Violence, nostalgia and the unravelling of Melbourne’s first pedestrian mall

When state Labor MP Katie Hall steps outside her office and the heavy door clicks shut behind her, a confusing mix of carnage and cherished memories lies at her doorstep.

Fewer than five minutes’ walk from her electorate office is Nicholson Street Mall, where her grandmother used to take her to Forges, Footscray’s premier department store.

It was a time when people would dress up and make a day of visiting the tailor, the shoe shop and the locally revered Coles cafeteria.

Just beyond Hall’s electorate office, a couple of hundred metres from the mall, posters are plastered on the hunched white shoulders of the Nicholson Street bridge.

“Avenge Abdifatah Ahmed,” one reads, referring to a 35-year-old man police shot dead in Footscray’s CBD in April 2025. “No justice. No peace. F--- cops.”

Across the bridge is the Courthouse Hotel, its historic facade recently spruced up with fresh paint and warm lighting.

On June 7, a brawl broke out in the pub before spilling onto the street . Millenium Nyolic, a 25-year-old, was stabbed in the chaos and died in a nearby laneway .

Orange leaves crunch under an older woman’s feet as she walks up to the pub. Hall points to a spot on the woman’s path. The MP was attacked here on Nicholson Street, too , a few metres from her electorate office. “Just up here,” she says.

On June 25, a man came running past her before he collided with two women walking down Nicholson Street. One of the women, an office worker returning from lunch with a sandwich in her hand, fell to the ground.

The man lined her up before kicking her in the head “like she was a soccer ball”, Hall says, her face grim.

A man of no fixed address was charged with assault over the alleged attack.

The MP takes off her hand brace to reveal a long bluish scar trailing down her ring finger. She needed emergency surgery after the man headbutted her when she intervened, knocking her over and damaging the tendons in her hand.

She winces as she moves her fingers gingerly up and down, practising the motion.

Walking now onto the pavers of Nicholson Street Mall – the section between Barkly and Paisley streets, closed to car traffic back in 1971 – the old Forges building can be seen, now largely derelict and vacant.