Everywhere the old is dying and the new struggles to be born. Except in St Kilda. Down there, the old and the new eke out an existence side by side. Monarch’s Cakes next door to Oakberry Acai. Streamline Moderne midrise flats next to elliptical luxury high rises. Crumpled leather sun worshippers beside bubbly injectable influencers. Sunken-faced punks with sideburns and skinny jeans next to dewy third-wave hipsters, also with sideburns and skinny jeans. And now, the two piers: the brand new one stretching out some 400 metres into the bay, so sleek and shiny that it looks like a render for a techno-utopian seasteading community. And only a stone’s throw away, the old pier: a half-deconstructed strip of concrete with rusty pylons sticking out of the water like the vertebrae of a long-dead leviathan. If everything goes to plan, the old pier will be gone by year’s end. But this summer—in this sizzling interregnum—the past and the future commingle in the manky waters of Port Phillip Bay.
The crucial thing to know about the old pier is that it was built mostly for leisure. Unlike Port Melbourne and Williamstown piers, which were used primarily for commercial and naval purposes, St Kilda pier was laid out some 160 years ago so citizens could take a nice stroll down the timber boards and exchange greetings. Promenading, as this activity was known, was a core rite of sociability within European and American high society. In Grande Siécle Paris, aristocrats would strut through the Tuileries in haute couture. In Victorian England, ladies clutching parasols and gentlemen in top hats would march gravely past each other at a deliberate pace. In boomtown New York, if an up-and-coming industrialist touched his hat to fifty other promenaders while parading up Broadway, it meant he was now an established man. The point was not to catch up and talk about the week’s events but to merely see and be seen in motion and in public; a contentless ritual of conceited salutation.
Meanwhile, in colonial St Kilda, promenading was a little cruder and more egalitarian. On the weekend, all and sundry would amble down to the pier: the landowning blue bloods from their Victorian mansions as well as the recent Scottish immigrants from their workers’ terraces. As day wore into evening, the pier would grow “crammed with old and young of both sexes and of every condition of life,” as one news report put it in 1874. On sultry nights, families would leave their stinking hot abodes and sleep head to toe along the length of the pier. One weekend afternoon, a mongrel dog jumped off the boardwalk in deep water and started to drown. A well-to-do businessman promenading with his wife rolled up his shirtsleeves and hauled the tragic mutt onto the beach.
At the turn of the century, a Catalan hotelier named Francis Parer was granted a permit to build a pavilion at the far end of the pier. Parer was Catholic, genteel, eccentric, and a teetotaler—and so was his concept of fun. He erected an ornate building with scalloped weatherboards, Muranese windows, and a terraced rooftop from which visitors could gaze westwards over the Bay back towards the growing city. He moved his family into the pavilion and began serving fish and fruit luncheons from the kiosk with strictly no alcohol. For diversions, one could go up on the roof and look at Parer’s meteorological tools, with which he made meticulous and mostly inaccurate weather predictions. As pier-master, he did his best to cultivate a certain Old World gentility in St Kilda, but then the Depression hit and most of the mansions in the bayside suburb were repurposed as guest houses. The wealthy promenaders were either no longer wealthy or had tree-changed to leafy Toorak. They also bought cars and on hot days could escape the city for distant beaches with pristine water (Frankston).
In the 1930s, Parer terminated his tenancy at the pier and it was taken over by the Kerby family, who were a little more vaudevillian in their tastes. They sold (illegally) spiked fruit punches and home-brewed beer. They trained performing seals and kept them in a water-filled boat anchored out the back of the rocky breakwater. As a side hustle, Mr Kerby tried to drill for coal in the Bay, but was stymied by the port authorities. During World War II, he installed a dance floor at the pavilion, where American GIs taught the local girls how to jitterbug. If a hammered Yank ended up in the water, Kerby would jump to the rescue. After tugging the swimmer in, he’d give mouth to mouth and then take a swig of Pine-O-Cleen to disinfect.
The freewheeling pier of this era is depicted in Sidney Nolan’s painting Under the Pier (1945). The artist grew up in St Kilda and referred to the suburb as “my kitsch heaven.” In his rendering, the sky over the pier has that cruel distant blue of a psychotically hot summer’s day in Melbourne. The promenaders look like the walking dead, skeletal and withering. In the foreground, three gigantic bug-eyed boys leap from the pier, butt-naked and grinning from ear to ear. Beneath them, the sea is filled with swimmers swirling around one another in a frenzied, multi-coloured drift.
In the post-war years, the exhilarating and slightly morbid energy depicted in Nolan’s painting spilled out into the rest of the suburb. There were cheap flats for rent and they filled with bachelors, immigrants, bohemians, artists, gays, drug addicts, and anyone who hadn’t yet managed to build up enough capital to disappear into suburbia, or didn’t want to even if they could. Michelle de Kretser elegises this St Kilda in her recent novel, Theory & Practice (2024). A young woman moves from Sydney to Melbourne to write a Master’s thesis about Virginia Woolf. She signs a lease on a flat in St Kilda because she is told that it is the place to be. It is the 1980s. She looks around. The beach is ugly compared to Sydney. Junkies sit blank-eyed in the parks. Old men grumble to themselves while waiting for a cup of soup on Fitzroy Street. At night, sex workers in sparkly eye-shadow line the length of Grey Street.
“St Kilda should have been depressing,” de Kretser writes. “But it lay open to sea and sky, and a sense of possibility flowed from that. When the estate agent handed me my keys, I headed away from my flat, towards the pier. Others, too, were walking out to sea in the carbolic summer light. We gathered at the end of the pier, where the breakwater began. My companions were weathered old men in shorts, copper statues with gnarly knees. We contemplated the water and the floating gulls, the distant music of trams at our backs. That salty blue water was full of life I couldn't name... I wanted the roll and slosh of its depths beneath me, the risk of drowning. I wanted it to carry me beyond the limits of myself."
Over the next year, she befriends a group of charming bohemians with whom she discusses French theory. She discovers that Virginia Woolf was a little bit racist. She falls almost in love with an engineering student/prototype fuckboy who is already going out with one of her friends. In St Kilda, her eager and naive idealism begins to harden into interpersonal pragmatism and intellectual maturity. But then the developers arrive and the rent goes up. The precariat has to move out. The party is over. It all ends ecstatically at the pier. "We scream our way across Marine Parade,” de Kretser writes, “and when we reach the pier, we break into a run. We pound along screaming as if to fling ourselves into the bay. We still have our young, unprepared faces. The sodium lights curving overhead have their mouths as wide as ours, setting a runny yellow glow on the water. Beyond their reach, the darkness mumbles and shrugs."
*
From here, we know the story. The deconstructionists moved northside. The young professionals moved in. Acland Street was fast-foodified. Rent kept going up. Eventually, St Kilda became a place for the very rich and the very destitute. There were interminable battles for the suburb’s future. Ambitious developers evoked the Riviera. Rusted-on locals grew fiercely protective, if a little nostalgic. Save Dogs Bar! Save the Triangle! Bring back Mirka Mora! Then, on September 11, 2003, someone set fire to the kiosk. By morning, it was an ash heap surrounded by water. The question of what to build in its place became a synecdoche for St Kilda’s wider crisis. Schmaltzy op-eds and talkback radio call-ins demanded a replica. Others (architects) thought it was time for something new. “For a place like St Kilda, which sees itself as socially progressive, to do something as pathetic as rebuild a fairly mediocre, early 20th century, timber ice-cream shop is just madness,” wrote one impassioned professor.
The old triumphed. The Premier at the time, Steve Bracks, paid for a perfect simulacrum of Parer’s original kiosk, which stood disconcertingly erect at the end of the sagging, weatherworn pier. Not long after, though, the clerks at City of Port Phillip began writing reports about “rejuvenating” the foreshore. The conversation moved slowly, until 2017, when Parks Victoria presented two possible designs for a new pier to the perennially engaged St Kilda community. One would be a straight line jutting out into the Bay—a simple refurbishment. The other would strike out at a new pitch a little further south, and come to a rightward parabola at the end. Given the community’s penchant for preservation, one would have imagined the curvy number would be swiftly rejected. But for some reason, the community spoke almost in one voice: they were ready for something new. From there, everything proceeded eerily well. The architects (Jackson Clements Burrows) worked harmoniously with the engineers who worked harmoniously with the builders who worked well with Parks Victoria who worked well with the local council. The final design was released in December of 2020. Construction started two years later. And then, at the beginning of this summer, the new $53 million pier opened to the public. A Christmas miracle.
Now, everyone in the city is talking about the new pier—or posting about it. Fair enough. It looks great, and in our aesthetically unassuming city a bit of civic vanity is refreshing. The wide promenade, fortified in gleaming white concrete, stretches out into the Bay so close to the water that it looks almost like it’s hovering. The sloping metal balustrades lend a further futuristic shine, counterbalanced by the weathered timber benches. But the true money shot is where the pier curls back towards the kiosk. It unfurls like a snail into a three-tiered amphitheatre, cupping the water and directly facing back towards the shore and the skyline.
A friend recently told me that in 2025 wedding planners design evenings around “content moments” i.e. moments that will encourage guests to post on social media. The end of St Kilda pier feels like it was designed for the grid. On a hot day, seeing all those bodies laid out on the steps, and beyond them the sea and the city shimmering, it is almost impossible not to reach for your phone. But if you look just a bit closer, you’ll notice that, in spite of its new window-dressing, it is still just the Bay. The Marina is only quarter-filled with nebbish yachts. The colour of the water is seaweed green when a southerly is blowing and sewage yellow when there’s a northerly. Visitors from beach-rich Sydney or Perth will no doubt come to the pier and snicker, just as gentlemen from Hyde Park might’ve at the St Kilda promenaders and their mongrel dogs way back when. But they’ll be missing the point. Promenading in St Kilda has never been about a view out towards the beautiful. It’s about gawking at each other, the unruly and sun-burnt masses.
*
In the morning, the new pier belongs to teenage boys. They ride their bikes past the “no bikes” sign and leap straight into the water next to the “no diving” sign. Those who can backflip, backflip. Those who can’t bellyflop. They dack each other and share their packed lunches. They go fishing because those under the age of 17 don’t need a license. The older ones have snail trails, neck tattoos, and hi-tech rods. The little ones with skinny legs and oversized hoodies huddle together and cast hand reels. No one catches anything. They dare each other to swim underneath the pier where the giant stingrays live. I’ll give you two dollars, they say. What does two dollars even buy these days? Half a Coke Zero? But it's like the pier is a portal back to a time when two dollars meant something.
Around midday, the boys are displaced by sun-worshippers indulging in the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh. Euro backpackers, hospo workers, uni students, apprentices, freelance curators, and Saturn-returning, spike-tattooed Brunswickites who came in on the 96 all lay their towels down on the tiered amphitheatre. Every action is performed with a secondary awareness of how it will be seen. It matters how you apply your sunscreen, how often you check your phone, how you hit the vape. At just after 2pm, when the mercury is pushing 33°, a French woman (I assume), topless and in sparkling pink bikini bottoms, swan-dives into the water, climbs up the ladder, and preens. Nearby, a sculpted Adonis with peroxide blonde hair performs handstand push-ups.
As the sun sets out over Williamstown, the pier heaves with families funnelled in from the boardwalk. Kids skip between grandparents and parents, negotiating for Mr Whippiy or a quick stop at Luna Park on the way home. Tourists line their kids up next to the barrier at the penguin viewing area and manage to snap a photo of the one mangy bird too lazy, or sick, to retreat into the rocks. (The little penguins are not promenading. They are merely subject to non-reciprocal gawks.) Then, when the final light leaves the sky, the families go home and the couples materialise. They are mostly straight couples, despite the rainbow-lit Espy blaring pride in the distance. Linen shirt, Birkenstock boyfriends (lots of them). Halter top, denim skirt girlfriends. Hiking couples taking little sips from their Camelbacks. Boomers in matching fedoras. Goths in matching chokers. They engage in all manner of hand-holding: fingers fiercely interlaced, tepid handshake, pinkies interlocked. Some couples have been together so long that they stroll in austere silence side by side, not even touching. Others push up against one another at the far balustrade where the overhead lights don’t reach.
The crowd thins past midnight. An Irish lass falls down a step and can’t get up. Half a dozen men in white singlets and tracksuit pants stand around fishing and smoking. They broadcast synthetic flute music via a phone placed in a ceramic mug. A burly guy pulls in a snapper. They measure it. 27cm. It is gutted and cooked on the spot on a portable charcoal grill. The seagulls begin to yap and then the first light of dawn arrives, and shortly after, so do the workmen whose job it is to deconstruct the old pier. They slice through the concrete slabs between the metal pylons with a giant circular saw. The disused walkway, once the locus of all this promenading, is loaded onto a barge and taken to shore for disposal.
One morning at the pier, I noticed three men in orange hazmat suits, white helmets, and gas masks unfastening brackets from the pylons of the old pier. They cautiously placed the rusty metal in a hazardous waste box and then wrapped the remaining steel column in black plastic. I asked a friend who lives near the pier and goes swimming there often what it was all about.
“Apparently asbestos,” she said.
“In the old pier?” I asked.
“I guess.”
“And it’s safe to swim?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “All I know is that the other day when I put my head under the water I heard this weird ticking sound. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Like there’s a giant clock under St Kilda Beach counting down.”
This seems unlikely, but there are lots of irregular things about the pier. No cops (that I’ve seen during my many visits). Not much CCTV. Basically no shade. No rubbish bins (carry in carry out policy). No lifeguards. As far as water safety goes, there are two orange inflatable buoys that I guess fellow citizens are supposed to use to rescue one another, à la Mr Kerby. Only 400 metres from shore, the pier’s end feels like it’s genuinely ruled by the public, world’s away from the mainland. One afternoon when I was down there, some lads on jet skis arrived from Port Melbourne with an esky filled with ice cold Santori Double Lemons. $7 each, they shouted, before whipping out a Square payment device.
There is a price to pay for this little slice of freedom. Already someone has drowned swimming nearby. I saw a guy try to poke a penguin with a selfie stick. There are Mr Whippy cups floating in the designated swimming area. We were told that there was a fire there just the other night spurting up from under the pier like a live volcano.
The pier gets its vitality from this confluence of fun and danger, just like the summertime. And like summer, this phase of the pier will surely end. The kiosk will open and start serving $24 blue margaritas. They’ll start charging for the “penguin experience.” They’ll hire lifeguards. They might even put those little spikes on the benches to stop people from sleeping over. Tick tock, tick tock, I guess. But for now, enough talking. Get down there this morning, before the wind changes.