My historic suburb is famous for footy and boozing, but can also be a peaceful place to live

Between Countess Street, Hale Street, Musgrave Road and Milton Road sits Brisbane’s smallest suburb. There are only 41 streets, roads and lanes in Petrie Terrace, but it packs a pocket-sized punch – for its history, its people, and its perfect evening light.

Most people know Petrie Terrace for Suncorp Stadium, just over the Hale Street border, and the infamous Caxton Street, Brisbane’s NRL hub. But any day there isn’t a game on – midweek, or a Sunday afternoon without a footy jersey in sight – is the Petrie Terrace I know and love. When the stadium is quiet and empty, the streets are strangely peaceful. It’s a place to belong.

I first came to know Petrie Terrace in the early 2000s, when I left my hometown, the mountain village of Mount Glorious, to move “downtown”. I was a twenty-something bartender who wanted cheap rent and easy access to the Valley nightlife.

For a few years, I lived on Sheriff Street, pulling coffees in the CBD’s Elizabeth Arcade by morning and pulling beers at O’Leary’s on Caxton Street by night, with a bit of sunbaking at Ithaca Pool in between.

Eventually I left, travelled across Australia and abroad for 20 years, not really belonging anywhere, and then – like a homing pigeon – I returned to Petrie Terrace when I started looking for schools for my daughter, who was about to start prep. I was trying to replicate my upbringing, but an urban version. The requirement was simple: a small school with a big community. I visited a handful of tiny schools around the city until I found Petrie Terrace State School, with just 240 primary students. It wasn’t quite the 30 I’d grown up with, but close enough.

I moved back first as a renter on Belgrave Street, and later as an owner in the more urban end of the suburb, under the flickering fairy lights of the Barracks and the neon glow of the newly erected digital billboard sitting annoyingly atop the old Casablanca restaurant and bar.

Buying an apartment in Petrie Terrace will likely stand as one of my life’s greatest accomplishments. I somehow secured a tiny piece of Brisbane’s most wonderful suburb before anyone realised how cool it was. And it was on these steep streets that I rediscovered community, and my daughter grew up belonging to a place.

There’s something about knowing people, and being known, that makes me fall in love with this suburb daily. I can’t walk down the street without bumping into someone I know: at the pub, dog walking or, like me, just using the streets for what they were meant for: wandering, meandering, having the kind of meaningless conversations that make life meaningful.

Petrie Terrace has what every town planner hopes to achieve but few manage: genuine “third spaces”, those informal places that aren’t home and aren’t work, but where we find ourselves belonging anyway. Petrie Terrace is full of them, if you know where to look.

A friend of mine, an architect who lives on one of Petrie Terrace’s narrow lanes, has more than once closed her street – no council approval, just a couple of witch’s hats and an idea – to set up a makeshift cinema projected onto a sheet on a garage door, or to gather the neighbourhood kids to make papier-mache baubles at Christmas, or run Halloween in the ’hood. When the neighbours and children spill onto the road, I’m taken back to a time that barely exists for most people in most places any more.

The suburb encompasses the old Victoria Barracks, built by Andrew Petrie – superintendent of works in the Moreton Bay Penal Colony – whose family, Brisbane’s first free settlers, gives the suburb its name. Andrew’s eldest son, John Petrie, became Brisbane’s first mayor, while another son, Thomas Petrie, learnt the Turrbal language and wrote reminiscences of early Queensland. These included the fact that Indigenous clans from across south-east Queensland gathered in Petrie Terrace for events up until the 1840s.

In the 1970s, Petrie Terrace had cheap accommodation that attracted artists, musicians, actors and bohemians. One of those rundown houses was No. 4 on Petrie Terrace (the street), a sharehouse occupied by seminal punk band The Saints. It briefly and thunderously became known as Club 76 after Ed Kuepper suggested painting the name over a boarded-up window and using the house for unlicensed gigs – until the cops shut it down.

Today, the suburb gathers hundreds of thousands of football fans every year to pack the stadium and surrounding streets. But that is not the type of gathering that I, as a local, love about this place. It is the gathering of light as it falls in the afternoon on Princess Row, or the way people gather in Hardgrave Park to let their dogs run amok. It is parents gathering to teach their kids how to ride at Suncorp Stadium, the only flat surface in the suburb.

It is gathering at the school gates, waiting for smiling faces alongside people who have become part of the thread of my family’s life. It is gathering with friends on decks and in backyards to chinwag about how wonderful it is that we discovered this place, and each other.

It is gathering on the corner of Petrie Terrace and Caxton Street, chatting with Tory and the Caxton Street Brewing crew in the late afternoon. It is gathering for Mexican family dinners at La Carmela, served by Angel and cooked by Fabian, or gathering with my mates at our late-night rum haunt, Pago Pago, watching streams of jersey-clad football fans navigate the street as we conspire to keep this place ours, against the current of their fandom.