The tiger snake in my basement is not typical of Coburg North, I would think. I just like to start there because it’s a story that travels well. The lovely beast slid in from the garden late one arvo while I was down there looking for something I promptly forgot, because now I had a tiger snake in my basement, hiding in a jumble of suitcases.

The story illustrates my favourite thing about my suburb: the bush that cuts a wild, V-shaped swath through it like a set of inverted lungs linked by two converging creeks. I walk there with my dog Archie every day, weirdly comforted by the reminder that everything up on brick and bitumen level is temporary.

On that score, another auspicious memory is the fire billowing from the top floor of the abandoned Kodak building down the road. It appeared a day or two after we sealed the plunge into home ownership 15 years ago. Some saw vandalism. I saw a nifty invocation of The Tower tarot card: danger, change, destruction, learning, liberation.

The snake and the tower are both gone now, the former fearlessly bagged by Steve the snake wrangler; the latter by the inevitable process of urban renewal. There’s a Woolies there now, part of a 20-hectare housing development that has brought in about 1000 new neighbours and kept........

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