In 2004, the Redfern riots made news bulletins around the country after hundreds of Indigenous protestors threw rocks, Molotov cocktails and fireworks at police.
The riots were sparked by accusations that police recklessly pursued teenager TJ Hickey, who died when he crashed his bike into a fence. An inquest later cleared police of any fault in his death. But for many, the riots only confirmed the suburb's dangerous reputation.
Mick Mundine from the Aboriginal Housing Company says many Indigenous Australians now consider Redfern a modern sacred site.
"Redfern is sorta like the main cultural base for Aboriginal issues," he says. "The first early activists and the civil rights movement happened in Redfern."
The suburb's Aboriginal population was believed to be in the thousands in the 1960s, with many employed in local industries. But by the 1970s, the suburb had become ravaged by poverty, substance abuse and violence. Figures from the 2011 Census showed only a few hundred Redfern residents identified as Indigenous.
And the suburb's face is changing once again. Eveleigh St - which runs through the district known as "The Block" - is where the 2004 Redfern Riots took place almost ten years ago. In grainy footage from the riots, you can see a row of nine run-down terrace houses. Today, they look almost unchanged from the outside. But inside they have all been renovated and the more than half are now on the rental market for up to $1200 a week.
John Sophios has owned these properties since the early '80s. He's proud of the work he's done with them and says, compared to surrounding suburbs, $1200 a week is pretty cheap for a newly renovated four-bedroom home.
Like the rest of Sydney, the property business in Redfern is booming. It has a median value of about $1 million. According to the latest Westpac Suburb Snapshot, Redfern is now more expensive than once- trendy hot spots like Newtown and Chippendale.
Local real estate agent David Servi says the area is definitely in demand.
"The clearance rates have been around 90 per cent for Redfern over the last year with prices ranging from about $300,000 up to $2.5 million," he says.
But are the skyrocketing prices pushing Indigenous residents out of their cultural heartland? Long-time Redfern resident Norma Ingram believes so.
She says for a lot Indigenous people, it's just too expensive.
"The society wants to grow out now and the Aboriginal community is in their way, so they send us all out to again to the outskirts of Sydney and they again want us to be fringe dwellers," she says.
Roger Metri has run a shoe-repair business in the area for almost five decades and says the gentrification of Redfern has been positive. "Redfern is like a little country town in the middle of the city. Everybody knows everybody," he says.
Mr Metri emigrated from Lebanon when he was 14 and says he's never wanted to live anywhere else. "If I want to go out [the back] to the toilet I don't even close the door. I just go up and leave the door open and my customers come in and sit down and wait for me," he says.
Aboriginal elder and café-owner Beryl Van-Oploo is also embracing change. Known to younger members of her "mob" as Aunty Beryl, she has taken a number of up-and-coming business owners under her wing. She's just opened a second business and is encouraging aspiring Indigenous business owners to stay local. "Our mob has to step up to the market and I know that a lot of them are," she says.
Her advice: don't fight the change. Embrace it.
