Description
I was inspired to product this painting of a Fitzroy hairdresser during a visit to Melbourne.
Walking down the streets of Fitzroy in Melbourne I spotted this most interesting lady.
As I went to take here photo, she turned around an looked at me.
Fitzroy is an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia,
Fitzroy is known throughout Australia for its street art, music scene and culture of bohemianism, and is the main home of Melbourne’s Fringe Festival. Its commercial heart is Brunswick Street, one of Melbourne’s major retail, culinary, and nightlife strips.
Long associated with the working class, Fitzroy has undergone waves of urban renewal and gentrification since the 1980s and today is inhabited by a wide variety of socio-economic groups, featuring both some of the most expensive rents in Melbourne and one of its largest public housing complexes, Atherton Gardens.
Fitzroy was Melbourne’s first suburb, created in 1839
Surrounded as it was by a large number of factories and industrial sites in the adjoining suburbs, Fitzroy was ideally suited to working men’s housing, and from the 1860s to the 1880s, Fitzroy’s working class population rose dramatically.
The area’s former mansions became boarding houses and slums.
The establishment of the Housing Commission of Victoria in 1938 saw swathes of new residences being constructed in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. With many of Fitzroy’s residents moving to the new accommodation, their places were taken by post-war immigrants, mostly from Italy and Greece and the influx of Italian and Irish immigrants saw a marked shift towards Catholicism from Fitzroy’s traditional Methodist and Presbyterian roots.
Before World War I, Fitzroy was a working-class neighbourhood, with a concentration of political radicals already living there.
Post war immigration into the suburb resulted in the area becoming socially diverse. Many working-class Chinese immigrants settled in Fitzroy due to its proximity to Chinatown. There is also a noticeable Vietnamese community, a small enclave of Africans, and the area (particularly Johnston Street) also serves as a centre of Melbourne’s Hispanic community, with many Spanish and Latin American-themed restaurants, clubs, bars and some stores.
Fitzroy is a hub for live music in Melbourne and there are many small commercial art galleries, artist-run spaces and artist studios located within the suburb.