Free the Strip! Melburnians fight back against outlawing of much-loved picnic spot

It looked like a typical spring evening on Melbourne’s Canning Street when a few dozen picnickers gathered on the grassy median strip on Friday, with drinks in hand.

People in one group who’d come with a full alfresco setting chattered as they ladled punch out of a glass bowl on a wooden table, set with a tablecloth and yellow flowers in a vase. Others sat on picnic blankets, passing around bags of chips.

What set this gathering apart was that it was actually against the rules, given the new ban against drinking on the strip. And the picnic had been organised in protest, part of a political saga that is unfolding on one of inner Melbourne’s most beloved streets.

Protesters on Melbourne’s Canning Street. The median strip, beloved as a social spot, has become a political talking point after drinking on the grass was banned. Photograph: Catie McLeod

It began on Monday, when a local bar and bottle shop, the Wine Corner Store, announced on Instagram that, “due to a few unrelenting miserable neighbours who have been non-stop complaining to the council”, consuming alcohol had been outlawed on the median strips on Drummond, Rathdowne and Canning Streets in Carlton North.

The council was reverting to a former classification of the median strips – which are much wider than a typical nature strip – with the effect that they are no longer treated as park spaces. The council said residents had complained about noise, rubbish and unsafe behaviour.

The community fought back to keep a tradition that has endured for many years. While the council ban followed an initial 29-signature petition that a resident submitted in August, a counter petition calling on council to revoke the ban gathered more than 7,707 signatures in just a few days.

The protest drinks on Friday were civilised.

Amid the uproar – and with people loosely uniting under a banner of Free the Strip! – Adam Pulford, the Greens candidate for the seat of Brunswick at the state election, had posted an invitation on social media for people to join him for a peaceful protest.

‘We need to be building community spaces and not getting rid of them,’ one protesters says. Photograph: Catie McLeod

People milled around, chatting and offering each other drinks and nibbles, talking about the importance of preserving places for building connections outside work and home.

“We need to be building community spaces and not getting rid of them,” said Sam Drummond, who attended the gathering. “Particularly post-Covid, there are very few spaces where people can come together and meet in public, in person.”

Others on the strip on Friday had heeded a call from a Canning Street resident, Rachel Richmond, to gather for the same purpose. As the groups coalesced, Richmond said it was “the most civilised act of civil disobedience I’ve ever participated in”.

“This might seem like a very ridiculously middle class thing to protest,” she said. “I mean, it’s literal champagne socialism but honestly, sitting underneath it is an issue about public space and public enjoyment of space.”

The only disorderly incident the Guardian witnessed on the median strip on Friday was a minor skirmish between a chihuahua and a labrador, both on leads.

However, local councillor Edward Crosling, who represents the Carlton North ward, said there had been “genuine amenity concerns”, especially from people living around the Wine Corner Store, and he believed it was unfair the council had been portrayed in a negative way.

Nevertheless, Crosling said council staff had gone too far in banning drinking outright. “There are some people that have been behaving not fantastically but the majority of people are just having a picnic,” he said.

Crosling said he was working with the council staff to prepare a motion for their next meeting in October, which he anticipated would re-classify the median as open space, and look at “particular” measures to address concerns surrounding the Wine Corner Store.

The venue’s owner, Steve Misfud-Ellul, told Australian Associated Press his business had wrongly copped the blame for large groups choosing to stop on the grass near the wine bar.

“We simply sell retail drinks to people and they choose to stop where they stop,” he said. “Ninety-nine per cent of the time it’s people sitting, picnicking on a patch of grass, with the loudest noise being laughing.”

Misfud-Ellul also stressed the council was not to blame.

“The council actually were fantastic and they acted on every complaint; they came through, they check and they saw there was no problem,” he said.

Despite the councillors pledging to fix the problem, the premier, Ben Carroll, waded in on Friday, sharing a post on social media that said: “Consider this unbanned. Because if council doesn’t reverse it, we will reverse it for them”.

Australian Associated Press contributed to this report