Despite its location “on the right side of the Yarra,” Hawthorn has always been more socially mixed than its comfortable neighbors, Malvern, Kew, and Camberwell. This book explores aspects of this surprisingly diverse suburban life in Melbourne's middle-class heartland from the period of European contact to the 1990s. It also focuses on the changes in the built environment. Factories and tearooms, cottages and mansions, churches, coffee palaces and municipal buildings are built, converted, demolished or preserved. The role of women, attitudes towards sex and contraception, to Empire, war and migrants are also integral to this story.