In my suburb, it's easy to tell the locals apart – just look at their legs

The Age

19-05-2025

Rosanna is an in-between place. It's a card-carrying member of Melbourne's middle suburbia but still gives more than a whiff of the farming country it was in living memory.
Growing up here in the 1970s and '80s, the newly built housing estates were surrounded by paddocks. I could see cows grazing on a nearby hill from my bedroom window. For the first few years of my life, milk was delivered by horse and cart – a fact my children refuse to believe.
Humans outnumber livestock these days, but it's a place where you can feel Melbourne suburbia click into a different headspace. Out here, just past Ivanhoe and Heidelberg, the neat geometric clip of inner-urban blocks finds a more languid groove. Even the air is different. It's fresher, the light is softer. The sun setting over the rewilded Banyule Flats wetlands is a thing of golden beauty.
Some of my favourite parts of the Rosanna I grew up with are no longer Rosanna – in 2006, the south-east corner was cruelly sliced off and given to Heidelberg. It's further proof that Rosanna's bigger neighbours have always had better PR agents. Heidelberg got its famous School of Art, but poor old Rosanna got erased from the illustrious history of McCubbin, Roberts and Streeton, who painted around here too.
Eaglemont gets the kudos as the canvas for Australia's experimental modernist architects, but Rosanna has its own heritage-listed Robin Boyd, with its tell-tale window wall peeking above a mysterious curved brick compound. It's close to my nana's old 1950s home, which is far more representative of a 'burb where simple weatherboard and brick veneer constructions didn't have much chance of alarming the Joneses.
It's changed now, in the way of all places 12 kilometres from Melbourne's CBD. The old houses are reaching the end of their natural life, and their replacements are bigger and flasher. It's gone up in the desirability stakes, but even still, Rosanna is the quiet achiever of the north-east: an unshouty suburb for unshouty people. For years, the closest thing to a bar was Aagaman Indian Nepalese Restaurant on Lower Plenty Road. Even these days, the only thing resembling nightlife is Margarita Wednesdays at Mexican Taco down near the station.
It's no coincidence Rosanna is the first zone 2 station on the Hurstbridge line. Heading toward the city, the next stop is Heidelberg – aka 'the big shops' on Burgundy Street. Turn the other way and there be dragons (or at least Macleod). And woe betide any commuter caught out by the tyranny of the express trains hurtling through Rosanna. I remember a woman in the afternoon peak hour rush berating the carriage for not waking her in time: 'You know where I get off, you bastards!'
No, Rosanna wasn't named after the early '80s Toto pop hit (obviously) but derives from a farm named after a 19th-century resident, Elizabeth Anna Rose.