The median house price is $370,000 and it's just 17 kilometres from the CBD, but Dallas is not near the top of most Melburnians' list of desirable places to live.
The low median house price is matched by a low median income, poor quality housing (much of it built by the State Housing Commission in the 1960s) and few of the amenities that people who live in other Melbourne suburbs enjoy.
Last week residents of Dallas were evacuated from their homes after a fire at a nearby garbage recycling plant blanketed the suburb in smoke and ash, rendering the air quality "hazardous", according to the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.
It's no accident that the garbage fire broke out next door to Dallas and not, say, Brighton, and that we weren't witnessing the evacuation of investment bankers, university lecturers and journalists from the path of the airborne toxic event: town planning, economics and culture make sure that the poor live alongside garbage dumps and the well-off don't.
Writing in The New York Times recently, David Brooks described the ways upper middle-class Americans corral the benefits of society for themselves and their children, and exclude other classes.
Brooks' piece is titled "How We Are Ruining America", and he argues that the "we" in question (he includes himself) have got very good at making sure their children stay members of the middle-class and other children are denied entry: both by spending money and time on cultivating their children (not necessarily a bad thing) and via building and zoning regulations that keep the poor out of neighbourhoods with good school systems and thereby denying them a shot at entry into a good college (which is inherently unfair).
Despite our image of ourselves as a more egalitarian society, Australia also has a well developed system of social segmentation that preserves the privilege of some and keeps others in their place.
Those who can afford private schools fees buy their children educational and social exclusivity in schools that keep underachievers out; other parents use more creative approaches, like moving into the zones of "high achieving" schools, shepherding their kids into selective state schools or using curriculum grounds including music, art, language and sport to secure enrolments in more desirable (read "less working-class") state schools. The rest – the people who live next door to the garbage dumps – have to make do with under-resourced state schools, while governments funnel more money into non-state religious schools than many now know what to do with.
But as important as education is, Brooks argues that what really keeps classes apart are informal social barriers enforced by cultural knowledge and practices that make class outsiders feel uncomfortable and tell them firmly, "you're not welcome here".
Chief among these cultural signifiers are food, drink, recreation and the labels on your clothing and other personal goods.
In Australia, which has had a better-paid and more secure working-class than the US, the battle is still fiercely fought over cultural power. A tradie's income can buy a big house, a flash car and even pay private school fees, but it can't purchase the cultural savoir faire to know you should be drinking a magic rather than a flat white, ordering saison, not American pale ale, or keeping an eye out for some hot young chef's Korean barbecue pop-up rather than heading to the food truck park for a burger.
You might have ticked off on marriage equality, but mention of the word "intersectionality" will have you reaching for the highway code, and you probably won't know how (or whether) to style your facial hair, if you should be wearing white Birkenstocks or gold, or drinking pink wine or orange.
With such impenetrable codes, middle-class tastemakers – people who work in the creative and culture industries, which now include food and drink – police the cultural boundaries that exclude the lower middle and working-classes, exchanging economic power for the power to decide what's hot and what's not, and who has access to it.
If that seems a long way from Dallas, it is, with only the occasional plume of garbage-flavoured smoke to remind us that we live in a fractured polity based on exclusion, not inclusion, of which these cultural codes are both symptoms and now, in some ways, cause.
Matt Holden is a Fairfax Media columnist.
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