Opinion
My suburb is the unglamorous sibling of a seaside gem. But we’re still better
Gareth Morgan
Poet and publisherGrowing up in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Williamstown felt like a sort-of ending, a cul-de-sac surrounded by water. Sitting on a peninsula that juts into Port Phillip Bay, Willi was, and is, a crumbling oasis of boats, boat-themed restaurants, a beach and 20 piers and these crazy cannons pointing out at the boat-strewn bay.
It’s beautiful, safe and free, but all of this still made me want to leave.
My suburb, Williamstown North, is an inland wedge of just 1622 people across the north of Willi. At the far end is the defunct Mobil refinery and an industrial park that makes up more than half the suburb. At the sharp end of this wedge is Newport rail junction, the first step out of this small-town suburb by the bay.
I was born in Williamstown Hospital and lived in the same Willi North house – a green weatherboard – for the first 20 years of my life. Most of the homes in this nest-like suburb curl around the Williamstown Cemetery (and the adjacent retirement home), and mine was no different.
Our house faced two parks: K.C. White Reserve, which looked onto the cemetery, and Quarry Reserve, behind which lay a vast abandoned lot we called “the rabbits” (due to the feral bunnies who lived there). The lot was surrounded by chicken wire with peeled-up edges that you could easily sneak through. And there is also Boral, a lively operation whose trucks come and go, carrying locally made asphalt.
I loved these parks. I kicked footballs relentlessly in winter, caught cricket balls in the summer. I trained hard with my brother and dad, and the year K.C. White was our home ground, we won the premiership. I also remember our kelpie splashing after waterbirds roosting in the puddle-strewn oval.
I would ride my bike up Park Crescent to buy a Slurpee at the 7-Eleven, or down to Challis Street for the paper. In the summer, when I was bored, Mum would send me across to the factories behind Quarry Reserve, next to the rabbits, where I’d hit a tennis ball against big smooth walls in empty parking lots. Experiences like this are characteristic of North Willi: big, flat and empty.
There was something freeing in this quiet spaciousness. Perhaps it’s why I was always drawn to the urban and melancholic work of Australian artist Jeffrey Smart. I can’t imagine growing up in a fabulous house by the postcard-pretty beach. The temperature is cooler here. The birdsong is louder. The sky is bigger, rounder.
There is some humming of business in this tiny suburb. Our local strip mall, across Kororoit Creek Road, houses the best pizza in the west – Pizza D’Asporto – and the Woolies where I worked many years as a checkout chick. I remember Nick, with the deepest red hair— and Wilma, Chaitanya and eventually the fearsome Ngaire, my work mums who came to dote on me and my terrible haircut.
Locals know the Hot Golden Bakery is miles better than any of those over in the bustling centre of Williamstown, especially for a pie or spinach and feta twist. The expansive lunchtime queue today is tradies, oldies and quiet, well-to-do folk with enough money to buy a salad roll rather than make one at home. There used to be the Sherbet Bomb Factory among the factories by the rabbits, but it’s gone now. Mark’s Cakes is still there, as is the Tumbles Playhouse, even if its fading sign of a juggling clown only now exists in my memory.
As I grew up, I started to find Willi North strange. While Willi is surrounded by a glimmering bay, a less idyllic horizon surrounds Willi North: abandoned zones and flat pragmatic surfaces that are slowly being built upon. There’s currently a lot of construction – that grey potential being realised. What will it bring, and who will it be for? A McDonald’s opened up on our side of Kororoit Creek Road, where the caravan park used to be, and other shiny new builds fill what were industrial streets. The people who called the caravan park home had to move, presumably further outward, in the harsh process of inner-west gentrification.
Living in Willi North, I found the best way to exit it is not to the city, but the bay. In my childhood, I discovered the “yellow brick road” through the Jawbone, a nature reserve and bird sanctuary on the bay. I still ride my bike along it when going to the beach.
While technically in Williamstown, this part of the Jawbone is ours. Like North Willi, it is vast, quiet and strange. Not perfect like the two-storey houses on Rifle Range Drive. Not a prize destination, like the beach. The Jawbone houses strange artefacts: the Historic Fishing Village and Angling Club, the all-too-frequently contaminated Paisley Drain, some rusty remnants of the Mobil refinery, the former Williamstown Racecourse, all of which remains is a fragment of graffiti-covered grandstand. Cormorants on rocks. The mangroves and saltmarsh thrive here, as they did before colonisation.
The Jawbone attracts its fair share of dog walkers in activewear in the day, but I know it best at night. As a teenager, I would sometimes walk out there after dark, and wonder at the she-oak needles coating the floor. The Jawbone gives you room to think. It’s a sense of space you can take back to your Willi North home, or wherever you need to go.
Gareth Morgan is the author of the poetry collections When A Punk Becomes A Spunk and Dear Eileen, and co-director of the independent Melbourne publisher Sick Leave.
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