JUST A FEW kilometres west of the brass lions and clock tower in Brisbane city’s King George Square, over a patchwork of corrugated iron and great crowns of poinciana and fig trees, is a little crosshatch of streets on the floor of a suburban valley. The streets – Nash, Elizabeth, Baroona, Beck and a handful of others – are flanked on three sides by the steep ridges and folds of nearby Paddington, Bardon and Auchenflower. The fourth, and open, side runs through neighbouring Milton and down to the banks of the Brisbane River, less than a kilometre to the south-east.

This crosshatch used to be a suburb: Rosalie. Latin for rose, some say. Yet it lost its official status in 1975, downgraded to a locality and subsumed into the renovated century-old houses, boutiques, restaurants and bars that today constitute trendy Paddington, with which – since the demotion – it has shared a postcode.