My suburb is split between grotty sharehouses and ritzy family homes. That’s its charm

Every afternoon at 4pm, at the St Lucia and Taringa roundabout, a man sits on his balcony and waves at everyone who passes by.

His name is Franky, and the restaurant beneath him, Franky’s, has been closed for as long as I’ve lived here. I’m not quite sure it ever opened. Still, every afternoon, there he is.

Franky is one of St Lucia’s colourful local celebrities, and the sight of him up on his porch with his afternoon drink is one I got to know well while living at Union College at the University of Queensland. Like most at college, I was not from Brisbane, and I picked St Lucia as my base camp for four years without knowing how grateful I’d be that I did.

Living and studying at UQ meant my whole world existed inside a one-kilometre radius. Everyone talks about the European walkable city as if it only exists in Paris or Berlin or Amsterdam. But I found it in a suburb built on hills, where the only thing standing between me and the gym was a steep walk home.

St Lucia’s two halves are easy to map. On one side, UQ and a few thousand 18-year-olds living away from home for the first time. On the other, the St Lucia Golf Links and the leafy green streets around it, where people golf, marry and settle into middle age. But even the fairways weren’t off limits to us: we held college balls at The Hillstone, ran along its paths, and took our first dates on picnics on its grass.

If St Lucia is a suburb consisting of two generations then Hawken Drive Village is where the two intersect. You have college kids buying cartons of Great Northern from Liquorland, and Ironside State School parents buying steak and macadamia milk from the IGA.

My first-ever job was at A Salt & Battery Fish & Chips, located in the “Ville”, as everyone called it. And one of my housemates had the shortest commute in Brisbane: a three-minute walk down the road where she opened Yonder Espresso at 5am. Her customers: all students on weekdays, and all families on weekends. Then the college kids go home for summer, and the suburb finally exhales. No more drunk, rowdy students ravenous for late-night kebabs from the institution that is Mr Deno Kebab & Pizza.

My second job was at Wordsmiths Cafe on the UQ campus. For three years I served coffee to students who couldn’t really afford a triple-shot coffee but needed one, then lecturers at lunch who could. By then, most of my social circle worked and lived in St Lucia. I knew the bartenders at the uni bar, The Redroom, and the baristas at If You Say So and Saint Lucy. I don’t think I ever paid full price for an oat cappuccino or a pint of Stone & Wood in those four years of my degree.

My suburb is a bubble you never had to leave. Then the 2022 floods made it an island.

At first, it felt like a snow day: classes were cancelled, and most of us stayed in, watching movies, playing games and drinking, waiting it out. The Munro Soccer Fields became a mini-lake with kayakers and stand-up paddleboarders floating gracefully over the goalposts.

With catering staff cut off by the floods, students stepped up to cook and serve dinner for all 300 of us. The menu was the same comforting college classic: frozen veggies steamed in bulk, and tray after tray of chicken parmis popped into the oven. The mood was closer to a party than a disaster.

But the bubble popped on Coleridge Street when we saw cars sitting underwater, and ground-floor neighbours who had lost everything. We joined the community clean-up, hosing out garages and salvaging belongings. I recall one elderly man whose garage was full of random memorabilia. His eyes went misty as we played with his old cowboy bullwhip; I think it had been years since anyone had.

Two years into living in our sharehouse, we learnt our landlord was the family in the mansion next door. The two sides of the suburb that never seemed to meet had been neighbours the whole time.

And Franky? He’s still at the roundabout, every day at 4pm, with seemingly all the time in the world.

Families on the after-school pick-up wave to him. Then in the evenings, college kids cruise past in their Ubers on the way to Fortitude Valley. Some still stick a hand out the window to wave at Franky’s balcony, even though he’s long gone inside by then.

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