Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\nThe council was reverting to a former classification of the median strips \u2013 which are much wider than a typical nature strip \u2013 with the effect that they are no longer treated as park spaces. The council said residents had complained about noise, rubbish and unsafe behaviour.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The protest drinks on Friday were civilised.<\/p>\n
Amid the uproar \u2013 and with people loosely uniting under a banner of Free the Strip! \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
\u2018We need to be building community spaces and not getting rid of them,\u2019 one protesters says. Photograph: Catie McLeod<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to be building community spaces and not getting rid of them,\u201d said Sam Drummond, who attended the gathering. \u201cParticularly post-Covid, there are very few spaces where people can come together and meet in public, in person.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cthe most civilised act of civil disobedience I\u2019ve ever participated in\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis might seem like a very ridiculously middle class thing to protest,\u201d she said. \u201cI mean, it\u2019s literal champagne socialism but honestly, sitting underneath it is an issue about public space and public enjoyment of space.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
However, local councillor Edward Crosling, who represents the Carlton North ward, said there had been \u201cgenuine amenity concerns\u201d, especially from people living around the Wine Corner Store, and he believed it was unfair the council had been portrayed in a negative way.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Crosling said council staff had gone too far in banning drinking outright. \u201cThere are some people that have been behaving not fantastically but the majority of people are just having a picnic,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cparticular\u201d measures to address concerns surrounding the Wine Corner Store.<\/p>\n
The venue\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe simply sell retail drinks to people and they choose to stop where they stop,\u201d he said. \u201cNinety-nine per cent of the time it\u2019s people sitting, picnicking on a patch of grass, with the loudest noise being laughing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Misfud-Ellul also stressed the council was not to blame.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe council actually were fantastic and they acted on every complaint; they came through, they check and they saw there was no problem,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Despite the councillors pledging to fix the problem, the premier, Ben Carroll, waded in on Friday, sharing a post on social media that said: \u201cConsider this unbanned. Because if council doesn\u2019t reverse it, we will reverse it for them\u201d.<\/p>\n
Australian Associated Press contributed to this report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It looked like a typical spring evening on Melbourne\u2019s Canning Street when a few dozen picnickers gathered on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":905619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-905618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=905618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/905619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=905618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=905618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=905618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}