COMMUNITY RANT

Is Balmain now only famous for friands?

It seems these days that you cannot take a Saturday morning stroll down Darling Street, Balmain, without encountering a lengthy line of people outside Zumbo's patisserie.

Each time I see dozens of patrons lining up for what I assume is a very tasty $8 pastry I am reminded of how Sydney's Inner West has changed.
When I was a kid growing up in Balmain in the '80s, it was still a socially diverse place. The pubs were not just full of lawyers and architects but also wharfies and labourers. Leichhardt was still a genuinely Italian precinct and Birchgrove, while fashionable, was not yet equivalent in wealth to Vaucluse. Neville Wran and Wayne Pearce were our proudest homegrown products.

It must be over a decade now since the Cricketer's Arms, an old-fashioned bloodhouse, became the Monkey Bar – a very pleasant, upmarket wine bar and restaurant. It was a very visible demonstration of the inexorable transformation of the old school watering holes with their loyal local punters, into trendy venues focused on weekend trade.

A few years later came the 'milk crate culture,' where beautiful people would drink their "superb" coffee not inside cafes, but on milk crates dominating the footpath outside. It was an ostentatious and bizarre turn for the worse but not a game changer.

Sometime in the recent past a cultural tipping point was reached and the traditional knockabout culture that had drawn so many people to the Balmain community all but disappeared.
Tiger town is still a wonderful place, filled with fantastic people but today the designer culture reigns supreme.

For some reason the crowd outside Zumbo's has taken on a powerful symbolic meaning for me and for other long-term locals I have spoken to. Some, less generous than I, have suggested that people stand 100-deep in the cake line because it is a great place to be seen.

I am not a huge fan of MasterChef but I have watched enough to know that Adriano has reached the dizzying heights of celebrity because he makes a bloody good dessert. I was even inspired once to set aside an hour to join the queue and snag myself a delicious, if somewhat pricey, chocolate croissant.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying the finer things in life. Nonetheless, I was taught to love Balmain not for its beauty or its style but for the friendship and camaraderie to be found there.
Can it be that Balmain, the suburb that hosts a world-record number of pubs and which was, for a century, the template for larrikin, working class Australian culture is now famous only for friands? Surely not.

Darcy Byrne, Leichhardt Councillor.