How the harbourfront street where a couple 'won' their neighbour's $40 million estate has evolved from Aboriginal burial ground to hideaway for Hollywood stars and bikies

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It was the staging point for the notorious Milperra bikie massacre, saw the birth of rugby league in Australia and caused the end of a judge's stellar career. 

Louisa Road at Birchgrove in Sydney's inner west has long been one of the city's most colourful hidden enclaves of the rich, famous and powerful.

There is only one Louisa Road in all of New South Wales and its residents consider it so distinctively desirable it has sometimes been known locally simply as 'The Road'. 

The narrow thoroughfare running past Birchgrove Oval has been in the news after a court awarded one resident couple their late neighbour's estate worth up to $40million. 

While it might not conjure the ostentatious wealth of Darling Point, Bellevue Hills or Vaucluse, many of those who call Birchgrove home would not choose to live anywhere else. 

With a combination of hugely expensive real estate and bohemia, Louisa Road has been called the Paris end of Balmain, Sydney's 'street of stars' and the inner-west's millionaire's row.

Louisa Road (pictured) at Birchgrove in Sydney's inner-west was the staging point for the notorious Milperra bikie massacre, saw the birth of rugby league in Australia and caused the end of a judge's stellar career

Pitch Perfect star Rebel Wilson owns a house on Louisa Road which she uses when in Sydney. Other actors to live in the street include husband and wife Judy Davis and Colin Friels 

Two-time Gold Logie winning actor Georgie Parker (pictured) has long called Louisa Road home. The 55-year-old star of Home and Away is a member of the famed Parker Furniture family

When Barbara Murphy died aged 83 in 2015 she left her two Louisa Road properties to her elderly brother and sister and provided neighbours David Moore and Dee Andreasen with $25,000 in her will.

The couple had agreed not to build an extension to their own home that would block Mrs Murphy's view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and to care for her in her final years.

Mr Moore and Mrs Andreasen, from No 70, challenged Mrs Murphy's will, telling the NSW Supreme Court the old lady had promised to give them her whole estate.

Justice Kathryn Ward, Chief Judge in Equity, agreed with the couple and last week ordered 66 and 68 Louisa Road be signed over to the couple, shocking neighbours. 

Bev Maunsell, who lived across the road from Mrs Murphy for more than 30 years, said she did not believe Mr Moore and Mrs Andreasen's actions warranted getting someone else's home.

'I'm absolutely flabbergasted,' she said.

The kerfuffle that decision has caused in this seemingly quiet neighbourhood is not the first time Louisa Road has made headlines in the past 30 years. 

There is only one Louisa Road (pictured) in all of New South Wales and its residents think it so distinctive and desirable it has sometimes been known locally simply as 'The Road'

Louisa Road has been in the news after a court awarded one resident couple their late neighbour's estate worth up to $40million. Neighbour Bev Maunsell (pictured) was flabbergasted

Louisa Road has been home to an outlaw bikie gang, a former prime minister and a Supreme Court judge who had to quit the bench after getting drunk and crashing his car.

The first rugby league premiership matches - Souths v Norths and Balmain v Wests - were played at Birchgrove Oval on April 20, 1908 in front of a crowd of 3,000.

One resident said every house on Louisa Road had a story and likened it to the long-running British television soap opera Coronation Street.

'It's not posh, it never has been,' he said. 'There's no attitude.

'It's not full of wankers. If they're a wanker when they arrive we pull them down.' 

A two-time Oscar nominated actor has lived on Louisa Road for decades, as has a Golden Globe winning director and an acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter. 

Pitch Perfect start Rebel Wilson paid $3.76million for a Victorian villa in 2105 and uses it when she is home in Sydney. 

If a script was ever pitched about Louisa Road there is so much creative talent living side-by-side the residents could write, direct and star in the film. 

Twenty years ago the writer Frank Moorhouse explained how celebrities would find a 'respect for privacy' if they moved to Balmain/Birchgrove.

'There's a wonderful sensitivity shown to them by the people,' Moorhouse observed. 'They can go about their business, shopping, without any fuss.' 

A year earlier about 30 residents hired their own security force in a move the Balmain and Rozelle Village Voice said showed Louisa Road's 'self-importance and selfishness'. 

Running along a ridge atop a finger of land jutting out into the harbour, most properties on either side of Louisa Road slope down into Snails Bay or Iron Cove.

There are 135 houses, 17 town houses, 81 units and 17 dwellings classified as 'others' on Louisa Road, according to Domain. 

Just one house is for rent - a five-bedroom, two-storey residence going for $1,100 a week - and none for sale. Only two houses and one unit have changed hands in the past year. 

The Bandidos outlaw motorcycle gang moved into 150 Louisa Road (pictured) in 1984. On Father's Day that year they rode to the Viking Tavern at Milperra and waged a gunfight with the Comanchero in which six bikies and a teenage girl were killed

Rebel Wilson paid $3.76million for a Victorian villa (pictured) in 2105. The three-level house was once the home of Booker Prize winning novelist Peter Carey, author of Oscar and Lucinda

The resident who spoke to Daily Mail Australia said the street was predominately Labor-voting, straight, and populated by a contingent he described as 'people trying to hide from their privilege'.

'We all like our own privacy,' he said. 

'What happens is everybody comes into their house and retires to the waterside because everybody's on the waterfront.

'So it appears like we're not friendly because nobody has a street presence.'

Louisa Road was named after the wife and daughter of French pioneer Didier Numa Joubert when he subdivided his Birch Grove Estate in 1860. 

For millennia the Wangal people had used the natural land corridor to chase down and spear kangaroos at the end of the spit which now channels commuters to the Yurulbin Point ferry wharf. 

Playwright David Williamson, a former resident, wrote in Emerald City: 'No one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life - it's getting yourself a waterfrontage.'

Former prime minister Bob Hawke and first wife Hazel (pictured) camped out in businessman John Singleton's Louisa Road townhouse after they were evicted from The Lodge in 1991

Playwright David Williamson and his wife Kristin (pictured) bought one of Louisa Road's best houses in 1987 and sold it a decade later to director Bruce Beresford and his wife Virginia Duigan

In 1987 Williamson and his wife Kristin devoted the money from Emerald City's film rights to buying one of Louisa Road's best houses across the road from Mrs Murphy's old home. 

'Either the house inspired the line in the play or the line in the play inspired the house,' the resident said. 

Ten years later the Williamsons sold to Bruce Beresford, director of Breaker Morant, Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy, and his novelist wife Virginia Duigan, who still live there.

Scriptwriter John Collee, whose credits include Master and Commander, Happy Feet and Walking With Dinosaurs bought in with his journalist wife 22 years ago. 

David and Christine Harris, founders of the Harris Farm Markets grocery chain, own a seven-bedroom, six-bathroom home on Louisa Road. 

David and Christine Harris, founders of the Harris Farm Markets grocery chain, own a seven-bedroom, six-bathroom home on Louisa Road. Mr Harris is pictured right and Mrs Harris left

Former News Corp and Foxtel CEO Peter Tonagh sold for about $7million in 2016 to Damian Eales, who is now off to New York to become global head of transformation in Rupert Murdoch's empire. 

Former prime minister Bob Hawke and first wife Hazel camped out in businessman John Singleton's Louisa Road townhouse after they were evicted from The Lodge in 1991 and awaited construction of their Northbridge mansion.

Two-time Booker Prize winning author Peter Carey and his wife, Alison Summers, lived on Louisa Road in the house now owned by Rebel Wilson before moving to New York in 1992. 

Also long gone are former Little River Band frontman Glenn Shorrock and trumpeter James Morrison.

Gold Logie winning actor Georgie Parker is a more recent arrival, joining acting royalty Judy Davis and Colin Friels, who bought their Louisa Road home in 1986.

Davis, who came to fame in the 1979 film My Brilliant Career, has two Golden Globes, two BAFTAs, two Emmys and eight local AACTA (formerly AFI) Awards.

Acting royalty Judy Davis and Colin Friels (pictured) bought their Louisa Road home in 1986. Davis has twice been nominated for Oscars. Friels is best known for playing detective Frank Holloway in the TV series Water Rats

She has been nominated for Academy Awards for her roles in Woody Allen's Husbands And Wives (1992) as well as A Passage To India (1984).

Friels has two AACTAs and won the 1997 Logie for most outstanding actor for his best-known role as detective Frank Holloway in the TV series Water Rats. 

The couple, who are private people, have nonetheless provided plenty of gossip for their neighbours over the years. 

Friels faced Balmain Local Court in June 2001 to answer assault charges after allegedly shoving two teenage boys while making a late-night noise complaint at another multi-millionaire's door. 

Those charges were dismissed but Friels was back before the same court in October 2002 when he accepted an apprehended violence order after a domestic argument during which a glass table was smashed and Davis fell to the floor. 

Two days later while trying to avoid cameras outside the couple's home Friels was was trapped in his Mercedes by a truck and reportedly 'sat motionless in a trance-like state for a full 10 minutes.'

A resident said most people who bought on Louisa Road (pictured) stayed for a long time. 'Everybody who lives here could live in the eastern suburbs if they wanted to,' he said

Almost a decade earlier, in January 1993, public relations maven Jan Murray was cleared of assault and malicious damage charges after a confrontation with a courier she found parked across her Louisa Road driveway. 

Murray was then still married to former Hawke minister John Brown with whom she once admitted to having had sex on his parliamentary desk and leaving a pair of her underwear in an ashtray. 

Louisa Road's most disruptive residents arrived in 1984 when the city chapter of the Comanchero bikie gang patched over to the Bandidos and rented No 150.   

The gang threw wild parties at the address which sometimes ran all weekend, taking valuable parking places and leaving piles of empty bottles on their neighbour's lawns.  

On Father's Day that year the Bandidos rode out of their clubhouse and met the Comanchero outside the Viking Tavern at Milperra and fought a gun battle that killed six bikies and a teenage girl. 

The Penfold stationery family later bought the property, which they lovingly restored and still own. 

The law came knocking on the doors of Louisa Road again in October 2004 when Supreme Court judge and former NSW attorney-general Jeff Shaw crashed his Alfa Romeo into a parked car. 

On Father's Day 1984 the Bandidos rode out of their Louisa Road clubhouse and met the Comanchero outside the Viking Tavern at Milperra and fought a gun battle that killed six bikies and a teenage girl

In October 2004 Supreme Court judge and former NSW attorney-general Jeff Shaw (pictured) crashed his Alfa Romeo into a parked car on Louisa Road

Pyjama-clad neighbours rushed out to find Shaw's stalled vehicle and the drunk judge asking them not to call the police or his wife before he headed to Prince of Wales Hospital.

A vial of Shaw's blood then went missing from the hospital, sparking a Police Integrity Commission inquiry. 

Shaw, who quite the bench, was convicted of drink driving, fined $3,000 and died in 2010 aged 60.

The resident who spoke to Daily Mail Australia said most people who bought on Louisa Road stayed for many years. 

'Everybody who lives here could live in the eastern suburbs if they wanted to,' he said. 'A lot of them could live on the waterfront in the eastern suburbs if they wanted to.

'Once you've lived here you can't trade up on the peninsular - it's just such a pleasant place to live.'