“The centre of my universe”
Three years ago, two friends visited me from the US, and I took them on a wander through the Fitzroy I grew up in — no script, just stories from the old streets and shops near my childhood home. They enjoyed it, and that’s where the idea for the Roy Boy Fitzroy Walking Tours came from.
I’m thrilled to announce the first tour kicks off in November — come along and experience the adventure for yourself
Every street has a story. These are mine.
Roy Boy is a memoir about growing up in Fitzroy during the 1950s and 1960s — the child of migrant parents in Melbourne’s oldest and most storied suburb. To outsiders, Fitzroy wore an ugly label. For decades it was dismissed as a slum — overcrowded, worn at the edges, forgotten by those who lived in more comfortable corners of the city. That reputation would cling to it right up until the 1970s, when gentrification began to reshape its streets and rewrite its story.
But that is not the Fitzroy of this memoir. And it is not the Fitzroy of this tour.
To the boy who grew up here, there was nothing broken about this place. There were back lanes to race through and shop owners that knew your name. There were schoolyard friendships and the smell of a dozen different kitchens drifting into the street. There were migrant families — Greek, Italian, and more — building new lives with quiet determination, turning a so-called slum into something rich, warm and entirely their own.
ROY BOY FITZROY WALKING TOURS invites you to step inside the pages of the memoir and walk the very streets where it all happened — to see Fitzroy not through the eyes of those who judged it from the outside, but through the eyes of a child who loved it from within.
This is not a tour of monuments and dates. It is a tour of memory — of what it felt like to grow up in a place that was, in every sense, the centre of the universe.
Walk the streets. Hear the stories. See Fitzroy through the eyes of the boy who loved it most.
Details -Check Trip Advisor for examples
Maximum Numbers: 15
Duration: – 1.5hours to 2 hours
Fee: $50 per Adult – Group minimum of 8-15 $400
Roy Boy book available for purchase during the tour – $30 – autograph option
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