The latest Giant hood. It was inevitable really …

As seems only right, the Giants ended their days in glorious Fitzroy, the coffee-swilling, street-art drenched, creative nerve centre of Melbourne. Our office was in an off-Broadway lane with an excellent bakery right across the way. It definitely feels like an authentically Giant location.

Nick still hangs out there, writing books, so if you’d like to mail us, our postal address is:
Suite 1, 45 Chapel Street,
Fitzroy, 3065
Victoria, Australia

The move to Fitzroy’s artist community continued a long-running tradition of Media Giants resisting conservative corporate culture.

Our offices always reflected our non-mainstream sensibilities when it comes to workplace environment. Our first office was in South Melbourne, above Red Bears’ indoor children’s playground. This was at the rise of the dotcom boom, so a crazy era where emerging internet companies were super smug in inviting you to their venture capital funded offices for meetings where they would point out the beanbags, foosball table and free cereal for employees in the kitchen. We would smile politely, shake our heads at their lack of professionalism and then ask potential clients visiting our digs if they’d like to meet in Red Bears’ Space Adventure room or the Jungle Explorers room? And did they want sprinkles and a swirly straw with their hot chocolate?

A constant companion in Giant offices: the magnificent football art installation by Michael’s late brother, Neil.

Clearly, this dotcom life was unsustainable, for everybody, and even real world indoor children playhouses turned out to be on borrowed time. (A massive shopping centre now inhabits the old Red Bears site adjacent to the South Melbourne market.)

We shifted to a converted former ball bearing factory on Moray Street, South Melbourne, which had a lot of stairs and a great view of the city. When we landed afl.com.au, and had to dramatically expand our staff numbers, we made a bigger move, to Cremorne, where we took up residence inside an old Rosella factory – about as Melbourne as you can get.

A street where we lived. Renowned local street artist Tom Civil was nice enough to turn Walnut Street into a yellow brick road. (Fun game: spot Fly Dog in this picture)

In more recent times, we achieved our dream (well, okay, Nick Place’s dream) of having an office immediately next door to a great cafe, in Walnut Street, Cremorne, and now we’ve finally embraced our destiny and become full-time members of the Fitzroy hipster crowd.

It should also be mentioned that our new office is next to a major street art crew, which meant that when they did a major piece recently, another strange tradition continued for us, of streets where we set up somehow being painted so that boring grey bitumen is not part of our Giant world. Long may that continue. (Note to self: don’t have an office on the financial end of Collins Street.)

Life’s good. Come and have a coffee sometime.

Chapel Street inevitably painted once we moved in. Perfect. Thanks, Juddy Roller Crew!