West St Kilda Residents Association

“At the cellular level (that means You),
how much are you willing to sacrifice for
truth?” —Maria Ressa, Journalist

Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize
laureate and CEO of Rappler, speaking to
Laura Tingle on the breakdown of
facts, truth, and trust. [13’40”]

Watch Yoorrook’s short video [1’52”]

“Yoorrook Justice Commission’s power was in the truths that were told. They provide a way forward to a better future for First Peoples and all Victorians, one based on truth and understanding. The historic truth-telling inquiry may have finished, but Treaty and Truth go hand in hand, and we will continue to share their stories.” Yoorrook’s final report can be found at https://www.yoorrook.org.au/

For more info, visit
First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria

“The starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.”

—Paul Keating
The Redfern Park Address
10 December 1992
Watch the video [16’49”]
Read the transcript

“You must believe that you can help bring about a better world. It may seem to you conceited to suppose that you personally can do anything important toward improving the lot of mankind. This is a fallacy. A good society is produced only by good individuals, just as truly as a majority in a election is produced by the votes of single electors. Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment with kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, and happiness rather than misery.”

— Bertrand Russell
A Fresh Look At Empiricism 1927-1942
“Love is wise, hatred is foolish.”

“I wasn’t born in America.
America was born in our lands.”

Ideas From Across The Pacific
Erik Baker | Trump’s Darwinian America
Judith Butler | Fascist Passions In Frames Of War
Woody Guthrie | All You Fascists Bound To Lose
Keeley Gould | Powwow (New Mexico 2014)
From: St Kilda: Music Art Life

WEST ST KILDA
RESIDENTS ASSOCIATION

West St Kilda Residents Association
PO Box 2022, St Kilda West LPO
Victoria 3182, Australia
wskrassociation@gmail.com
www.wskra.com

Committee Members

—Leigh Hardy—
[President]

— —
[Vice-President]

— —
[Secretary]

—Megan Nevett—
[Treasurer]

—Clare Lincoln—

—Catherine Sharples—

Community Links

reconciliation

—Rosemary Rule—
—Dennis Fisher—
Co-Chair

Pride Centre

—Paul Horwell—
Chief Executive Officer

Better Health

—Andrea McLeod—
Chief Executive Officer

Launch Housing

—Sherri Bruinhout—
CEO

Orange Sky

—Lucas Patchett OAM—
Co-Founder & CEO

Sacred Heart

—Hang Vo—
Chief Executive Officer

Thorne-Harbour

—Kent Burgess—
Chief Executive Officer

Local Members
Of Parliament

Local Government

Port Phillip City Council

St Kilda Town Hall
99a Carlisle Street, St Kilda
www.portphillip.vic.gov.au

Executive Leadership

—Chris Carroll—
Chief Executive Officer

—Brian Tee—
General Manager
City Development

—Kylie Bennetts—
General Manager
Community Wellbeing

—Robyn Borley—
General Manager
Governance & Performance

—Simon Hill—
Acting General Manager
City Infrastructure

—Tarnya McKenzie—
Acting Director
People & Experience

Councillors 2025-2029

—Alex Makin—
Councillor, Montague Ward
Mayor

—Bryan Mears—
Councillor, Lakeside Ward
Deputy Mayor

—Libby Buckingham—
Councillor, Balaclava Ward

—Louise Crawford—
Councillor, Elwood Ward

—Heather Cunsolo—
Councillor, Port Melbourne Ward

—Justin Halliday—
Councillor, Alma Ward

—Rod Hardy—
Councillor, Albert Park Ward

—Beti Jay—
Councillor, South Melbourne Ward

—Serge Thomann—
Councillor, St Kilda Ward

Divercity Media Release
Meet Our New Councillors

Council Services

New to Port Phillip City?
New Residents Directory

Pets and animals
Pet registration
Dog parks and beaches
Cat curfew

Major events hotlines
and road closures
What When Where

Help Council improve
with feedback/complaint
City Council online forms

Panel 1

3182: St Kilda & St Kilda West

Postcode 3182 Victoria:
St Kilda+St Kilda West

An introduction to what may well be
the most liveable —and compassionate—
inner-city postcode in the world

Despite what The Age | Domain | Caroline Zielinski
had to say about St Kilda in an article under
a rubric The Age calls “Insight” (28 June 2025)

Just Like This
Fragments Of St Kilda Life:
—There’s Never Been A St Kilda—
—A Love Letter To West Beach—
—Days Just Like This—
—Nights Just Like This—
—Live Music Just Like This—-
—Life Just Like This—
—Places Just Like This—
—Initiatives Just Like This—-

There’s Never Been A St Kilda
Music & Video by Mal Webb, James Cattell, Dominic Hook, Kylie Morrigan et al (see below)

Just Like This…
Love Letter To West Beach
Video montage by Michael Gilbert

Days Just Like This…
At St Kilda South Reserve
Music: Beach Bum by Kevin MacLeod

Days Just Like This…
At St Kilda Beach
Video clips: Gerome Villarete

Nights Just Like…
Open Mic Tuesdays At The Basement
Video clip: Gerome Villarete

Places Just Like…
The Basement on Open Mic Tuesdays
Video clip: Gerome Villarete

Live Music Just Like…
The Peptides At The Bowlo
Video clip: Gerome Villarete (Sunday 13 July 2025)

Life Just Like…
Shane Carter, itinerant rough-sleeping artist, on Fitzroy Street, giving new meaning to Street Art
Images: Gerome Villarete

Places Just Like…
Blessington Street Laundrette, St Kilda
Images: Gerome Villarete

Places Just Like…
Abbey Road, Acland Street Village, St Kilda
Images: Gerome Villarete

Places Just Like…
Memo Music Hall, Albert St, Acland St Village
Video clip: Gerome Villarete

Places Just Like…
Fitzroy Street, St Kilda
(Friday 11 July 2025)

Initiatives Just Like This
“Being homeless is not illegal.”
“Housing is a human right.”
Need To Know information for people who are homeless (sadly, some can’t read)

“In 2017 realestate.com.au ranked Australian capital city suburbs by their access to schools, work opportunities, and a number of other factors. The top 10 suburbs were all in Victoria or Queensland. The nation’s ‘most livable’ suburb was St Kilda West (Albert Park came in at number 7 and Port Melbourne at number 9). As Melbourne was rated as the world’s most livable city from 2011 to 2017, we figure that St Kilda West must be the world’s most livable suburb! “—Colin Fryer, President’s Report 2018 AGM

Melbourne ranks as fourth most liveable city in the world for 2025 | TimeOut Melbourne | Melissa Woodley + Liv Condous (17 June 2025)
[Media Screenshot TimeOut Melbourne Online]

There Will Be No Love Dying Here

More About West St Kilda
More About The Neighbourhood
Just About St Kilda Places

Home

Panel 2

Yoorrook: Walk With Us:

Yoorrook Justice Commission
COMMUNITY TRUTH-TELLING

The Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria was Australia’s first formal truth-telling inquiry into historic and ongoing social, economic, institutional, and systemic injustice against Australia’s First Peoples since colonisation.

[The circular image above and similar images used as headers on these pages were derived from the design by Gary Saunders::Bangerang::Yorta Yorta::Wiradjuri::Dja Dja Wurrung, for the Yoorrook Justice Commission.]

Yoorrook truth-telling commission begins to examine ‘brutal ugliness’ of Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people | ABC News | Bridget Brennan (24 March 2022)

Investigating Australia’s hidden history | Four Corners Documentary

Supporting the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s Walk For Truth | Bank Australia

“Walk forward together.” Yoorrook Justice Commissioner Travis Lovett | Croakey Health Media

(Media Screenshot ABC News Online 7.30 Report)

Yoorrook Justice Commission’s historic Walk For Truth | ABC News 7.30 Report (18 June 2025)

Walk For Truth: hundreds of people join 486km trek from Portland to Melbourne for reconciliation | The Guardian | Sarah Collard (18 June 2025)

(Media Screenshot ABC News Online Danielle Bonica)

Thousands join Walk For Truth as Yoorrook Justice Commission truth-telling inquiry concludes | ABC News | Kate Ashton and Nate Woodall (18 June 2025)

Yoorrook Justice Commission Final Newsletter

POST-SCRIPTUM:

Yoorrook, the Victorian truth-telling process, had come to a close, but the work for a better future based on truth, understanding, and transformation carries on, not just for some but for all Australians.

“No blame,
no reasoning,
no argument,
just understanding.
If you understand, and
you show that
you understand,
you can love, and
the situation will change.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace In Every Step

Walk For Truth
Wednesday, 18 June 2025
Walk For Truth on Wednesday 18 June 2025 from King’s Domain to Parliament House was the culmination of Yoorrook’s 500+km walk from Portland to Melbourne as both invitation and demonstration to uphold and support community truth-telling, understanding, and transformation. In my 20 years in Melbourne, it was the most moving gathering for belonging to this land —and what it means to be Melbournean, Victorian, and Australian.

[Media Gerome Villarete Melbourne]

“The centre of democracy is truth. You are not free if you’ve been lied to.”—Jason Stanley

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”—David Mitchell

“The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include Indigenous Australians. There is everything to gain.”—Paul Keating (Redfern Park Address, 10 December 1992)

Why is truth fundamental?
Because to live is to engage with reality—not illusion. To ignore, deny, distort, or remain ignorant of the truth is to participate in a lie. A lie cannot survive in an examined life.
Gerome Villarete
26 June 2025
Art Saves Lives

POST-POSTSCRIPTUM:
On Anger, by David Whyte:

“Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

“Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.”

More at Making Sense | David Whyte

Maya Angelou | Live In Lewisham (1987)
“And Still I Rise” from 32’19”

“The trouble for the thief
Is not how to steal the Chief’s bugle
But where to blow it.”
—An African saying—

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I rise
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
Just cause I walk as if I have oil wells
Pumping in my living room
Just like moons and like suns
With the certainty of tides
Just like hopes springing high
Still I rise
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my sassiness upset you?
Don’t take it so hard
Just cause I laugh
As if I have gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard
You can shoot me with your words
You can cut me with your lies
You can kill me with your hatefulness
But just like life, I rise
Does my sexiness offend you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance
As if I have diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts
Of history’s shame, I rise
Up from a past
Rooted in pain, I rise
A black ocean, leaping and wide
Welling and swelling
And bearing in the tide
Leaving behind nights
Of terror and fear, I rise
Into a daybreak
Miraculously clear, I rise
Bringing the gifts
That my ancestors gave
I am the hope
And the dream of the slave
And so
There I go!

—Maya Angelou
Live at The Lewisham (1987)
And Still I Rise (From 32’19”)

NAIDOC 2025 links:
NAIDOC Week at Port Phillip City
NAIDOC Week Education Resources

50 Years! Vic Naidoc Pride Gala, Fitzroy Town Hall, Saturday 12 July 2025

NAIDOC 50 Years | The History Of NAIDOC Posters | ABC Indigenous (2024)

The Point | SBS NITV | NAIDOC: The Next Generation
“What’s it like to carry a name like Mabo, Dodson or Bayles? As NAIDOC celebrates 50 years, the Point sits down with emerging leaders who carry on the Strength, Vision and Legacy.”—The Point with John Paul Janke

*Clockwise from top left: Mundanara Bayles, Lowanna Grant, Maggie Blanden, Kaleb Mabo*

[Credits Screenshots The Point Online]

Uncle Jack Charles | Day Of Mourning (2018) | Words adapted from “Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights” (1938) by J.T. Patten and W. Ferguson

“On Australia Day, 1938, protestors marched through the streets of Sydney, followed by a congress attended by over a thousand people. One of the first major civil rights gatherings in the world, it was known as the Day of Mourning.”—NAIDOC | History

“We have been ‘protected’ for 150 years, and look what has become of us.”
–William Ferguson in 1938

Learn more about the decades of struggle for recognition and reconciliation here:

Just About Us Australians

“At the cellular level (that means You),
how much are you willing to sacrifice for
truth?” —Maria Ressa, Journalist

Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize
laureate and CEO of Rappler, speaking to
Laura Tingle on the breakdown of
facts, truth, and trust. [13’40”]

Home

WEST ST KILDA
RESIDENTS ASSOCIATION

Panel 3

The Association

The West St Kilda Residents Association is a not-for-profit, volunteer, community-based organisation of West St Kilda residents. It is non-sectarian and not politically partisan.
Its general objective is to serve the community interests of West St Kilda residents.

The West St Kilda Residents Association aims to provide an open and public forum for all West St Kilda residents to express their views and to be informed on issues relating to their community.

– Preserving and enhancing neighbourhood character and residential amenity
– Town planning, traffic management, parking regulation and public transport, and
– Preservation of heritage buildings.

The West St Kilda Residents Association promotes integrated planning, active consultation, communication and engagement between all stakeholders in the neighbourhood.

Within our borders: Catani Gardens & West Beach. Across the shallow water: St Kilda Pier and the Royal Yacht Squadron marina berths. On the other side of the tram tracks: Albert Park Reserve sporting clubs.

The West St Kilda Residents Association was formed on 23 March 1999 at a public meeting of about 100 residents of the West St Kilda area at what was then the West St Kilda RSL Club at 23 Loch Street.

The membership adopted Model Rules for an Incorporated Association and applied for incorporation on 8 June 1999 under the Associations Incorporations Act of 1981. This was granted on 18 June 1999.

After the Victorian State Government passed the Associations Incorporation Reform Act of 2012, the West St Kilda Residents Association Committee drafted a set of rules based on the new model, with changes to suit our specific requirements. These were approved at the 13 November 2013 AGM and accepted by Consumer Affairs Victoria.

The West St Kilda Residents Association is non-sectarian and not politically partisan.

*Contours Of Catani (2021) by Buff Diss Artist. Image Gerome Villarete Melbourne*

CONTOURS OF CATANI
A public amenity uplift project

One of the public toilets in West St Kilda is located in Cummings Reserve, on the wide nature strip on Beaconsfield Parade. Its location is in a prime entertainment, sports, leisure and residential area in one of Melbourne’s treasured beachside locations.

The old brick toilet block had been slated for demolition by Port Phillip City Council, but due to more delays in the implementation of plans and the severe lack of upkeep, the public amenity had become a local blight. It is, however, a perfect canvas for public art.

That old, unwelcoming toilet block is now a welcome community landmark. We can only encourage Council to consider building the new design replacement toilets next to the existing structure or in another location nearby—after all, this open-air brick toilet block must be the last of its generation in our bayside city.

*Bay Totem (2001) by Peter Blizzard, Artist. Image Robert Hamer*

BAY TOTEM
A commemorative public art project

From the Creative Brief (August 2000) of the Sculpture Fountain Commission:

“Artists are invited to submit concepts for a sculpture fountain that both meets the commemorative aspect of Federation and blends harmoniously with a spectacular yet sensitive environment. It is envisaged that the proposed installation should be enduring and provide a new icon of historical and cultural significance to the City of Port Phillip and greater Melbourne.

The aim of the project is to mark one hundred years of Australian nationhood around a theme that may be described as ‘emerging together’- a concept equally relevant to Australia in the next one hundred years as we tackle the remaining tests of tolerance and reconciliation. The water element symbolic of continuity and an ongoing process of calmness and healing.

In developing this theme artists may wish to consider Federation in its broadest context: how do we view it, what does it mean to us? How to describe in visual terms what came out of this era—an upsurge of new ideas and international influences, a wider recognition of the hemisphere in which we live, or a re-affirmation of our own national identity?

Alternatively, we may see this process in human terms: as a new beginning, to give us an occasion to review our history and challenge attitudes to Indigenous cultures and to successive immigrant groups. It may also be a spiritual journey, contemplative and reassuring of our ability to connect, change and evolve over time.”

Commissioned jointly by the City of Port Phillip and the West St Kilda Residents Association.

Read our story

West St Kilda was built at the turn of the 19th century on reclaimed land, roughly fifty hectares of the saltwater marshland at the edge of the Ancient Sea that the Bunurong Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation called Nairm, the great bay, today’s Port Phillip Bay.

The West St Kilda Residents Association is an incorporated association registered with Consumer Affairs Victoria since 1999. We are a residents association — not an owners or ratepayers association. The Association engages with all levels of government in the service of West St Kilda community interests.

Subscribe in support of the association’s work in the local area—from the past 25 years to the next 25. Volunteer on the Committee. More Volunteers can make committee work more fun.

By subscribing, you support the sustained efforts in preserving and enhancing West St Kilda’s neighbourhood character and residential amenity. Your annual subscription strengthens representation and helps fund the association’s biannual newsletters, its annual general meetings and local social gatherings.

WEST ST KILDA RESIDENTS ASSOCIATION

Postcode 3182 Victoria: St Kilda+St Kilda West

WEST ST KILDA
RESIDENTS ASSOCIATION

Postcode 3182 Victoria:
St Kilda+St Kilda West