You can come to my suburb by bus, train, bike or boat. And, like us, never leave

After 17 years of countless moves while renting around the inner west, I thought I knew every suburb in the area. When finally looking to buy, we discovered Hurlstone Park, a pocket of Federation charm and gardens demurely tucked away at “the Paris end of Canterbury Bankstown” (according to one of our regular Herald letter-writers, alluding to our style and many canine companions, I’m sure).

You can arrive here on foot from a nearby light rail stop, on a bike via the Greenway, by bus, by train (well, by a replacement bus for the foreseeable future) and by boat via the kayak launching platform down at the Cooks River, with its abundant bird life, magical sunsets and popular play and picnic areas. Hurlstone Park is still a place of quiet Sundays and backyards; in ours we host frogs, skinks, ringtail possums, native bees and birds (recently a young white-faced heron).

During the cooler months I am reminded, by the sounds of hollering that reach us from the fields of Ewen Park, of my now-grown children’s rite of passage playing for one of the oldest football clubs in Australia, the Hurlstone Park Wanderers. We honour our past here. The silhouette of our small group of shops has changed little since the suburb’s development alongside the railway, around 1900. We still have a butcher, a grocer, baker and land agent, but lost our boot maker a few years ago. Being young at heart, we’ve embraced the arrival of cafes and small bars. You’ll find us at HP Bowlo on a Friday evening, when the winning ticket of the “best meat raffle in Sydney” elicits applause and excited barking.

In Hurlstone Park we are the sum of our parts – local artists preserve our streetscapes and our many musicians get us together on weekends; my good friend pipes at the Cenotaph on Remembrance and Anzac Days. A photographer beautifully portrayed us during the harsh lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a lady I know has run a huge charity jam stall for eons. Community groups revegetate and clean up our much-loved river area, increasingly known as Goolay’yari, (pelican dreaming), reminding us of this place’s cultural history as fishing grounds.

We are newcomers, of 25 years, to this enchanting place; our neighbours put down roots some 40 to 60 years ago, from Vietnam, Lebanon, Greece, Portugal and Italy. We increasingly encounter young family groups strolling alongside our planted verges, too. There’s little crime to report, although the pinching of fruit and plants from our wondrous gardens sometimes lights up the local Facebook page. This is a place where I’ve forged fantastic friendships and made unexpected connections, like meeting a European designer who was pictorially documenting the “tile risers of Hurlstone Park”, and corresponding with a man photographing the leadlights of inner western homes.

Our potent community spirit has seen us punch above our weight in the face of multiple threats to turn our village into just another railway station with a shopping mall and shoddily-built apartment blocks. We have stood our ground against developers, past councillors and the state government.

I love this place so much, some years ago I walked its leafy streets for many weeks documenting its built character; this eventually led to council heritage studies and protections, announced to a cheering crowd at the old council chambers in Campsie. The Hurlstone Park Association rallied the community when the state was imposing planning changes and the metro conversion of our rail line, and you can largely thank the good people of Hurlstone Park, through their numerous and quality submissions, for preventing the wrecking of many of the historic railway buildings between Sydenham and Bankstown. Another local mounted a successful campaign to have art, instead of advertising, plastered across our railway bridge.

Hurlstone Park sits on a wobbly political stool; many of us feel inner westy, and Bankstown is a long way along congested Canterbury Road. We are old-fashioned but progressive. The first-ever Greens councillor came from here and served for many years. There’s tension in the air with the housing debate and the looming Metro opening.

Like a lot of established suburbs, affordable housing is scarce. If I had my way, I’d get rid of the big McDonald’s on the boundary, and the overflow carpark of the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL Club, which is infested with poker machines anyway, and build quality public housing. The same for the investor-owned vacant block around the corner which for years has been an overgrown dumping ground. Unfortunately, the type of development we get is the demolition of solid brick villas, replaced by oversized, overpriced, boxy, single dwellings or duplexes that look out of place. I often wonder why people come to a beautiful spot like this only to ruin the streetscape for profit or self-aggrandisement.

This is a place of neighbourliness and contribution that hits the high notes of liveability – transport connections, walkability, green space, attractive quiet streets and homes, proximity to public schools; even a council-run childcare centre. I find it ironic that successive state governments have wanted to wreck Hurlstone Park to create a “great place to live”.

Right now, I can hear the echoing songs of butcher birds and the screech of a yellow-tailed black cockatoo. Soon the whir of frequent metro services will infiltrate the air. I hope that the clash and bang of demolition and high-rise construction isn’t added to the mix. In such a scenario, I’m sure I can rely on the folks of Hurlstone Park to emerge from their garden sheds with pitchforks and pens at the ready to defend this little piece of paradise.

Marie Healy is an inner west GP.