Feeling connected to your suburb is now a sin?



Rush at the station

Camberwell is one of the nicer historic garden suburbs of Melbourne. It is also also the boyhood suburb of comic Barry Humphries and the home of actor Geoffrey Rush. Both Rush and Humphries have taken part in movements to protect the heritage of the suburb from overdevelopment, including proposals to build a nine storey car park and office block over the historic railway station (they lost).

Their efforts to protect the heritage of Camberwell have drawn fire from a leading architect, Professor Kim Dovey. According to Dovey, people who resist modernity are ... well, racists and whatnot:

Melbourne University academic Kim Dovey has also accused some residents of trying to defend their patch from ethnic and class differences.

"There's an element of 'well, we're not racist, we welcome different kinds of people as long as they behave exactly the same as we always have," Prof Dovey said yesterday...

Prof Dovey said Rush had dramatised the issue by making people feel if they accepted change "they would be giving up something of themselves".

So bad luck if you feel attached to your lovely, green, historic suburb. According to Professor Dovey you're not allowed to try to conserve it for yourself or your children. If you do try, you're just resisting modernisation/globalisation and must be a racist. And Professor Dovey gets even more Orwellian. You're not even allowed to think, as your suburb gets transformed, that you're giving up something of yourself - that too is a forbidden thought.