in the CBD and venues in St Kilda and neighbouring Fitzroy formed the circuit on which the Birthday Party played before they left for London in 1980. The scene was small, serious, and contained — a community of bands and audiences who were doing something genuinely new with the sounds coming from New York and London while being far enough from both cities to develop it without the pressure of proximity to the centres. What the Birthday Party made in Melbourne before their departure was raw material; what they became in London and Berlin was the finished thing. But the Melbourne years were where the essential character was formed.

St Kilda retains its character as Melbourne's most artistically identified neighbourhood, though gentrification has displaced much of the cheap living that sustained creative communities in the 1970s. The Espy — the Esplanade Hotel at 11 The Esplanade — is the most enduring venue from that era, a large pub on the beachfront that has hosted Australian rock and indie music for decades and survived multiple development threats. It is still operating.