Channel 9’s Postcards Spends a Day at EBV
There is a version of a Sunday evening where you are on the couch, half-watching the telly, and a place you have never been to turns up on the screen and makes you sit up a little.
Laneways with actual people in them. A piece of public art you cannot quite place, a coffee queue that does not seem to mind the wait. A bakery with the ovens going and the pastries being rolled in full view. A brewery a few doors down, a cinema, a wine bar with the lights low. And above all of it, a rooftop that has no business being that green, six kilometres from the middle of the city. You think, quietly, where is that.
That place is East Brunswick Village. And if you have just watched us on Postcards and gone looking, welcome. We are very glad you came.
For anyone who does not know it, Postcards is Victoria’s long-running travel show on Channel 9, the one that has spent the better part of thirty years pointing Victorians toward the good stuff hiding around their own state. So when the Postcards team asked to spend a day here, we did the only sensible thing. We put the kettle on, opened the doors, and let them see the place the way a resident sees it. Here is where they went, and what they found.
First stop: bread, with Franco at To Be Frank
Every good day around here seems to start at the bakery, so that is where Postcards started too, with Franco from To Be Frank.
To Be Frank is one of those places that quietly tells you what EBV is about before anyone says a word. Franco and his co-founder Lauren opened the first shop in Collingwood back in 2019 with a fairly stubborn idea: make honest bread, slowly, and do not cut corners. They bake using a method they call respectus panis, which is a long way of saying very little yeast and a lot of patience, the sort of fermentation that is kind to your gut and impossible to rush. The EBV bakery is purpose-built and open, so you can stand there with a coffee and watch the croissants being rolled and the pastries laminated, which is a genuinely lovely way to waste ten minutes.
Franco talked with the Postcards team about what it means to be part of this community, and what the bakery stands for. It is not complicated. Good bread, made properly, shared with the people around you. There is the baguette and the focaccia and the enormous two-kilo wholemeal miche, and then there is the coconut and dulce de leche bomb, which is a small, unapologetic nod to Franco’s Argentinian roots. Order the coffee too. The beans are roasted by Symmetry, just up the way.
A wander through the village
From the bakery, the team did what most residents do without thinking about it. They wandered.
This is the part that is hard to explain until you have lived it, and easy to see on screen: at EBV, the day-to-day stuff is right there. The butcher, Hagen’s Organics, is a few steps from the bakery. There is a cinema. There is a brewery. There are shops and studios and places to eat, all of it stitched into the ground floors of the buildings people actually live in. The Postcards team moved through it the way a resident does, showing just how much of ordinary life you can do here without ever reaching for the car keys.
There is a quiet luxury in that. Not the shiny kind. The kind where you realise, on a wet Tuesday, that everything you need for the evening is a two-minute walk from your front door, and the walk is nice.
Up on the rooftop
Then everyone went up.
The rooftops at EBV are the bit that tends to make people on the couch lean in, and fair enough. There are gardens up there. There are beehives. There are vegetable beds that residents actually tend, BBQ areas that get used, and shared dining spaces where a Friday night can quietly turn into something bigger than you planned. The Postcards cameras found what residents already know: a lot of the good stuff here happens above street level, in the open air, with a view.
What they were really documenting, though, was the community. EBV runs on it. There are social clubs and activities and the slow, ordinary business of getting to know your neighbours, which is a thing that has become weirdly rare in city living and does not have to be. Up on that rooftop, with the bees doing their rounds and something on the grill, it looks about as easy as it should.
The gardens
If the rooftop is where the community gathers, the gardens are the reason so much of it is alive.
The Postcards team toured the rooftop gardens with Fiona, the ecologist and landscape designer behind the new biodiversity gardens at Elm Grove and Fasteners Way. Fiona is also a resident, which matters, because she is not designing these spaces from an office somewhere. She is planting them, then living inside them.
She walked the team through the thinking: native species chosen for the local ecosystem, planted to give back to the biodiversity of Merri-bek and the Victorian Volcanic Plains, the ecological region EBV sits within. The grevilleas and tea trees that feed the honeyeaters. The little local daisies and grasses that quietly run a nursery for butterflies. It is a garden that does a job, and the job is bringing life back to a patch of the inner north.
Last stop: Rumi and The Rocket Society, with Joseph
The day finished, as good days often do, around a table.
The final stop was with Joseph, founder of both Rumi and its neighbour The Rocket Society. Joseph opened Rumi back in 2006 and, nearly two decades and a serious local following later, brought it home to East Brunswick Village. Named after the thirteenth-century poet, Rumi has always been about a bigger idea than any one border: modern Middle Eastern food built on Joseph’s Lebanese heritage, served the way it is meant to be, in shared plates down the middle of the table.
Joseph talked the Postcards team through where the menu comes from. His heritage, his family, the traditions he grew up with, all of it turned into something you can taste. The cheese cigars. The advieh-marinated lamb shoulder that has been on the menu for years because people would riot without it. Next door, The Rocket Society keeps the lights on later, a small wine bar putting the wines of the Levant on the map. Between the two of them, this corner of EBV does a very old thing very well: it feeds people, and it gathers them.
Missed the segment? Watch it on 9Now
If you have found your way here without seeing the feature, or you want to watch it again, you can. The East Brunswick Village episode of Postcards will be available to stream any time on 9Now after it’s aired, alongside the rest of the Channel 9 lineup. Grab a coffee, put it on, and see the village for yourself.
Come and see it in person
A television segment can only show you so much. It can show you the bread and the rooftops and the gardens and the table at Rumi. What it cannot quite do is give you the morning light coming in sideways through your own window, or the walk to the bakery, or the neighbour you have not met yet who is up on the rooftop tending the tomatoes.
That is the part you have to come and feel. Sustainability, community and liveability are not lines in a brochure for us, they are the ordinary choices that make a day here what it is. Every EBV apartment is designed around that, six kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD, built for exactly this kind of living.
If Postcards gave you a glimpse and you would like the rest of it, we would love to hear from you.
Register your interest in EBV apartments and come see what living here could look like.
East Brunswick Village is a community-focused, sustainable village in Brunswick East, home to independent makers like To Be Frank, Rumi and The Rocket Society, and the biodiversity gardens designed by resident ecologist Fiona. Follow along as the village continues to grow.
