The west I knew was treated as second best, but those days are numbered

I spent the first 20 years of my life in Melbourne’s west.

It was a place stigmatised as poorer and more industrial than the eastern suburbs. Friends and family over there lived within range of the Dandenongs or Port Phillip Bay. We had a local quarry and the weed-infested wilds on the banks of the Maribyrnong River.

Workers in 2022 at Barro Landfill in Kealba, where an underground fire burnt for years.Credit: Darrian Traynor

I had no inkling my side of the city had been typecast as “unpopular for living” in Melbourne’s first planning scheme, published by the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1954.

Melbourne’s august planners deemed that the city should continue to grow to the east, with its “more attractive physical and climatic characteristics” than the industrial west.

And so it went throughout the 20th century.

My parents bucked the demographic trend when they moved west in the 1970s, swapping a small cottage in Clifton Hill for a spacious AV Jennings home with a big backyard in Kealba.

Kealba isn’t known for much. A noxious underground tip fire that burnt for years might be its main claim to fame.

It was a classically car-dependent dormitory suburb, wedged between migrant-heavy St Albans and white-bread Keilor. Even its name – an awkward amalgam of those two suburbs – signified in-betweenness. Its commercial centre was a lone milk bar; otherwise it was a maze of crescents and courts filled with detached houses and the odd children’s playground (always vandalised).

But it was what we knew, and it wasn’t all bad. Our Maltese neighbours introduced us to pastizzi: flaky pastry filled with hot feta, delicious and exotic.

We rode our bikes down thrillingly steep trails on the banks of the Maribyrnong and forded the river to Brimbank Park on the other side.

The sense of geographic isolation I felt growing up in Kealba has been supercharged in newer western suburbs.

And it was affordable. Twenty kilometres north-west of the city, Kealba was a precursor to Melbourne’s 21st-century westward sprawl.

I left the west in my early 20s, but in the past year, I’ve made several return visits while reporting about Melbourne’s outer suburbs.

What’s struck me is how everything and nothing has changed.

It’s no longer unpopular for living. In fact, it’s wildly popular now.

Melbourne’s west has more than doubled in size this century, as about 650,000 people moved or were born there.

It has become the fastest-growing region in Australia.

Kealba wouldn’t even qualify as an outer suburb any more.

New suburbs – equally obscure to most Melburnians – have sprung up further west: Delahey, Taylors Hill, Fraser Rise, Deanside, Aintree.

Generations of Italian, Maltese and Croatian immigrants have been replaced by Vietnamese, Indians and New Zealanders.

It’s been said geography is destiny. Unlike Sydney, which is ringed by national parks, Melbourne has grassy plains on its western and northern fringes.

This has been a blessing and a curse. It has provided an accessible and affordable place for the city to welcome newcomers, who have enriched us with their cultures and skills. But it has made it too easy for successive governments to plonk people in the outer suburbs and let them fend for themselves.

The sense of geographic isolation I felt growing up in Kealba has been supercharged.

Ten thousand people live in Mount Atkinson. They have no schools, no trains or buses, no shops.

In Mambourin, five years ago, homebuyers were presented with plans for a “20-minute community”, where everyday needs are met within a short walk, ride or public transport trip. Today, they must walk at least 1½ kilometres to the nearest bus stop.

The sparsely populated west of 50 years ago is groaning. And many of its flagship infrastructure projects have stalled: electrified rail to Melton and Wyndham Vale, trains to Melbourne Airport, the East Werribee employment precinct.

Meanwhile, the state government forges ahead with the $35.4 billion Suburban Rail Loop and the $26 billion North East Link, in Melbourne’s east.

Labor has had a monopoly in the west for decades.

But the region’s political clout is growing, inevitably, through sheer expansion. The west had just six state seats in 1992, compared with 25 in Melbourne’s east. It has 13 seats in the current parliament, the eastern suburbs have 24.

And despite Labor’s landslide 2022 state election victory, the party experienced swings against it in almost all seats in the west.

Voters also swung against Labor in five of six federal seats in Melbourne’s western suburbs in the 2022 poll, where Anthony Albanese’s government was elected with a 3.7 per cent swing.

These trends suggest the west is on course to become marginal territory. A region burdened with the legacy of being labelled “unpopular for living” could one day hold the keys to Spring Street and The Lodge.

Maybe then that list of deferred projects will gain traction.

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