So soon after I'd paid homage to my favourite place to park up, some disgruntled figures in the neighbourhood came at my beloved Wine Corner Store with a couple of well, technically speakings.
As many readers would have heard, The Wine Corner Store has been making some headlines for its customers causing a “ruckus” to some locals on the sunset strip. I’ve heard from the horse's mouth (Steve, local legend and owner of The Wine Corner) that this said “ruckus” is people being a little too loud on some residents' sun-soaked patch of green. One neighbour recently even threatened to call the cops if Steve didn’t do something about the people who had legally purchased drinks, legally sat down on the grass, and legally opened said drink at the ungodly hour of 7pm.
Mathew Van Kooy, a local architect, has rounded up 29 neighbours to petition the council for "enforcement action" against people drinking on the famous Canning median strip. Wardle Studio, where he's a partner, says on its website that "precincts endure when they are generous, well used and alive with activity." After several complaints from the collective, the City of Yarra's hand was forced. It hired a lawyer to investigate the legal definition of the strip. Turns out there isn't one. Which means the strip falls back to its original legal status, the status before greening, before trees, before any beautification: the strip is now legally defined as part of the road.
As of September 1, the council has committed to enforcing that definition, spelling out where you can drink (footpaths, parks, gardens) and where you can't (roads). Which means my mate out the front of Rathdowne Bottle Mart, putting away a six-pack of XXXX at 2pm, is a law-abiding citizen, while the twenty-and thirty-somethings on the upper-middle-class highway, sipping another bottle of Little Reddie, had better look over their shoulders. The community is up in arms. A counter-petition to overturn the ban on drinking and socialising was quickly mobilised (at the time of writing has 7,316 signatures). That's roughly 250 times what Mathew Van Kooy managed.
Since the 1970s the median strips of Rathdowne, Canning and Drummond have been well patronised lay-about spaces. They’ve been de-facto parks for 50+ years, and one architect who asked for the receipts has shown some pencil-pusher way back when forgot to do the paperwork. These streets were originally planned to funnel people directly into the city. Dirt and bluestone superhighways that could accommodate a horse and cart and lead goods and people into the belly of the CBD. Once Melbourne got rich and wanted to show off in the early 20th century, city planners decided to “beautify” the whole city, transforming these trade routes into Parisian boulevards, complete with lawn and Canary Island Date Palms. By today's standards, the strips are too small and too awkwardly placed to count as a park or garden. So all this sitting, lingering, picnicking, cricket, badminton, make-out seshes, or break ups will have to be put on hold for now as this beloved fixture is officially outlawed as a public space.
For what it's worth, the council was never asleep at the wheel here. They made numerous trips out to The Wine Corner over the past 18 months in response to complaints, checked what the space was understood to be, and each time landed on the same answer: it's a reserve, drinking's permitted 9am to 9pm, there's nothing to enforce. It took one architect and a handful of neighbours saying they think it’s too loud at 7pm to manufacture a problem where the council itself had repeatedly found that there was none.
The Wine Corner has been nothing but a good custodian of the strip. Since the spot took off from one influencer’s post on TikTok, the staff at The Wine Corner have gone beyond what anyone’s paying them for to keep the peace: they go up and down collecting bottles, ciggie butts, cans left on the lawn, they tell people to wrap it up at 9pm, move anyone along if they're causing too much of a scene, fork out for extra rubbish collection, and clean the toilets that non-paying punters are using for free. They get the same bloody people as Carlton Cellars down the road, The Wine Corner's just got a better wine list, better people-watching, and apparently a stronger community service ethic than the people who complained about it.
This isn't an isolated skirmish. Post-COVID Melbourne keeps churning out these "well-technically-speaking" campaigns wherever people actually try to gather in public. There's the Florian saga, neighbours who couldn't stomach a cafe doing takeaway out the front. Miscellania, who copped a rollback of their liquor licence. These grinds keep chipping away at our clubs and co-ops. There's a pattern here, which isn't really about roads or reserves or paperwork, but a small, well-resourced minority deciding that public places should behave like their private ones, and a council too fearful to side with the community for any actual public good.
Mathew could have knocked on Steve's door. He could have spoken to the community directly. Instead, he skipped the conversation and went straight to enforcement.
Steve says The Wine Corner’s business is unaffected, it is a bottle shop after all. People are still buying the wine, they're just drinking it someplace else. The community has lost a place to be communal in but there’s still space on the footpath to be tended to by the lovely staff. In a time when a lot of people can't afford to drink in venues (see: Waxflower charging $23 for a pint of Guinness), Steve understands that people need to have the option to pay as little as possible and still reap the benefits of parking up in public.
The strip is nothing short of a Third Place for the residents of Canning, Rathdowne and Drummond. A place you can turn up without a booking, without a bar tab, and run into a friend or meet a stranger on a patch of grass in the sun that belonged to the people.
If you ask me this whole thing is a non-issue – I’m sure I’ve drunk in plenty of places that I should not have. If it's a crime to have a beer in the sun on a summer day amongst the hotties of the north then lock me up and throw away the key.
See you at the strip.