My suburb used to be a country town that looked down on its neighbours

Once upon a time, my suburb was a country town. The first time I visited it, on a childhood trip to Gippsland, I travelled down the Princes Highway through what used to be a series of distinct small towns.

There was Hallam with its magnificent Hallam Hotel, and Narre Warren, before the Fountain Gate shopping centre. The village of Beaconsfield led into Officer along the highway and, finally, Pakenham, where every sign seemed to lead to the racecourse. But it was Berwick that stood out.

Berwick has always had the feel of a town that knows its place in the world. Its centre is a solid grid built around a steep main street with various 19th-century buildings.

Two decades later, I moved here with my husband-to-be so we could be closer to work. Our new house was small and had internal walls that were painted purple, rotten floorboards and no heating. But a real estate agent friend assured us that it was in a good location, sitting on a traditional quarter-acre block in Berwick’s original grid. Turns out he was right.

What was once the country town of Berwick (Berr-ick, not Burr-wick) has become incorporated into greater Melbourne. The former farming areas surrounding the township have been redeveloped into a sprawl of suburbs. At the 2021 census, the population of Berwick passed 50,000 (and it hasn’t peaked yet), making it one of Australia’s biggest suburbs by population.

Instead of being split into new smaller suburbs, as you would expect, what is apparently a well-regarded name has been kept as it pushed up against the edge of Clyde North and snowballed into a kind of super-suburb.

As a new resident of Berwick, I found the “letters to the editor” section of the local paper a source of entertainment as lifelong residents protested against every change. Over time, small-town joys such as nearby horse paddocks, the airfield and a swimming club on the Cardinia Creek were lost, but the Bush Nursing Hospital (now the ever-growing Casey Hospital) remains the birthplace of most local children.

Traffic improved for a while when the Princes Freeway bypass was built – when entering the town centre, you could once expect to be stuck behind a truck blowing dirty smoke, grinding its way up the steep Berwick hill. But with the growth of Melbourne’s south-eastern edge, those traffic problems have returned. I don’t think there is a day when the Monash flows freely in peak hour. What used to be a 20-minute trip to nearby Cranbourne regularly takes twice as long nowadays.

The country town feel of Berwick’s centre still survives, even though High Street’s grassy median – with its mature trees and garden beds – is now more a car park than park. Many historic buildings still stand, although they are mostly repurposed. Incredibly, Berwick Library, which started in 1866 as a mechanics’ institute library, is still run almost entirely by volunteers. The war memorial stands proudly at the end of the strip, and the Anzac Day ceremony seems to get bigger every year. Among the flower beds stands a sculpture of Edwin Flack, Australia’s only competitor in the 1896 Athens Olympics, who won two gold medals before returning to his home town to raise cattle.

Berwick always saw itself as self-contained and perhaps a little better than its neighbouring towns. I once asked the old bloke who lived in my street all his life why he didn’t attend the nearby Beaconsfield Primary School in the 1930s. With a sharp intake of breath, he told me: “Berwick children never crossed the Cardinia Creek to go to that school – it wasn’t Berwick.”

Some of the attractions we now enjoy are due to the generosity of these older families. The magnificent Wilson Botanic Park was developed on an old quarry given to the council for a park. And in more recent years, when Berwick Primary relocated to a larger site in a new housing estate, the old school site was bought by the council, with contributions from notable Berwick residents, and transformed into a graceful park and cafe. On a warm day, this park is as busy – and beautiful – as many in Melbourne’s centre.

The annual Berwick agricultural show is still run by a volunteer committee that works incredibly hard to keep it going. Akoonah Park regularly stages events, including a weekly market, and hosts a caravan park. The early residents who chose the site of the showgrounds would never have imagined their town would come to surround it. As the region grows, the showground is increasingly taken over by cultural events such the annual Diwali event. At Easter this year, it was hired for a children’s fair – complete with camels that stood in the park each evening after the event was closed, chewing slowly.

With its university campus, major hospitals and TAFE, Berwick continues to be the focus of the region. And nothing reflects the growth more than the new, giant, multi-level railway station car park.

In a way, as in the past, Berwick is still a place that provides for many needs of its residents without them needing to go too far from home – just the way I imagine the residents of old liked it.

Clancy Briggs is a former town and community planner who now works in community health.

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