The swarm of bees chose the right St Kilda resident. “They lodged themselves in the ceiling of the balcony,” says philosopher Karen Green, pointing out the loungeroom window of her apartment on Robe Street. After a professional failed to remove them, Green, knowing something about bees, got a protective suit and a box and tried to cajole them inside herself. “They didn’t move for weeks,” she tells me, “Until one day they swarmed – flew over the road and completely covered a car!” The car owner wasn’t impressed, so Green donned her suit and managed to swoosh the swarm into the box. “It was during COVID lockdowns, so everybody was very bored – it was a bit of drama and entertainment.” The driver was relieved, and Green had the beginnings of her very own hive.
How did she know what to do? In 1977, Green was studying a Bachelor of Philosophy at Oxford University, and her boyfriend kept bees. “He went away and asked me to open up the hives and take out the queens,” she tells me, a delicate process which involves removing the larger queen cells from the hive. Green succeeded with the first hive, but the second was much more aggressive. “I didn’t have a proper bee suit, just my trousers tucked into my socks, and foolishly, my socks were black.” She laughs at the memory. “One of the bees stung me on my ankle and then all of them went crrtch!”
Despite the attack, Green was unperturbed – she was fascinated by the bees and loved watching them “flying home with little multicoloured baskets of pollen on their knees.” When one of those hives later escaped, swarming on to a rose bush in a nearby Oxford garden, she was assisted by the local vicar. “He was a beekeeper too,” says Green, “and he was dancing around saying ‘Haha! Doing the B.Phil are you? You will have had your fill of bees after this!’”
Like the wild bees that found her, Green has made her home in St Kilda. As a child, her father’s work meant the family moved around a lot – Louis Green was a history academic specialising in Renaissance Italy, and by the time she was a teenager Karen had lived in Melbourne, Adelaide, England and Hobart.
Her first St Kilda experience was in the summer of 1967, when her father sub-let a flat from a communist historian in ‘The Orion’ on the corner of Grey and Barkly Streets – “crumby flats but they seemed wonderful when I was 16.” The residents of Orion called it ‘The Commune’ and it was a Bohemian mecca of students, writers, and left-wing literature. Green didn’t live there long, but St Kilda seemed exciting, a world away from her home in suburban Camberwell. It was a formative experience; the St Kilda bug had bitten.
After studies at Monash, Oxford and Sydney universities, Green returned to St Kilda in 1982, moving into flats on Robe Street with her toddler daughter. Writer and actor Bill Garner lived downstairs with his partner, playwright Sue Gore, and their young son. Green had known Garner from Monash days – “he was a tutor, very sexy, I was quite keen on him but nothing happened. He did invite me to go and see his red ambulance…but I declined.” Green and Gore used to chat in the kitchen while looking after small children, musing about buying the block of flats from the owner. “Then I went to Tasmania,” Green bridles, “and they bought the block, but I didn’t get in! In fact my ex-boyfriend bought this one.”
But now she’s back to stay. Twenty-eight years later, Green bought that ex’s Robe Street apartment and has been in St Kilda ever since; her son Michael lives over the back lane with his family. In a loungeroom heaving with books and art, I notice a pair of Mirka Mora paintings above the couch, one with an artist’s comment: ‘MIRKA 71 – for Karina – pour les 21 ans.’ Green’s parents knew the Moras, and for her 21st birthday her father took her to Mirka’s Wellington Street studio to choose a gift. “She said if I took the one on the right which had been damaged, she would give me the other one for free,” she says, pointing out a small water stain. “So my father paid for that for my birthday, and then she gave me the other.”
What does she like about St Kilda? Apart from convenient public transport, beach swims in summer and the cool sea breeze, it’s the character of the suburb that has burrowed into Green’s heart. “St Kilda has got both the heights and the lows,” she says. “Beautiful old mansions like Eildon, and then the down-and-outs. It’s very much a place where you are always reminded that “there but for fortune go you or I.”” She loves to wander the familiar streets: so full of her personal history, they feel like home. Will she ever leave? “I’m not planning on moving,” she grins. “But sometimes I do get restless.” Just like her bees.
Storyteller: Isabel Robinson is a Melbourne writer and community development worker. Her words have been published in The Age, The Guardian and The Victorian Writer and she is currently working on a novel for middle grade readers with her husband, Stephen Sholl. She manages the City of Voices inclusive theatre group and lives in St Kilda. www.isabelrobinson.net
