When a vision of shiny new cities meant moving to the country

Almost half a century ago, I became acquainted with an amusing fellow from a country city who was convinced that something called decentralisation was about to expand his already considerable fortune.

He believed the promise of politicians that soon whole departments of public servants would pack up their desks and homes and move, en masse, from Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne to his town.

Melbourne’s skyline has been turbocharged with new apartment developments in the past decade.Credit: Scott McNaughton

So convinced was he that he built a multi-storey office block, ready to accommodate those government workers, whose departments would pay juicy rents and who would soon, surely, be followed by numerous private companies and their employees, mad for a slice of the guaranteed wealth and clean country air to breathe.

Memories of this heady time returned as I contemplated the recent excellent series in The Age concerning the prospect of new cities to be created within Melbourne’s metropolis to ease pressure on the existing CBD and commuters.

Here was the idea of decentralising within the big city — in Sunshine, Clayton or Box Hill — rather than moving people and businesses out, way beyond the increasingly populous suburbs.

It’s all a long way from the old dream of creating new inland population centres in an effort to ease big-city congestion.

My friend the business entrepreneur, waiting to fill his new office block with grateful metropolitan escapees, wasn’t the only dreamer.

I was among a frolic of optimists who moved to what was billed as Australia’s national growth centre in the mid-1970s.

It was, in fact, two cities joined by a hyphen: Albury-Wodonga.

The owners of the local newspaper, The Border Morning Mail, were pouring large amounts of money into new printing facilities and recruiting journalists from all over the place, and I became one of them.

The promised explosive growth in Albury-Wodonga, we were persuaded, would be part of the answer to easing the pressures on Melbourne and Sydney. We would witness the remaking of Australia.

The big cities were said to be nearing crisis — overcrowding, traffic congestion and pollution were all discussed endlessly — and it would only get worse as Australia’s population — 13 million at the time — was anticipated to double by the year 2000.

Today, the arguments remain familiar and have become supersized with predictions that cities will get vastly bigger. Melbourne is projected to have a population of 9 million by the middle of the century or earlier.

There seems, however, no obvious appetite for a return to the old idea of decentralising to the regions.

No less a figure than prime minister Gough Whitlam drove that vision splendid.

He, New South Wales premier Robert Askin, and Victorian premier Dick Hamer stood together on the causeway linking Albury and Wodonga on January 25, 1973 — 50 years ago — to announce their three governments would join forces to build Australia’s first major national growth centre.

Albury-Wodonga, with a population at the time of less than 50,000, would be home to 300,000 by the year 2000, they declared.

What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, it turned out.

The combined population of Albury-Wodonga is about 100,000.

There was, for a start, the fact that Albury-Wodonga sat astride the Murray River; Albury in NSW and Wodonga in Victoria.

Given the long history of state rivalries, the idea that these two cities could be made one seemed about as likely as peace breaking out between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

There were two city councils and two shire councils, none of them exactly friendly, and all of them very prickly indeed when they were required to work in the shadow of a shiny new bureaucracy called the Albury-Wodonga Development Corporation.

The biggest file in the Border Morning Mail’s library came to be labelled “border anomalies”.

Builders and developers faced hundreds of different cross-border regulations. Wodonga firefighters couldn’t plug their hoses into Albury’s hydrants because the size of their couplings didn’t match.

Victoria and NSW even had different duck-hunting regulations. Albury hunters who shot birds from the NSW side of the river and tried to retrieve carcasses that fell on the Victorian side could find themselves in court for hunting without a Victorian licence.

But all of these difficulties were minor compared with the task of persuading public servants to uproot their lives in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne and move to the so-called growth centre. In the — gasp — regions!

They plain refused. Their unions stood by them and threatened endless industrial action if marching orders were issued. Department chiefs dragged every chain they could lay their hands upon.

And then, in 1975, the political order was stood on its head.

Gough Whitlam and his government, champions of decentralisation, were sacked by governor-general John Kerr.

Malcolm Fraser and his Liberal government swept to power.

In 1977, Fraser killed the Albury-Wodonga dream. The previous plan for a city of 300,000 was now reduced to a forecast 150,000.

My old friend’s “office block” never saw a public servant’s desk. It was converted to a weddings and function centre.

Albury-Wodonga, happily, grew organically into a perfectly fine pair of regional cities. Forty-six years after Fraser reduced its target of 300,000 to 150,000, the combined population of the cities is about 100,000.

And today, the discussion about how to shoehorn 9 million people into a city like Melbourne settles on how to create new cities within its metropolitan borders.

Good luck with that.

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