Median

 August 16 Word of the Day: Median

 

Clarinda is one of Melbourne’s top three “most tightly held suburbs”, according to a newspaper article entitled ‘The suburbs people never leave.’ Actually, the article reports residents saying approvingly it’s only a short drive to Oakleigh, so they do leave now and then, just not permanently. Oakleigh helped me grasp the location of Clarinda, a suburb I didn’t know and have never visited but seems to be on the other side of Warrigal Road, where we went to the drive-in in the old days. I am probably not alone in my ignorance of Clarinda, which is why people like living there, in another of those “best kept secrets of Melbourne.” The other two in the top three are Kilsyth South and Belgrave South, places where “home owners hold on to their properties for a median 26.9 years before they sell.“ Constant mobility is hardly a virtue of living. Wanting to escape denotes psychological anxiety. I wonder why the headline isn’t ‘The suburbs where people prefer to stay’, but such a statistic may be beyond the scientific interest of real estate. Anyway, as a watcher on a cast-iron balcony I enjoy browsing down this list, even if the same list in another paper may contain several different names. It comes as no surprise that two suburbs adjacent to my own obscure valley are in the top 20: Yallambie and Viewbank. Viewbank is Heidelberg by another name, one reason for its secure anonymity being that the main feature going through Viewbank is not a road but the Yarra River. Only two others feature in the inner east, Mont Albert and Murrumbeena, making me ask if a more meaningful list would be ‘The suburbs people most wish to leave’, though real estate is doubtless keeping tabs on them too. That Williamstown North is one of only two listed in the west is another story. Inner Melbourne is represented by old money Parkville, but also Carlton, the very mention of Carlton indicating that this early suburb has moved past its postwar déclassé legend into an entrenched gentrified respectability. I nod sagely at the naming of some of the islands of calm: St. Helena, Tecoma, Warranwood, Seaholme. Others require the Clarinda search test, Attwood and Wandong belonging I can report, like Ferny Creek and Croydon Hills, in the bracket Outskirts. Shoreham catches the eye as a questionable outlier, but the figures are thrown into complete chaos by Cape Schanck, which is not a suburb or a town or even much of a cape; Wikipedia plays safe by calling it a locality. Perhaps the whole article is a subliminal advertisement for Cape Schanck, with the intention of turning it into a suburb, but I must accept the word of the newspaper that it is somewhere people never leave.