My suburb wanted to beat Chadstone. So it banned traffic

33 minutes ago 1

Opinion

November 24, 2025 — 7.00pm

Once a town and a city, these days my suburb can feel more like a village – and one with a bustling heart.

Before moving here in 2007, I’d spent five years living in Greece. As a travel writer, I had explored the vibrant neighbourhoods of Athens, idyllic islands and remote mountain villages. I never imagined that one day the tables would turn, and I’d be back in Melbourne, leading eager tourists around a Greek neighbourhood in suburban Melbourne.

At the time I arrived here, it had a sleepy vibe. There was only one souvlaki joint and the liveliest thing about it was our “Greek senate” – the old men who would gather in the mall in the mornings, drinking coffee and smoking.

It was our search for a family-size house closer to my husband’s kids that led us to Oakleigh, 15 kilometres southeast of the city. I was an inner-city snob – we’d both grown up in the then migrant strongholds of Fitzroy and Richmond – but were drawn to period homes and urban character. With good local food shopping, convenient public transport and road connections, the suburb was attracting more professionals and young families. It was no substitute for Athens, but I had landed in a neighbourhood where I was greeted in Greek, could find my staples at the local delis and felt a cultural connection, even if I was a stranger to the suburb.

Oakleigh has long been a hub for Greek migrants who first settled in the area in the ’50s and ’60s. Once a separate town – and stopover between Melbourne and Gippsland – central Oakleigh retains a small-town feel, largely due to the historic precinct’s grid of narrow, one-way streets, heritage civic buildings and avenues of plane trees.

Originally centred around Dandenong Road and the grazing runs near Scotchman’s Creek, the town focus shifted south towards the train station after the Gippsland railway opened in 1877. Oakleigh’s rich history is most evident in Warrawee Park, where kids play and community events incongruously take place around the old gravestones of the Pioneer Memorial Park, initially a cemetery on the outskirts of the township.

Jobs in the timber yards, brickworks and other industries saw Oakleigh boom, bringing migrants and housing. It was eventually absorbed into suburban Melbourne in the 1950s. Oakleigh remains an employment hub, with industrial and commercial areas west towards Huntingdale and along Dandenong Road, and a busy mini-CBD, which offers amenities rivalling those of much larger suburbs. Locals alone couldn’t possibly sustain the nine hairdressers, 10 barbers, eight nail salons and more than a dozen miscellaneous beauty services in the one square kilometre around the central grid.

But over the past 15 years, a Greek resurgence has seen Oakleigh – and the bustling alfresco cafes and eateries of Eaton Mall – become a different kind of destination. People come from all over to eat Greek, buy Greek and experience the unique atmosphere of arguably the Greekest place outside Greece.

I got to know many of the local traders when I started running walking tours with SBS food presenter Maeve O’Meara in 2014. We would take groups from across Victoria and interstate through shops and kitchens to taste the flavours of Greece and meet the proud people behind the businesses breathing new life into the area.

Trailblazer Nikos, who first opened a cake shop in Oakleigh in 1986, is credited with introducing Greek cafe culture to Eaton Mall in the late ’90s. The mall had become a pedestrian zone in the ’70s, to boost local retailers in response to the growing threat from nearby Chadstone. But the game-changer was the arrival of Vanilla in 2008, which opened beyond 5pm, bringing evening crowds and demonstrating the mall’s potential as an all-day cafe and dining precinct and community meeting place.

Its thriving plateia (town square) atmosphere was boosted by a major facelift in 2013, just as Oakleigh was being re-energised by a new generation of Australian-born Greeks and a more recent wave of migrants fleeing Greece’s financial crisis.

Places like Kalimera introduced traditional pork souvlaki, while pastry chefs from Greece have upped Oakleigh’s dizzying array of sweet offerings. Established businesses from other parts of Melbourne have followed – including Melissa, originally in Collingwood’s Smith Street, the recently resurrected Cafe Greco from Chapel St – along with newcomers like rooftop bar, Olympia.

From travel agents and lawyers to jewellers, Oakleigh now has the country’s largest concentration of Greek and Greek-run businesses, organisations and services, and a dynamic community built around the core pillars of the Greek Orthodox church, Oakleigh Grammar and Oakleigh Cannons soccer club.

Saturday mornings in Oakleigh have a festive market day quality. You bump into neighbours and people from across town doing their shopping, getting a “souv” or coffee and cake. You know it’s Greek Easter when you see queues outside the butcher shops and dodge people with whole lambs slung over their shoulders.

Depending on the day or time, the mall buzzes with changing shifts of retirees, lunchtime workers, families, tourists and young people, and often four generations sitting together. Locals avoid the queues on weekends and balmy evenings, when you might feel like you’ve crashed a party. Good luck finding parking or getting out of Oakleigh Centro car park on a Saturday morning.

Of course, Oakleigh is much more than its Greek heart. The vitality of the area has attracted new businesses and eateries offering everything from Nepalese momo to Sri Lankan buffet.

Oakleigh’s many diverse communities enjoy a rich social life around local churches, schools, social and sporting clubs. Warrawee Park hosts an Anzac Day dawn service, an annual music festival and the ever-expanding Greek Glendi, and there’s a live music scene at the RSL and bowls clubs.

In the time we have raised our family here, Oakleigh’s liveability has also been enhanced by major infrastructure investment. We enjoy summers in the parkland setting of the Oakleigh pool, saved from closure and now part of the revitalised Oakleigh Recreation Centre. Millions have been spent on multi-sports facilities at Caloola Reserve and the Oakleigh Cannons’ new grandstand. Peak-hour trains run every few minutes from the upgraded Oakleigh station.

It all makes for a hospitable and lively, family-friendly suburb, with a strong community spirit, life in the evenings and weekends, and a place where all generations are at home and almost everything is a walk away.

On Sunday mornings, we walk to the popular Rotary trash and treasure market. At Easter, we join the masses at Saints Anargyri church, walking home after the midnight service with our candles lit. On New Year’s Eve, we join neighbours on the old Hanover Street bridge to watch the fireworks over the distant city skyline.

Recently, high-rise apartments have sprung up around Oakleigh’s periphery. Locals are alarmed by the prospect of 16-storey towers and traffic bottlenecks already forming from the bike track currently under construction along busy Hanover St.

I wonder what it will be like by the time we are the next generation of old Greeks who call Oakleigh home.

Victoria Kyriakopoulos is a writer and author of several Lonely Planet Greece guides.