The suburb that gave us a raunchy grilled cheese scene

Ghost stories are an apt way to think about Leichhardt, a suburb in Sydney’s inner west haunted by news articles about empty shopfronts and struggling restaurants for the past decade. The sleepy residential neighbourhood might not be the first suburb to come to mind when you think of Sydney’s pop culture epicentres, but its streets bear the traces of Australian cinematic, literary, queer and music history.

Pioneers Memorial Park on Norton Street, once the site of Balmain Cemetery, is where you might find some actual ghosts. Opened in 1868, the graveyard was home to some 10,000 burials before being relocated in 1912. Perhaps you’ll spot the spectre of comedian Charles Frederick Young or Henry Beaufoy Merlin, an illusionist, showman and artist whose photographic work was so important to Australian history that it’s now listed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme.

Even though many of its Italian migrants have since moved on, Leichhardt still bears the moniker “Little Italy”. The Italian Forum, a largely failed utopian vision of a bustling European piazza, is a ghost town today. But at its centre remains a statue of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose work helped establish modern Italian as we know it and influenced the likes of Chaucer, Milton and Tennyson. The forum is also home to Actors Centre Australia, which counts Harriet Dyer and Anthony Campanella among its alumni. Hugh Jackman, a patron and the most famous alumnus of the school, was so passionate about the complex that in 2022 he called Inner West mayor Darcy Byrne, suggesting the acting school buy it.

It would be wrong to talk about Leichhardt and its history without mentioning the works of Australian writer Melina Marchetta, whose characters live and breathe Sydney’s inner west. In her debut novel, Looking for Alibrandi, Italian-Australian protagonist Josie comes of age in the streets of Glebe, Haberfield and Leichhardt (parts of the 2000 film adaptation were also shot on location there). Set in the early 1990s, Leichhardt’s star is already beginning to fade in the novel, but its cultural legacy remains alive in the women in Josie’s family. It’s where her mother works as a medical secretary and her grandmother bought her first house.

As Josie says in the novel’s final chapters, “Leichhardt was at its prime in the 1950s. The gates of immigration had opened and relatives and friends from the same Italian towns found themselves bumping into each other in the streets of Sydney”.

The suburb is also where some of Australian film history’s most recognisable moments were brought to life. Since the early 1990s, Canal Road Film Centre has lived in the industrial outskirts of Leichhardt, home to over 50 industry specialists that include prop makers, cobblers, set designers, special effects artists and dressmakers who have lent their hand to productions including The Sapphires, The Great Gatsby, Babyteeth, Australia and King Kong.

More recent cinema history saw two of the biggest film stars of the moment – Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney – film the rom-com Anyone But You. The bachelor pad where the two romantic leads have their pivotal one-night stand was set in Boston but was filmed in a two-bedroom warehouse conversion in Albert Street (the property hit the market earlier this year with a price guide of $3 million – a small price to pay for the site of the raunchiest scene involving grilled cheese ever).