Badgerys Creek airport: the prosperity and the serenity

The nearest residents to the runway at the new western Sydney airport will still be 10km away, unlike at Mascot.

Robert and Trish Williamson, outside their home in Wallacia, are delighted the new airport is finally going ahead nearby. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

When Robert and Trisha Williamson first moved to Wallacia in 1979, the government was already devising plans to build an airport in western Sydney.

Thirty-eight years later and the two are excited and relieved to hear the government will run the project and work will finally begin on the Badgerys Creek airport.

“It’s great that something is finally being done,” said Mr Williamson. “I know people who lived down there (on the airport site) who were uprooted and forced to move years ago because they were told it was going to happen, and then nothing did. I think it’s about time the government had the balls to say ‘yes we’re going to run it’ and just get on with it.”

The couple, aged in their early 60s, believe the airport will bring prosperity to their area, potentially increasing the value of their home and creating local jobs.

They live just more than 10km from the proposed runway and are among the closest residents to the planned airport.

“I think the positives far outweigh the negatives,” said Mrs Williamson, who drives a shuttle bus for special-needs children in the wider Penrith area. “People complain it’ll be noisy but we’ll probably be deaf by then anyway.”

While the Williamsons do not travel by plane often, when they do it takes almost two hours to get to Sydney airport in Mascot.

“That’s another reason why we’re all for it, because we have to travel forever to catch a plane,” said Mrs Williamson.

“The irony is that it’s quicker to fly to Melbourne than it is for us to catch the train home from Sydney airport,” said Mr Williamson.

Although they will be in their 70s by the time the Western Sydney airport is operational, they say it is still an exciting prospect — if not for them, at least for their three children and five grandchildren.

The Williamsons are an entire city away from Elaine Vea Vea and her husband Stephen who have lived in Hardie St, Mascot, just 600m from the end of the east-west runway at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport, since 1971.

Luckily, they delight in the sound of big jetliners coming in to land — almost as much, in fact, as Michael Caton’s iconic film character Darryl Kerrigan did.

“It’s just like The Castle, we love it,” laughed Mrs Vea Vea, who is of Aboriginal and Vanuatuan background. “When the old 747s used to come in low to land on the east-west, that was great.

“I used to work at Ansett, so you could say air travel is in the blood. And I’m from Rockhampton and there’s still plenty of family up there, so we do a fair bit of flying anyway. “We’ve just gotten used to the noise living here; I don’t mind it at all. It’s great.”

Mrs Vea Vea, who became a social worker at the Redfern Aboriginal Health Service when the Australian carrier Ansett went out of business 16 years ago, said she had been listening to the news about yesterday’s Badgerys Creek creek announcement.

The couple lives in a weatherboard cottage with no special noise modifications. Mrs Vea Vea laughed on learning the nearest homes at the new airport would be at least 10km from the runway. “You can’t be serious? Really?” she said.