People flocked here for city living, country style. But will its historic heart beat on?

Standing on the edge of Jacksons Hill, 40 kilometres north-west of Melbourne’s CBD, Jarrod Bell can see his beloved Sunbury’s past and future in one sweeping vista.

From here you can see the winding, dusty valleys of Jacksons Creek, Rupertswood Mansion, known as “the birthplace of the Ashes”, historic vineyards, planes landing and taking off at Melbourne Airport, and in the distance, a hazy Melbourne skyline.

You can also see the older suburbs built in the ’70s and ’80s concentrated down in the valley near Sunbury’s town centre, while up on the sprawling grasslands the frames of new houses are going up and excavators hungrily carve up new estates.

Jarrod Bell, mayor of Hume and life-long “Sunbury boy”. Credit: Justin McManus

“Everything that’s flat will be built on,” he says, resigned to the fact.

Bell, the 33-year-old mayor of Hume, is a born-and-bred “Sunbury boy”. He grew up in the ’90s in a home surrounded by horse paddocks when the population was about 10,000 people.

In those days, driving up out of the Sunbury valley during spring, he would see “fields and fields” of yellow canola crops out the rear window of his parents’ car.

“You don’t get that now,” he says.

Sunbury’s population is now about 40,000 people – four times as large. In 20 years, it will more than double again to 100,000.

Bell is on a mission to do what he can as mayor to keep his home town’s “city living, country style” allure, knitting together old and new Sunbury in the face of a population boom. That includes keeping the historic heart of the town beating when new retail chains open in nearby housing estates.

New homes being built in Kingsfield Estate, on the eastern edge of Sunbury.Credit: Justin McManus

‘Old’ Sunbury

What today is known as Jacksons Creek, which winds through Sunbury before eventually meeting the Maribyrnong River, was once the home of the Indigenous Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people. According to one version of local history, it was their name for the river – “Sunburra” – that gave the town its European name. A few remnant ceremonial sites, such as the town’s heritage-protected “earth rings” speak to the area’s pre-European settlement days.

Sunbury was one of the earliest European settlements in Victoria in 1836, when John Aitken, George Evans and Samuel and William Jackson arrived from Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).

Jacksons Creek in Sunbury, a view from the picturesque “Nook” picnic ground.Credit: Justin McManus

It was a pastoral area until it was proclaimed a village in 1851. The Jackson brothers named the district after Sunbury-on-Thames in Middlesex in England when it was established in 1857. Today the wide streets in central Sunbury – lined with English oaks, as well as its bluestone buildings, churches and bridges – date back to those early periods when the township was a stopover between Melbourne and the Central Goldfields region.

It was in the late 19th century when Sunbury became known as the “birthplace of the Ashes”, after visiting English cricketers played, and lost, to a local team in December 1882 at Rupertswood Mansion – the estate of wealthy landowner William Clarke.

Clarke’s wife is said to have burnt a cricket bail in “remembrance” of the death of English cricket, creating the ashes for which Australian and English teams have competed ever since.

The legacy of the mansion was, however, stained by child sex abuse against students in the latter half of the 20th-century while it was operating as a Catholic boarding school.

Rupertswood Mansion.Credit: Melanie Faith Dove

After the gold rush, Sunbury was a major Victorian wine-growing area, whose vineyards included Goona Warra, first planted in 1863 by James Goodall Francis, who later became Victorian premier.

According to local histories, many vineyards were removed when grazing became more profitable by the late 1920s, yet Goona Warra still operates today.

For a long time, the area’s major employer was a “lunatic asylum”, which later became a school for the intellectually disabled.

The arrival of Tullamarine International Airport in 1970 was pivotal for Sunbury. The airport is a 20-minute drive from the town and became a major employer for locals.

In this era, the area was declared a satellite city alongside Melton, and housing estates cropped up boasting large blocks with gum trees and room for kids to have ponies and motorbikes.

About 30,000 people attended the Sunbury Pop Festival in January 1974.Credit: The Age Archives

It was also in the ’70s that Sunbury gained notoriety for the Sunbury Pop Festival – Victoria’s answer to the Woodstock music festival in the United States (although locals quietly point out the farmland where the festival was held is technically in nearby Diggers Rest).

Since then, it has grown, and grown.

‘New’ Sunbury

Today at 40,000 people – on the edge of the Macedon Ranges but still technically falling inside the boundary of metropolitan Melbourne – Sunbury still can’t decide its identity: a suburb of Melbourne, a regional town or a satellite city.

What is considered within Sunbury’s 3429 postcode now spans 132 square kilometres. It includes 12 schools, 10 bus routes and at least 16 different housing estates.

Its status has been a point of local contention since the early 1990s when former Liberal premier Jeff Kennett controversially amalgamated hundreds of local councils.

In the mass restructure, the former Shire of Bulla (which took in Sunbury), Greenvale and Cragieburn were brought together under the vast new Hume City Council.

For many – including Mayor Jarrod Bell – Sunbury’s inclusion in the mega- council still doesn’t quite make sense. Sunbury is on the Calder Freeway corridor, while the rest of Hume is on the Hume Corridor. Sunbury is on V/Line’s Bendigo line and the Sunbury metropolitan train line, while the others are on the Craigieburn line. It takes 90 minutes to take public transport from Sunbury to Broadmeadows (Hume), but 20 minutes on the train to Gisborne (Macedon Ranges).

“There is no doubt in my mind that there’s a stronger connection to Diggers Rest (in Melton City Council) and into the Macedon Ranges,” says Bell.

“But ultimately these are the boundaries that Jeff decided to draw in the ’90s.”

Sunbury’s identity crisis developed into a serious campaign for the town to secede and break out as its own council in the early 2010s, taking the area’s biggest ratepayer – the airport – with it.

In October 2013, a non-compulsory poll was conducted across the City of Hume by the then-Liberal state government, in which 61 per cent voted to establish a new municipality, backed up by a panel report a year later that recommended its reincarnation as the “City of Calder”.

The view of Melbourne’s CBD from Jacksons Hill estate in Sunbury.Credit: Justin McManus

But the 2014 election of a Labor government under former premier Daniel Andrews kiboshed the plan, with its own reviews finding the carve-up would leave Sunbury ratepayers worse off.

It still sticks in the craw of longer-term residents like Graham Williams, who runs the Sunbury Ratepayers Association. He believes there is a lingering sentiment that Sunbury is ignored and neglected in comparison with Craigieburn and Broadmeadows.

“According to all the reports written [secession] wasn’t economic. But a lot of community members said they were happy to pay a bit more in rates to be independent,” says Williams, who is also a Liberal Party member.

“In the same way, Diggers Rest is actually right on the periphery of Melton, and they have the same sense of being abandoned.”

Sunbury station which services both metropolitan trains and country V/Line trains.Credit: Justin McManus

Bell, a Labor Party member, acknowledges the “feeling of neglect”; Sunbury residents often point to the huge new aquatic centres in Broadmeadows and Craigieburn as an obvious disparity compared with their 1960s-era public pool.

“You can’t deny the reality of the feeling and the perception, [but] the facts don’t back it up,” he says, claiming Sunbury gets ample council attention.

“There’s a pride in Sunbury. Even with the ‘Sunbury out of Hume’ movement, that was a movement that was really trying to celebrate the story of a community,” he says.

Williams is emblematic of “old Sunbury” – although he maintains many families with longer ties to the area would still consider him a “blow-in”.

He and his wife moved from Tasmania to the mainland in the early ’90s seeking job opportunities and to be closer to his wife’s family.

Thirty years ago, the land adjacent to the Sunbury railway station was a dusty paddock used as an impromptu car park and a place for travelling circuses to set up.

Sunbury Residents Association president Graham Williams at Sunbury railway station.Credit: Justin McManus

“It was a large but small country town,” he says.

“When we came here the council had plans that there would never be development between the top of Bulla Hill and Sunbury township.”

It’s a different story now.

Sunbury continues sprawling in several directions at once, with new estates stretching south down Vineyard Road towards the Calder Freeway, out north towards Romsey on Lancefield Road and south-east along Sunbury Road towards the airport.

People in Sunbury refer to their housing estates like they would a suburb – Ashfield, Rolling Meadows, Goona Warra, Canterbury Hills. Redstone and Everley are the newest arrivals.

But the newer estates aren’t like those built in the ’80s on large covenanted blocks with gum trees; many have small blocks with little to no backyards and are what Bell describes as “an endless sea of grey roofs”.

“It’s a heart-breaking situation,” he says. “[But] the opportunity to have the say on the development of these precincts was 10 years ago.”

The view from Jacksons Hill of new housing estates.Credit: Justin McManus

But where older residents sometimes look at new estates with pity, for new arrivals to the area they represent a precious opportunity.

Johnrey and Ericka Baraceros, both 30, moved into their new, four-bedroom, standalone home in Redstone estate with their chow chow dog, Kobe, in October last year – a stark contrast to their previous two-bedroom highrise apartment in Southbank.

“We really enjoyed that city lifestyle, that fast-paced environment, especially in our young 20s,” says Johnrey.

But when COVID hit – and they were both forced to work from home – Johnrey says the couple had a “realisation of the importance of space”.

Both he and his wife had grown up in the north-western and western suburbs of Sydney on larger blocks with backyards and wanted the same for their future children in an area they felt was as close as you could get to the country, but with city amenities.

Johnrey and Ericka Baraceros with dog Kobe in front of their new Sunbury home in the Redstone Estate. They swapped apartment living in inner Melbourne’s Southbank for space in the city’s outer north-west.Credit: Penny Stephens

Despite being in what will become a dense estate, the couple’s backyard faces onto a long-established farm property.

“We’ve swapped the sound of sirens in Southbank for sheep and roosters,” says Ericka.

The couple takes the train into Melbourne five days a week – driving five kilometres from home to Sunbury station and taking either the Metro or V/Line trains into the city. At weekends, they drive around the Macedon Ranges or out to Daylesford exploring bushland with their dog.

Bell and Williams worry about how these new estates will integrate into old Sunbury. They are still facing classic greenfields issues – many are still not hooked up to sewerage systems with pump trucks weaving in and out of the new estates several times a day. And there aren’t yet any public transport links into the main town centre.

One of the commercial waste trucks servicing a new estate in Sunbury.Credit: PENNY STEPHENS

The only hard boundary to growth on the south-eastern flank of Sunbury is a remaining “green wedge” of Bulla between Sunbury and the airport.

“Sunbury will grow as far as it can to Bulla, but there’s a reason Bulla still only has 500 residents,” says Bell.

Bell is unusually frank about the true reason for this buffer.

“It’s unofficial, but the green wedge in Hume isn’t about protecting prime agricultural land,” he says. “It’s actually about protecting the curfew-free status of the airport.”

Hume Council, unlike neighbouring Brimbank, has never supported a Sydney-style nighttime curfew at the airport – even with the now-confirmed third runway causing concern for residents’ health in the area.

Hume has fewer residents living directly under the flight path and plans to keep it that way. Allowing residential growth near the airport would mean more noise complaints and community impetus for a curfew.

With a lower-than-average level of economic disadvantage in Sunbury, Bell says a 24-hour airport is an absolute necessity for the area.

“The airport has always been a massive driver of the economic success or prosperity of Sunbury,” he says.

“I remember vividly as a child the collapse of Ansett. I remember going to school the days and weeks after and kids were crying because mum and dad had lost their jobs.”

Protests at a mass rally at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport in 2001. Credit: Alan Betson

Today the airport employs 20,000 people, and is climbing. But there’s still not enough local jobs after a decline in manufacturing in the area, says Bell.

“Sunbury is still very dormitory – we are different from the rest of Hume. Most people leave town for their work,” he says.

The microeconomics of Sunbury are also at play in its main shopping streets.

O’Shanassy Street, Evans Street – speak to the growing diversity of the population with lines for Vietnamese banh mi rolls out the door at lunchtime, and in the fair trade coffee roasters and deli-style cafes popping up.

“Evans Street is the ‘story of renewal’,” says Bell.

Evans Street in Sunbury.Credit: Justin McManus

The centre is bustling mid-week. Even on a weekday, Williams says,the town centre’s three supermarket car parks are full. “You can’t get a park for neither love nor money,” he says.

The newly minted $39 million multi-storey commuter car park has eased the burden somewhat. With the new Metro tunnel coming later this year, the Sunbury train line will open up to more of the city – and Williams is hoping for more state infrastructure funding, not least to upgrade the local train station with modern features like lifts.

While the township is quickly outgrowing itself, Bell says he and the council are worried about what will become of the historic town centre when a new major shopping mall with large chain retailers opens in Redstone estate five kilometres from the traditional town centre.

“That’s where all the big shops are going to go. So the discussion that we as [a] council are having is, ‘That’s great, how do we protect the historic town of Sunbury? How do we activate it?’”

Concept plan for Sunbury’s arts and culture precinct in the former Sunbury Asylum buildings.Credit: Kirsten Thompson Architects

One way is a plan to draw on the bohemian streak of its Sunbury Pop Festival history. A forthcoming development will see a wing of the heritage-listed Sunbury Lunatic Asylum (the former Female Refractory) transformed into an arts precinct where local artists, potters and woodworkers will work, and theatre shows will be performed.

“It will be a bit like Daylesford, a bit like Abbotsford [convent],” he says.

“That mix of old and new.”

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