‘It’s beautiful, but we’d like fresh air’: Life inside Melbourne’s most polluted suburb
In a series, The Age explores why the western suburbs are Australia’s fastest-growing region and what’s holding them back as the number of homes more than doubles in some areas in the next decade.
Marie and Brian Long have suffered the effects of pollution in Brooklyn for decades.Credit: Justin McManus
Marie Long trembles as she recalls the nights she would tuck in her daughter and have to explain the rancid smell that had invaded the bedroom.
Summer was always the worst, when heat accelerated rotting flesh.
“It would smell like a train full of dead elephants coming into your home,” Marie says. “It still upsets me to this day that we even had to put up with that.”
Marie’s children are adults now, but for 30 years she has dealt with the psychological impacts of dust and odour raiding her home.
The 57-year-old lives in Brooklyn, the Melbourne suburb with the worst air pollution, and a microcosm of the environmental problems residents face in many parts of the city’s west.
There are two sides to Brooklyn. On one, it is a neat, quiet residential neighbourhood that is home to about 2000 people.
Here, within the Hobsons Bay council boundary, double-fronted brick homes are increasingly turning into modern townhouses as young families seek a slice of affordable land 14 kilometres from the CBD.
“It’s a beautiful place to live,” says Brian, Marie’s husband. “But we’d like to breathe fresh air. The industry shouldn’t be there.”
Just across the six-lane Geelong Road, within Brimbank council, is an industrial zone with noxious operations: from abattoirs and meatworks to waste and recycling plants.
Deep in the industrial precinct are massifs of crushed concrete, brick and bitumen. When The Age visits, a herd of feral goats roams the slopes of a disused landfill after escaping slaughter.
When a northerly wind blows, dust and smells are carried into Brooklyn homes, the closest of which are only 100 metres away.
Brooklyn’s residential pocket is hemmed in by three heaving roads: the West Gate Freeway, the Geelong Road section of the Princes Highway, and Millers Road, all rumbling with trucks travelling to and from the Port of Melbourne.
Residents have been campaigning against pollution for decades and formed the Brooklyn Community Representative Group in 2008, bringing together the Environment Protection Authority, local councils and businesses.
There have been improvements. Air quality has exceeded PM10 standards (when there is a high concentration of pollutant particles the size of dust) nine times since July, down from a peak of 30 times in the year 2019-20.
Neighbouring Footscray hasn’t had more than one exceedance a year since 2019-20.
The number of odour reports in Brooklyn has fluctuated. There were 703 odour reports in 2018, falling to 64 in 2022, then rising again to more than 400 in 2024.
EPA western metropolitan regional manager Jeremy Settle says PM10 levels may have fallen because of wetter weather and recent works to seal dusty industrial roads and surfaces.
As for odour, he says the EPA is working with the meat processing plants.
“There is still a lot of work to be done out there,” he says.
Industry built before residents moved in
In 1954, the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works designated Brooklyn – then on the outskirts of the urban west – one of the city’s “offensive industrial zones”.
Houses followed, as Victoria’s planners wanted to build homes for workers close to industrial areas such as Brooklyn’s.
Today, Brooklyn’s industrial and residential zones would not be allowed to exist in such proximity.
Under EPA guidelines, a buffer zone of up to one kilometre is required to separate homes from businesses in the animal processing and waste and recycling sectors.
But existing use rights are foundational to the state’s planning system and allow businesses of a particular nature to continue in zoned areas.
Christian Buxton’s plasterboard recycling business EcoGypsum is voluntarily reducing dust pollution.Credit: Jason South
The Age attended the Brooklyn Community Representative Group’s final gathering of 2024, at which a handful of residents expressed their frustration at ongoing pollution after 17 years of meetings.
Young father Hayden, who has lived in the suburb for four years, is fed up with the lack of accountability from authorities.
“I had contemplated selling because sometimes when my two-year-old daughter goes out on the grass and comes back in, she returns with dusty hands and feet, and that’s a real shame because I love Brooklyn,” he says.
Christian Buxton’s family-owned business, Sunshine Groupe, has operated in Brooklyn since the 1930s.
In September, his plasterboard recycling outfit EcoGypsum became one of four Brooklyn businesses to voluntarily register a Better Environment Plan, a Victorian-first legal commitment approved by the EPA for reducing dust pollution.
Measures include installing dust monitors, establishing wind breaks and sharing resources. Buxton says the four companies – the others being City Circle, ResourceCo and Delta Recycling – are spending a combined $1 million on site improvements.
The businesses crush and recycle more than half of the state’s construction material waste, and Buxton says moving away would make them unviable as they would lose customers.
“My wish would be that we find a way to cohabit,” he says.
Buxton hopes more Brooklyn companies join the environment plan. So far, no animal processing businesses have done so.
One of them, Australian Tallow Producers, has been sanctioned several times for odious smells, including a $200,000 fine in 2015 and $8060 in 2019.
Australian Tallow did not respond to questions.
Data by local government area, collated by Torrens University, shows that health problems linked to air pollution – including hospitalisation rates for asthma, heart failure and heart disease, as well as lung cancer incidences – occur at a higher rate in Brimbank, Hobsons Bay and Maribyrnong council areas than in the general Australian population.
In 2021, the Inner West Air Quality Report, commissioned by the Victorian government, called for pollution from heavy industry and diesel trucks to be mitigated.
More than 9000 trucks are expected to travel through the state’s $10 billion West Gate Tunnel each day when it opens next year. While this is expected to remove diesel-spewing heavy trucks from local roads in Yarraville, they will be funnelled past Brooklyn homes via an exit ramp on Millers Road.
A government spokesperson said the West Gate Tunnel would remove more than 9000 trucks from residential streets.
“The opening of the Metro Tunnel and West Gate Tunnel in 2025 will make a big difference for our growing west, helping people get home sooner, and connecting them with critical jobs and services,” the spokesperson said.
Alex Damasoliotis loathes living so close to heavy industry and trucks. She worries about the health of her children, aged seven, 10 and 14.
The family lives in Altona North, next to Brooklyn, and Damasoliotis shuttles her two youngest up Millers Road to Annunciation Catholic Primary School.
Moving isn’t an option. This is their home, and there is a lot to love: community spirit, multicultural restaurants and easy access to the beach, parkland and CBD.
But Damasoliotis wants to see government action. She grew up in leafy Armadale before moving west in 2008 to be near her husband’s family.
“It’s just chalk and cheese. We had tree-lined streets, and you could open your window without worrying about dust and odours,” she says. “There’s dust all over my car and my window ledges are black.”
Alex Damasoliotis with children Jonathan and Paris.Credit: Justin McManus
Similar issues play out across Brimbank, Hobsons Bay and Maribyrnong councils.
Recently, the west has had major, prolonged incidents.
In July, thick black smoke billowed over the western suburbs after a chemical explosion sparked the worst industrial fire in six years in a Derrimut factory.
In Kealba, a fire has been burning deep underground at a landfill for five years. The operator, Barro Group, had its licence cancelled by the EPA last year and will face court in January.
Western waterways have also been under pressure from industrial activity and increased litter and stormwater from a rising population.
Then there’s tree canopy cover. It is lower in the west than any other Melbourne region; it was just 5.5 per cent in 2018, compared with 25.9 per cent in the east.
Even the old suburb of Williamstown – the so-called “Toorak of the west” – is far less green than Toorak.
A green legacy for future generations
Advocacy groups have been working to make the west greener.
Greening The West has helped drive about $40 million in federal and state funding for projects including the planting of more than 1 million trees, cleaning up waterways and supporting the Greening The Pipeline, a 27-kilometre green corridor and bicycle track that would connect Werribee to central Melbourne.
Geoff Mitchelmore, 84, founded the Friends of Lower Kororoit Creek at Altona North in 2001 and has led the transformation of the waterway from desolate and poisoned to lush and biodiverse.
A 2004 bird count identified 40 species. In 2020, they found 140.
“There was nothing here. No trees, no paths, no picnic tables. Just weeds, rubbish and a lot of drug dealing,” Mitchelmore says.
He negotiated millions in public and private investment, and now wants to plant a forest in Brooklyn’s industrial precinct to filter dust.
Geoff Mitchelmore is the founder of Friends of Lower Kororoit Creek.Credit: Justin McManus
“My biggest concern is the health and wellbeing of the community – all those young kids growing up in all that dust,” he says.
Mitchelmore has lived in Altona North since 1968, and despite frustrations, loves the west.
He’s excited about plans for a wetlands centre in Altona Meadows at the Cheetham Wetlands, which host thousands of migrating shorebirds each summer.
“The other side of town is developed right to the waterline with housing, but in the west, we’ve got this preserved forever,” he says.
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