My suburb has caviar for pub grub and oodles of cavoodles but somehow keeps it real

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I’m not born and bred. This fact alone means that, in the eyes of many Balmain lifers, I’ll never truly be regarded as a local. But I’ve been here long enough that I now find it impossible, at the tail of a long evening, to sit on the Balmain ferry and not feel a rushing sense of homecoming as the vessel hums past Goat Island and points its bow towards the warm, twinkling houselights of Mort Bay.

This is the second time I’ve written about Balmain for the Herald, which, for someone who never thought of themselves as especially parochial, feels like two times too many. But it turns out that even the most outward-looking people have indelible attachments to their home. Indeed, the older I get, the more I suspect that our worldview – far from being informed by op-eds in The Guardian or podcasts by Karl Stefanovic – is mostly forged on our local streets; such as on the morning after bin night, when the kindest of neighbours mount search-and-rescue parties to locate all the bins that have been inexplicably strewn across five separate blocks.

I guess this is what people mean by community: that hackneyed, syrupy term that’s more or less been rendered meaningless by politicians. But Balmain really does feel like a community, as if every resident belongs to the same........

© The Sydney Morning Herald