What’s your connection to Brooklyn?
I moved here three years ago. I’ve only lived in Melbourne for 11 years and I moved to the inner west about five years ago and bought in Brooklyn about three years ago.
What do you like about Brooklyn?
I like the proximity to the city – I work in the CBD. It’s close to Altona beach. Relatively easy to get anywhere from here.
What would you change?
I think the past footprint of Brooklyn – it’s been seen as probably the poorer cousin in Hobsons Bay to Williamstown and Altona beach. It’d be nice to ramp up that footprint, that it’s not just an industrial area.
Can you tell me about The Neighbourhood Project?
The Neighbourhood Project is just a group of people that live in the Brooklyn community and at the moment, with help from council, we’re trying to do things to either beautify the suburb or just get more community involvement happening.
We received a $30,000 funding grant from CoDesign Studio and then the council matched that $30,000, so we’ve been using that to put on a whole bunch of different community events. Last year, we did a Christmas movie night, which we’re doing another one on December 9. So, that’s just a movie with Santa; there’s probably going to be some food trucks. We’re trying to get more people involved, but we usually meet once a month and then discuss what we’ve got ongoing.
What’s your favourite local cafe or eatery?
Brooklyn doesn’t have a cafe or a local eatery, so we’ve [The Neighbourhood Project] booked for the next 12 months – for the first Sunday of every month – for a coffee cart to come to the new Brooklyn park.
Last week we did a bake sale in association with the school. One month before, about 170 people turned up.
The really nice thing about the pop-up cafe is, people are not just coming to get a free coffee; they’re bringing their kids, bringing their dogs, bringing their family and they’re milling around for a couple of hours and socialising.
The first one we had, there was graffiti on one of the rubbish bins – six of the residents bought cleaning equipment with them and cleaned off the graffiti.
What’s something people would be surprised to know about you?
I’m a bit of an amateur photographer. I don’t know if that’s a surprise though – I’m a pretty open book, really, so no one’s really surprised about anything.
