St Kilda East

St Kilda East extends form Chapel Street, St Kilda, to Caulfield, and is 7 km south-east of central Melbourne. Along its northern edge is the Dandenong Road tram (1928) and another east-west tram (1913) runs along Balaclava Road to Caulfield. Near its western edge the railway runs from Windsor to Sandringham.

St Kilda East lacks the spectacle of St Kilda in terms of both indoor and outdoor entertainment venues. Its sole large parkland, Alma Park, has the railway running through it, unless one also includes the cemetery, the resting place of Alfred Deakin and Albert Jacka, V.C., M.C. and Bar, and Mayor of St Kilda (1930) and many notable women including businesswoman Janet Templeton and Christina McPherson who authored the melody of Waltzing Matilda.

There are several churches: Free Presbyterian (1864, Chapel Street), Presbyterian (1877, Chapel Street) and St Mary's Catholic (1871, but dating from 1853, Dandenong Road). The Catholic church also has the Christian Brother College (1878). There are two campuses for Jewish schools, Yeshivah and Beth Rivkan, and two synagogues.

St Kilda East is a dormitory suburb compared with its beachside neighbour, and its nearest shopping centre is to the south in Carlisle Street, Balaclava.

During the postwar years the St Kilda council was amenable to the building of flats on relatively small housing blocks. Flats were built so rapidly and in such numbers in St Kilda East that the St Kilda municipality's population rose by nearly 10,000 persons in the 1960s, resisting the declines in most other inner-suburban places.

Flat building had begun in the 1920s. ‘Ardoch’, a garden suburb near St Mary's church, had flats added to it in about 1925. After having a high school, which closed in 1989, Ardoch was restored under heritage guidance by the Urban Land Authority and 94 apartments built. In the very south of St Kilda East there are Ripponlea primary school (1922) and the senior campus of Caulfield Grammar School (1881).

St Kilda East’s census populations have been:

At the 2011 census, residents with an affiliation with Judaism were 27.9% of all residents who expressed their religion.

Occupied dwellings at the 2011 census were: