NORTH FITZROY'S SISTER SUBURBS

We live in troubled times. North Fitzroy needs to establish its own global alliances with similar neighbourhoods around the world

Words by Charlie Gill

Illustrations by Marnie Florence

This feature was originally published in The Rotunda's December 2025 edition. The pdf is accessible via our home page.

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The world order is collapsing. Climate change is gearing up. Democracy will crumble, the global-supply chain will skid to a halt and nations will splinter into thousands of municipal microorganisms. It will be an awful time to be alive and a wonderful time to be a community newspaper.

After all, The Rotunda has always considered this suburb to be a Vatican-style sovereign city-state. Eventually, the mask will slip and we’ll finally be able to live freely as the communist paradise Sky News always knew we were. We’ll annex Clifton Hill, give dogs the vote and (if they get their way) introduce a strictly One Cat Policy. The decline of the West will mean the rise of the North (Fitzroy).

Given relationships between states are already fraught with suspicion, there’s never been a better time for individual neighbourhoods to forge their own alliances. ‘Sister cities’ already exist, but we need to think smaller. In consultation with friends of this newspaper stationed around the world, The Rotunda is happy to announce North Fitzroy’s sister suburbs.

Yeonnam-dong

Seoul, South Korea

We’re in the Asian Century and need a strong ally in the region. Tianjin, in China’s northeast, is one of Melbourne’s sister cities, but the City of Melbourne’s Tianjin office did not respond to The Rotunda’s request for comment. We pivoted south and contacted a South Korean friend: Sumi Kang, a software saleswoman born and raised in Seoul. She is also a YouTube vlogger and Instagram influencer with multiple videos fetching millions of views.

Sumi called us from Seoul and identified North Fitzroy’s equivalent as Yeonnam-dong: a leafy and lovely area directly next door to the city’s trendy tourist nightlife spot, Hongdae. It seemed to mirror North Fitzroy’s relationship to Fitzroy. Yeonnam-dong is also famous for a peaceful park that features an old railway line, just like Edinburgh Gardens.

“Dog owners love to just hang out there and they can make their own network with other dog walkers,” says Sumi. (Her own dog, a Korean Jindo named Gamja, has 23,000 Instagram followers.)

Yeonnam-dong’s property prices are high for a suburb on the north side of the Han River; in Seoul, the south side is posher, like in Melbourne. The Rotunda told Sumi the relationship between people on either side of the Yarra can feel tenser than North Korea and South Korea’s situation, then realised how culturally insensitive that sounded. Either way, she forgave us, and visited North Fitzroy in late November to properly assess the two suburbs’ similarities:

“Like Yeonnam-dong, everything is photogenic,” she told The Rotunda over coffee at the Tin Pot. “It has a cosy vibe.”

Gordonvale

Far North Queensland, Australia

Gordonvale is a sugarcane town just south of Cairns in Far North Queensland. It has been represented in parliament by Bob Katter since 1993. From the chimneys of its 100-year-old sugar mill, a train of white smoke seems to rise as high as the 922-metre pyramid-shaped mountain that looms over the township below, where less than 12% of residents have bachelor’s degrees and only 23% voted yes to the Voice referendum.

In North Fitzroy almost 60% of residents have bachelor’s degrees, 88% were supportive of the Voice and 100% are ignorant to the challenges of sugarcane farming. On paper, our locales seem as far from a match as any two in Australia. And yet it is also on paper that we share one common denominator: a humble community newspaper.

Like The Rotunda, Gordonvale’s local rag takes its name from its skyline’s greatest icon: Pyramid Views has been in production for nine years, founded and edited by local P.E teacher Sandra Charlton.

“It’s bright and optimistic, more about stories and less about news, more about civic pride and less about politics, and more about celebrating than finding fault,” Sandra told The Rotunda. “It’s a conservative town…We’ve got an Acknowledgement of Country on the second page, and that caused a bit of a stir with some people. So it’s mostly human interest stories.”

“I couldn’t believe the reception. It was immediately warm. It wasn’t long before people were just coming up and taking it out of my hand."

Gordonvale is infamous for being the first place in Australia to introduce the cane toad, and last year a 2.3 metre crocodile was captured in the nearby Mulgrave river. North Fitzroy might be to blame for introducing the $150 ironic mullet haircut, and many residents would genuinely prefer to be attacked by a crocodile than cop an unfavourable VCAT ruling. We’re pretty different. Still, if you follow the coast up north far enough, eventually you'll come across a newspaper just like this one.

Jamaica Plain

Boston, United States of America

Should civil war break out in the United States, a North Fitzrovian government would surely back military intervention to defend progressive values against MAGA and co. Accordingly, we need an alliance with another charming but gentrified left-wing enclave: Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.

Boston and Melbourne are officially sister cities, but the Melbourne Boston Sister Cities Association seems dead in the water, so The Rotunda organised an interview with David Ertischek: editor and owner of local news website Jamaica Plain News.

“Jamaica Plain is, like, off the deep-end when it comes to the left. You’ve got liberals, and then you’ve got JP,” David says.

This is because the respective histories of Jamaica Plain and North Fitzroy run parallel. In the mid 20th-century, it was largely home to the working class, and in the 1970s community activists stopped the state tearing the suburb apart with a multi-lane highway (now, the area is a linear park with playgrounds and a bike path). During the early 1990s, artists and young professionals moved in, and as of 2025 property prices are through the roof.

“I’ll meet people who bought their house for like $63,000 and then they’ll sell it for $1.5 million,” David told The Rotunda. “We have an old school pub or two, but besides that you’ve got modern restaurants making meals with fancy ingredients.”

Our links, though, aren’t limited to resplendent gardens, a history of community activism and a common political persuasion. North Fitzroy's atmosphere wouldn’t be the same without trams, and streetcars have long been part of J.P’s identity. Sadly, they got phased out in the latter half of the 20th century, but you can listen to the sounds of nearby above-ground trains and imagine they’re still there.

“My friends come from rural areas to stay with me, and say: ‘I don’t know how you live with that.’ And I say: ‘It just sounds like a wave.’”

11th arrondissement

Paris, France

A few years back, a member of The Rotunda’s editorial staff was partying in a Parisian nightclub when they looked at the wall and saw a picture of the Edinburgh Gardens dogfield. It wasn’t a drug-fuelled vision or a message from God to come back home. Actually, they’d found themselves in ‘Fitzroy’: a bar in the city’s trendy 11th arrondissement that takes its name and inspiration from North Fitzroy’s more famous neighbour.

The Rotunda contacted ‘Fitzroy’, expecting them to treat it like a divine visitation, but they didn’t respond after multiple attempts. Clearly, the AUKUS situation—in which Australia scrapped its contract for French submarines—had engendered the same kind of populist fury that, 236 years ago, tore down the Bastille less than 300 metres away. Even the Fitzroy bar was boycotting Fitzroy. And yet the imposters—who have a ‘Fitz Spritz’ on their menu, but no sign of Carlton Draught on tap—had put our dog-field on the wall. It was infuriating, and not a good start for our sister suburb relationship. It’s a relief we can make our own baguettes.

The Rotunda then realised we’d been yet to take advantage of the inner north’s greatest asset: our reputation as cafe experts. Maybe we could break bread by actually breaking bread? And so we sent a reporter stationed in Paris to interview a waitress at a popular local cafe that serves Australian-style brunch. The cafe was called Passager, on Avenue Ledru Rollin, and the waitress was named Sasha. How would she describe the 11th?

“Up and coming while still classic. A good mélange of past and present…It’s super creative.”

It does sound like a match. And what about when it comes to coffee?

“We’re currently using more oat milk than we are regular milk,” Sasha told our correspondent.

Bang. Definitely a match.

Ivan Vazov

Sofia, Bulgaria

Joanna Murray-Smith is an internationally renowned playwright and longtime North Fitzroy resident. In early November, she was on a trip to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where a theatre company was putting on four of her plays at once. The trip, which she described to The Rotunda as “surreal”, involved being interviewed on live television alongside an interpreter from the United Nations. She also discovered that the Bulgarian translator of her play Honour had added an entirely new final scene. Either way, audiences adored it.

“I was mobbed. It’s going to be hard coming back to Australia.”

Given it seems essential for North Fitzroy to have some presence in Russia’s backyard, The Rotunda gave Joanna a separate mission to identify Sofia’s North Fitzroy equivalent. Preliminary research had suggested similarities with a neighbourhood close to the inner-city that was coincidentally named after Bulgaria’s most famous playwright: Ivan Vazov.

“It has a similar arty feeling to our neighbourhood,” says Joanna. “It’s about the same distance from the city-centre as North Fitzroy is to Melbourne’s CBD. And there’s a lot of political and artistic graffiti.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a community newspaper, but one of Vazov’s most famous plays is called A Newspaperman. During her live interview on national television, Joanna told the Bulgarian public she’d been sure to visit the Ivan Vazov museum while she was in Sofia. The Rotunda, however, can confirm Joanna had never heard of this man in her life prior to our research request. Now, given her trip to Sofia was such a success, she says she wouldn’t be surprised if they named a suburb after her. Otherwise, if we do end up annexing Clifton Hill, it might get a name change.

Santa María La Ribera

Mexico City, Mexico

We needed a sister suburb that was home to a glorious monument just like ours. It seemed likely we’d find one in Mexico City—a place known for its eclectic and brilliant architecture—so The Rotunda spoke to locals online and enquired about neighbourhoods with a deep sense of community that also have a rotunda. The answer was Santa María La Ribera, not far from the city centre.

24-year-old North Fitzroy Primary School graduate Cohan Feary has been travelling the world for almost a year. In mid-November he was in Mexico, so we asked him to check the area out. He then sent a completely unsolicited but nonetheless brilliant 1000-word report. We’ve included an abridged version below:

“The expedition began with a ‘pulque pina’, perhaps the equivalent of a negroni at Monty’s, but pineapple-flavoured and fifteen dollars cheaper. We took the train to the end of the line, Buenavista, which spits you out onto the main artery that runs through Santa María La Ribera: Calle José Antonio Alzate, its very own St Georges Road.”

“Eventually, we made it to the guiding force behind this journey: the Alameda de Santa María La Ribera, a big rotunda in the middle of a small park. The rotunda is significantly more grandiose and colourful than its North Fitzroy counterpart.”

“Strangely, the park—which is bordered by a plethora of bars and grocery stores—might have more gum trees than Edinburgh Gardens herself. Perhaps we need some native regeneration in our own backyard if a park in Mexico feels more like home than my own walk to primary school.”

Cohan, who’s currently in the Canadian Rockies, still isn’t sure when he’ll come home. We’ll try and plant some gum trees before he gets back.

The next steps

Truthfully, there were so many great candidates around the world suggested by various friends of The Rotunda: from Silver Lake in Los Angeles to Cihangir in Istanbul. But after deciding on the six neighbourhoods around the world North Fitzroy ought to join forces with, we realised how challenging formalising these relationships would actually be. The City of Melbourne were hopeless, but the City of Yarra at least told The Rotunda that entering a sister suburb arrangement would probably need to be ticked off by the councillors. Meanwhile, we used our VCE French to write a letter to the mayor of the 11th arrondissement, resorted to Google Translate to write an appeal in Bulgarian, and tried to buy a fax machine so we could contact the municipal authority for western Seoul. So far, none of our olive branches have been picked up and no ceremonies have been planned. We’ll let you know how it goes.