Tony Birch

Or you would get a sense of something happening in the street that it was best to avoid.

So...

I have a good sense of avoiding conflict and avoiding dangerous situations by, I suppose the best way to put it would be by being able to read the street.

I mean, that's very different now.

When you go down Brunswick Street, all you have to read is the sign for eight different sorts of coffee you can get.

But as a kid, it was a very different place.

Our family was well known, so people were generally protective of me as a kid.

But you still had to be quite aware of what was going on around you on certain streets that you would avoid at certain times of day or night.

Well, I never saw a naked taxi driver, Richard.

I think that was entertainment for the middle class.

I'm not sure.

I mean, it's interesting you say that because, and again, we've got to avoid being romantic because it was in some ways a very tough place to grow up in.

But I would say quite strongly that robbery was very uncommon amongst people simply because we didn't have anything to rob.

you know, it's not as if people could come to your house and take something from you that they wanted because you tended to have nothing.

And I don't mean that in any sort of woe is me way.

I mean, we may have occasionally had a black and white television, but we certainly wouldn't have any cash or any other goods in the house.

Robbery amongst people was very uncommon.

It was more the case that when I was a kid in Fitzroy, the sort of illegality that you would see and

you know, a pretty sort of wild night would occur somewhere along Gertrude Street or possibly Brunswick Street.

But that was related to the pubs.