Women Who Shaped Fitzroy Street
Highlighting the women who shaped Fitzroy Street's social landscape.
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When Melbourne City Council decided on a clean-up campaign in the 1930s, forcing sex workers to move south of the Yarra, it changed the face of Fitzroy Street and St Kilda forever. Already the home to a large ‘camp’ community, St Kilda absorbed these new arrivals, bringing more trade and visitors to the area.
Other women who have helped sculpt the social landscape are:
Val Eastwood
In 1950, Val Eastwood opened Café 31 in St Kilda – close to the Pride Centre – now Café Di Stasio. Eastwood, a former model and dance teacher, opened her first café, Val’s Coffee Lounge, when she was in her mid-twenties. This was a rare city venue, which welcomed the ‘camp’ community, which was otherwise underground. Café 31 was the second of a string of venues that Val ran from 1951 to the late 1970s. Val’s venues were a magnet for gay men and women – as well as the theatre crowd and bohemian Melbourne generally.
Janet Diane Hillier
anet Hillier, a lesbian originally from Adelaide, was another key person who created a vibrant gay Melbourne. She started by organising a birthday party for herself in the mid-1960s and saw the need for more events for the camp community.
In 1977, Janet Hillier joined forces with camp entertainer Douglas Lucas and created what was to become a Melbourne’s institution – Pokey’s at the Prince of Wales Hotel in Fitzroy Street St Kilda.
Jan’s business acumen and Doug’s lavish costumes and choreography ensured that for 14 years drag was stylish, witty, and extravagant. Close to half a million people attended the brilliant shows over fourteen years before Pokey’s closed its doors on Friday night 13 March 1992.
Mirka Mora
Mirka Mora, one of Melbourne’s best-known bohemian artists, transformed the culture of her adopted hometown after her arrival in Australia in the 1950s from war-torn France.
Mirka loved St Kilda’s raffish charm and made it her home for nearly two decades. From 1965-1970, she lived with her family at the Tolarno Hotel in Fitzroy St and assisted with managing the Tolarno Bistro with Georges, her husband. It became Melbourne best-known French restaurant. Meanwhile, Mirka was slowly building her reputation. Her 1967 exhibition at Tolarno Gallery was well reviewed. At 35, she was already a serious, mid-career artist, appreciated by an influential circle of peers and patrons.
Mirka left her mark all over the city: on murals in restaurants and at Flinders Street Station; in a mosaic on St Kilda Pier; on a clothing collection worn by many a Melbourne woman and even on the exterior of a tram in the 1980s.
In 2002, she was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture and Communication.
c.1954. Photographer Rose Stereograph Company.
Courtesy State Library of Victoria.
Yvette Kelly and Rose Banks
Twin sisters Yvette Kelly and Rose Banks, worked at the ‘Gatty’ since they were 14 – when it was owned by their Maltese migrant parents. They took over running the place after their mother’s death in the late 1990s.
For years, the Gatwick had effectively been a boarding house, with a good proportion of long-term residents, but thousands of other people stayed for shorter periods, sometimes only a week or two or even a few nights.
Many were people in temporary crisis, sometimes self-inflicted, sometimes circumstantial, but all desperately needing somewhere to stay, with scant other accommodation options.
For many, the walls of the grandiose Art Deco building provided a refuge, and the sisters who ran the Gatwick were not only proprietors but also confidants, counsellors and surrogate mothers.
The sisters sold The Gatwick in 2018 to Channel Nine’s The Block, which gutted and renovated the building into luxury apartments. The sisters bought apartment No.2 saying, ‘We terribly missed the place.’
Photo Courtesy State Library of Victoria: Rose Stereograph
For more information on local LGBTIQ+ history, please contact The Victorian Pride Centre.
For further information on Mirka Mora, please contact The St Kilda Historical Society
For more on our history and heritage, including guided tours, please visit Port Phillip History and Heritage.
For more information on The Gatwick head to https://www.thegatwickhotel.com
About the author: Fiona Drury is a corporate writer and editor who has lived, worked and shopped (almost exclusively) in St Kilda since emigrating from England in 1988.
About the photographer: Jeffrey Diamond is a local artist who has lived, worked, dined and caroused in St Kilda since 1980, always with camera in hand.
