My tiny suburb birthed two huge celebrities, but that's not why we look down on our neighbours

The Age

09-06-2025

There are two 'Gullys' out here at the base of the Dandenong ranges: Upper Ferntree Gully and plain old Ferntree Gully, and I've lived in both. The names are similar and the postcodes are the same, but they have very different identities.
Upper Ferntree Gully is 29 metres higher in elevation than its bigger neighbour, which was called Lower Ferntree Gully until the early '60s when residents agitated to drop the 'Lower', in part because they felt it made them seem inferior to their 'Upper' neighbours. They always were a touchy lot down there.
My wife and I have lived in Upper Ferntree Gully for almost 30 years, after a landslip further up the hill in Upwey forced our young family to leave our quaint (read rundown) hills cottage in 1992. That is a story for another day. While it was a costly and traumatic episode in our lives, it was a silver lining to find our current home, in an ideal suburb.
A five-minute walk from our place brings us to the local train station, supermarket, four coffee shops, a historic pub, the 1812 theatre, primary school, medical clinic, two cricket grounds, hospital, Sunday market and the Dandenong Ranges National Park.
A few minutes across the border into the suburb of Tremont (pop. 69) is the '1000 steps' – now known as the Kokoda memorial walk – arguably the most popular bushwalk in Melbourne. Here, lyrebirds can sometimes be seen and or heard, and wallabies and echidnas are common among the gums lining the numerous tracks within the park. (A tip: if you're considering doing the steps, avoid weekends, which can get very busy, and wet weather, as the steps are steep, slippery and narrow.) How many other suburbs have that variety of services and natural attractions within such close proximity?
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Melburnians have visited this area since the 1860s seeking fresh air and visual relief from the city's mostly flat landscape. The place takes its name from the famous 1857 painting by German artist Eugene von Guerard, Ferntree Gully, which now hangs in the National Gallery in Canberra. The journey up here was made easier when the railway came through in 1889, with a station named Lower Ferntree Gully established near the cemetery and, two kilometres further along the line, another one at Upper Ferntree Gully.
Most people only glimpse Upper Gully as they drive through it on weekends. They miss the steep and often narrow streets, the large, beautiful gardens, and eclectic range of houses that give Upper Gully its character. It is a quiet place during the week, and only really experiences congestion on weekends as day trippers pass through on their way to the hills (please don't call them mountains, only people who live up there call them that). Many come to ride on Puffing Billy, which started from here in 1900, before the line to Belgrave was electrified in 1962.
We get a bit more rain than in Melbourne, and it's usually a couple of degrees cooler in summer. Snow is unheard of; you have to go up to Olinda or higher if you want to savour that particular delight.