Someone posted a photo online recently of those Victorian terraces near Richmond Station, the ones on Punt Road with the massive billboard plastered across the facade. The question was simple enough: what’s the story, do people actually live there?

The answers that came back were not simple at all.

Turns out the building was, for a long time, a brothel. Legal, licensed, operating. And the comments section filled up pretty quickly with people who had personal connections to the place: former workers, former neighbours, a bloke who wired up the red light above the back entrance as a seventeen-year-old apprentice electrician and clearly never forgot it.

There’s something both predictable and oddly satisfying about watching certain parts of Melbourne turn into temporary waterways during a good storm. This week, Whiteman Street near Southbank became a rather impressive creek, complete with a tram dutifully ploughing through in the background like nothing was amiss. Someone cleverly watermarked their flood photo with “Murdoch Media” which gave me a proper chuckle – though I’ll admit it took me a moment to get the pun.

The other day, a fascinating discussion caught my eye about Melbourne’s “ghost suburbs” - those peculiar pockets of our city that technically exist on paper but seem to float in a strange liminal space between reality and urban legend. It got me thinking about how we define our neighbourhoods and the quirky ways our city has evolved.

Take Travancore, for instance. Most people think it’s just that one fancy apartment building near the IGA on Mount Alexander Road, but it’s actually a tiny pocket with a fascinating history of Indian-named streets. The suburb is a testament to Melbourne’s historical connections to India, named after the former princely state of Travancore. Yet most Melburnians would struggle to point it out on a map.