My suburb drips with money. Its open-minded outlook may surprise you

August 24, 2026 — 7:00pm

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In a lifetime we inhabit a world of different places. I spent my adolescence in Glen Waverley, where you tended to be at least within long walking distance of your friends, and where there was effectively no public transport: school buses once an hour. Behind it all lay the belief in decentralising Melbourne – the football at Waverley, the Chadstone shopping centre, Monash.

Back then, what I knew of Hawthorn was its football club, which was the funny anomaly of a middle-class club trying to make its way in a tribally working-class world. Hawthorn didn’t win a premiership until 1961 – which sent a great wave of enthusiasm throughout the VFL and was notable for such stars of the Hawks as Brendan Edwards and John Winneke, an amateur from a legal family who would end up as president of the Court of Appeal and one of the roughest, some would say foulest, tongues ever to occupy that eminence.

But I didn’t think of Hawthorn as a place. I cheered on that first premiership – my father was a sportswriter – and I remember trips to the Rivoli with him to see films such as The Bridge on the River Kwai. Even then, I thought these eastern stretches a bit bland.

Would it be a good bet to reckon that there are more private schools across Hawthorn than you would find anywhere in the world? Not just Scotch and Bialik but MLC and Xavier and Trinity, which might not share the postcode but are continuous with the Hawthorn matrix: a compact square mile of it.

Hawthorn is an extraordinary stretch of pretty, very well-off suburbia which runs from Camberwell in the east to the river and Richmond in the west – and a suburb I never thought I would end up in. It’s an odd place to end up for someone who lived........

© The Age