This was published 9 months ago
Epping’s new growth spurt: The suburb showing signs it might be on the cusp of boom time
By Adam Carey
Casa D’Abruzzo Club bocce club president Tony Rizzo and friends play a spirited game each Wednesday night.Credit: Jason South
It’s Wednesday evening at the Casa D’Abruzzo Club in Epping and Tony Rizzo is in his element: among old friends, trying his arm on the bocce courts.
The standard of play is formidably high and the competition fierce among these mostly Italian-born senior citizens. Rizzo, the bocce club president, has already settled an argument about the rules that threatened to disrupt tonight’s competition before it started.
“I’m a bit strict; I don’t want any arguments or anybody raising their voice or bad language,” he says.
Rizzo, a Sicilian, moved to Epping in Melbourne’s outer north in 1972 and worked for almost 50 years as a mechanic, running his own workshop. Now retired and on the pension, he lives two streets from the club. Bocce, a northern Italian pastime, is a big part of his life now, but for most of his working years he barely knew the game.
The corridor for the proposed Wollert rail extension, envisioned since 2003 but never built.Credit: Jason South
“Where I come from, I didn’t even know what bocce was because I come from the south,” he says. “I’ve only been playing eight years, and I love the sport, I love the people that are here.”
The Casa D’Abruzzo Club is colossal. It has 2000 members, 75 poker machines, a glittering bistro, two soccer pitches, eight tennis courts, a hulking brick shed for bocce and a car park big enough to rival some shopping centres.
Its long-serving president, Fernando Cardinale, claims with pride that it is the largest Abruzzese club in the world. It began modestly when four Abruzzese clubs merged in the mid-70s and bought eight hectares of flat paddocks on O’Herns Road, beyond Melbourne’s urban fringe.
“It was a little road, no lights, you couldn’t find the place,” he says.
So what was the attraction?
“There weren’t many places in Melbourne where you could buy 20 acres.”
O’Herns Road is no longer a country track. It was absorbed into Melbourne’s northern growth boundary years ago, widened, duplicated and connected via a new diamond interchange to the Hume Freeway. Tens of thousands of residents live on its northern side now, in estates full of houses with postage stamp-sized backyards.
Epping’s oldest standing buildings date from the 1870s. A handful of handsome and resilient bluestone structures that still serve their original function, including a police station, primary school and an Anglican church.
But there are still fields of dreams being bought and sold in this outer northern suburb, which has the aspect of a place that is still finding its feet more than 150 years after its founding.
Major train delay
An invisible line snakes through Epping.
It runs along the busy road that splits the 400-bed Northern Hospital and the Epping Plaza shopping centre, cuts across car-choked Cooper Street, threads north between the bulky warehouses of one of the suburb’s numerous industrial estates and deep into the expanding grid of tightly packed houses on Melbourne’s expanding northern fringe.
This narrow strip of land is waiting for a train.
It’s been waiting since plans were drawn up in 2003 by the former Bracks government for “Aurora”, a liveable, environmentally friendly new suburb to Epping’s north.
Two decades on, the corridor still exists as a dashed line in the Melways street directory, hypothetically branching off the Mernda line from Lalor station and spearing into the new suburb of Wollert, with the descriptor “proposed transport corridor”.
Like Doncaster and Rowville rail before it, the Wollert rail extension is an idea whose time has not yet come.
It should have come says Curtin University professor of sustainability Peter Newman, who served as a mentor to the urban planners who conceived the rail extension more than 20 years ago.
“It was so obvious, the space was there; it would have been ridiculously easy to put some track down,” he says. “The line was just waiting to be extended.”
In the time since it was envisioned, Epping has grown exponentially.
Tony Francis was one of the Aurora estate’s first residents – and was among its most active campaigners for better public transport.
He was lured by the state government’s stated aim in the original plans “to continually raise the benchmark and push to more sustainable land, community and built form outcomes” in Aurora.
In most ways, the estate has held true to that aim: its homes all have recycled water, solar hot water and a minimum six-star energy rating.
Aurora resident Tony Francis says the failure to extend rail into Epping’s north has created an unhealthy road culture.Credit: Jason South
But Francis believes the long-term failure to make good on extending rail into Epping’s north has bred an extreme reliance on cars which means the estate ultimately falls short of its sustainability goals.
“The crowded roads have had an adverse effect on road culture too,” he says.
“There are more impatient, discourteous and aggressive drivers, and these are consequences of doing nothing about a railway line north to Epping North and Wollert.”
Aged 80, Francis has ceased actively campaigning, but says the case for building the extension is stronger than ever.
It’s a point acknowledged in the City of Whittlesea’s 2023 structure plan for the suburb, which was finalised in June and envisions unfashionable Epping as the future “economic heart of Melbourne’s north”.
“Epping Central is currently a car dominated environment,” the plan states.
Whittlesea’s faction-riven council was sacked by the Andrews government in 2020, but the administrators who govern the fast-growing city of 232,000 people are pushing the case for “the potential Wollert rail corridor”.
The extension “is critical to improving the level of public transport service to support the planned growth and to improve connectivity to the critical services in this Metropolitan Activity Centre,” the Epping structure plan states.
But unlike Doncaster rail – which is approaching the 100th anniversary of its proposal in parliament – the Wollert rail extension is an idea whose time could yet come.
In November, the Albanese government pulled federal funding from 80 road and rail projects across the country following a review of Australia’s 10-year infrastructure pipeline.
Billions of dollars were stripped from projects including fast rail to Geelong and the extension of the Frankston line to Baxter, but the small sum of $250,000 for a feasibility study for the Wollert rail extension survived.
“The Wollert rail feasibility study will get under way soon, assessing all modes of transport to provide the best transport options to link Wollert and surrounds,” an Allan government spokesperson said.
Epping’s next growth spurt
It has been steadily sprawling northward since Melbourne’s urban boundary was extended in 2010 and again in 2012. Stubbly fields to Epping’s north have been bulldozed and replaced by an ever-expanding patchwork of new streets and homes.
Development of the former Epping quarry site is starting to take shape, with 151 social housing apartments and a private hospital recently opening.Credit: Jason South
More than 60,000 people now live in Epping and its dormitory suburbs of Epping North and Wollert. But Epping’s next phase of growth is just as likely to be upwards as outwards.
In September last year the state government released its housing statement, seeking to tilt the balance of new homes in Melbourne away from the suburban fringe and into established and well-serviced suburbs by “unlocking new spaces to stop urban sprawl”.
It named Epping as one of the first 10 places where this will happen, with a target of building 60,000 new homes within a decade.
It’s not hard to see why. The suburb is home to one of Melbourne’s largest hospitals – the 400-bed Northern Hospital – a private hospital that opened just this month and a major new mental health hospital.
Northern Hospital in Epping.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Melbourne’s wholesale fruit, vegetable and flower market and the Epping Plaza shopping centre are two established drawcards and there are gargantuan tracts of industrial land along the M80 Ring Road and Hume Freeway.
“People come from across the northern suburbs to access its shops, health, justice, and community services,” the Victorian Planning Authority said earlier this year as it began the government’s work of assuming new planning controls to encourage housing growth in Epping.
“Paired with its schools, TAFE, and employment precincts, the area provides jobs and education for thousands of people.”
Even more crucially to the government’s plan, Epping has a private developer as an enthusiastic partner in its home-building ambitions.
In 2015, developer Riverlee bought a former quarry turned landfill site on Cooper Street – between the Northern Hospital and the produce market – paying almost $14 million for a chance to turn “a 46-hectare hole into a development jewel”, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review at the time.
Epping has sprawled northward at a rapid pace since Melbourne’s urban boundary was extended.Credit: Jason South
Riverlee development director David Lee said the company’s bet on Epping was not without risk, given the site’s history. “We saw it as untapped, with an unbelievable amount of potential if we were able to solve the zoning and the engineering issues,” he said.
“All of the signs pointed to an unbelievable opportunity. It just needed a bit of patience and creative thinking. We took Epping as a challenge, one of the most challenging sites we’ve worked on. It took us six to seven years before we could break ground and start building.”
The company’s $1.2 billion punt on the site includes a plan to build between 2000 and 2500 medium- and high-density townhouses and apartments, a business park, health precinct and 11-hectare green spine along a rehabilitated Edgars Creek.
Much of the site remains rubble-strewn and fenced off nine years on, but fragments of Riverlee’s vision for “New Epping” have begun to rise from the former tip site.
Ramsay Health Care’s 70-bed Northern Private Hospital opened on February 5. Three buildings with a combined 151 social housing apartments have opened for the precinct’s first residents, having been given fast-track planning approval by the state government.
New Epping and the new Northern Private Hospital.Credit: Jason South
The towers stand alone for now, ringed by undeveloped land, and Lee says it will be a few more years before the residents of those three towers get any more neighbours. He guesses it will take about 10 to 15 years before the precinct nears completion but says, “sites like Epping, you never really finish them”.
Epping’s changing face
Epping is multicultural Melbourne in microcosm.
Fifty-six per cent of residents speak a language other than English at home – almost double the state average of 30 per cent. No single ethnic group dominates the mix. The most common languages spoken in order of prevalence according to the 2021 census are: Arabic, Punjabi, Macedonian, Italian and Greek.
A High Street landmark, St George and St Mary Mother of God Macedonian Orthodox Church is a spiritual and cultural locus for Australia’s largest Macedonian community, thousands of whom have settled in Melbourne’s outer north.
Seven per cent of Epping’s population is of Macedonian ancestry, according to census data. Similar proportions live in the neighbouring suburbs of Thomastown and Lalor.
Macedonians who migrated to Australia in the mid-20th century were fleeing persecution, Macedonian Orthodox Community of Melbourne & Victoria president John Branov said.
His father came to Melbourne in 1939, working in factories and running a cafe on Gertrude Street in Fitzroy before heading further north like many others from the diaspora.
“The home ownership dream led Macedonians into the outer suburbs,” Branov said. “They were working-class people; they weren’t doctors, lawyers.”
The Orthodox church is just one spiritual meeting place for northern Melbourne’s Macedonians.
Balkan Skara restaurateur Marijan Nikolovski has witnessed Epping’s multicultural evolution.Credit: Jason South
The other is Balkan Skara, a small restaurant just off High Street that has dished up traditional Macedonian meals since 2005. The restaurant’s grill master, lifelong resident of Thomastown Marijan Nikolovski, took over the business just three months ago.
Like many men in Melbourne’s outer north, his working life was intertwined with Australia’s car manufacturing industry. His automotive parts business collapsed when Ford, Holden and Toyota closed down.
“Once they shut down it was inevitable that we were going to shut down,” he says.
Nikolovski didn’t waste a crisis. A family meeting spurred the move to buy the restaurant, a move he says has been rewarding so far, giving him a chance to witness Epping’s many-coloured face from behind the grill.
“It’s good, clean, wholesome food and the community is embracing it,” he says. “We’re getting a lot of Chinese customers, a lot of Indians, not just Macedonians.
“Multiculturalism is alive and well in Epping.”