Wyndham City

In 2018, I moved to the Shire of Wyndham on the far western fringes of Melbourne. Wyndham is an area of conspicuous growth, one of just a handful of locations left in Melbourne offering anything akin to affordable land and housing. It is expanding at a frantic pace—far beyond the infrastructure necessary to sustain it can be implemented. This region of Melbourne has historically been the object of some derision for its supposed lack of sophistication and desirability. It is comprised of newer suburbs, with none of the ornate European architectural legacy found closer to the city centre, erected upon a dramatically flat landscape.

I was in Hoppers Crossing. The first subdivision of residential land occurred here relatively recently, in the mid-twentieth century. Neighbouring Hoppers Crossing to the south is Werribee, which has a considerably older history as a township established to service the surrounding agricultural areas in the 1850’s. It was once infamous for a diabolical scent billowing from within its borders as a consequence of being home to the sewerage processing centre of Melbourne. Coming from country Victoria in the 1990’s along the Princes Highway, one would be alerted to Melbourne’s proximity by hitting the invisible wall of methane encircling Werribee. This is a rare and more subtle event now, due to superior operational processes. Nowadays, the Western Treatment Plant is actually recognised for being an exemplar of how to manage sewerage in an environmentally sustainable way and is an internationally renowned bird habitat. How widely this is known or appreciated is uncertain, and old stereotypes persist of a miasma-shrouded area. Further north from Hoppers Crossing are such suburbs as Truganina and Tarneit, a mixture of industrial, pastoral, and residential areas—prime sites for the expansion of building currently underway.

It was meant to be a temporary move—a convenient base I was offered during a time of general transition. I was trepidatious for many reasons, but thought I’d only be there six months, at the outside. For much of my life, I had alternated between being an inner city dweller or inhabitant of enviable rural locations, and this was really the last place I expected ever to find myself. I’d left behind a place of mountains, streams and towering mountain ash which vibrated joyously with the calls of lyrebirds and kookaburras. A picturesque village of Art Deco and federation weatherboards. Truly paradise to paradise lost, I thought in my pretentious melancholia, initial blindness and failure of imagination.

Upon arrival, I felt oppressed by the seemingly absolute obeyance to functionality. The shopping centres were almost uniformly grey-toned. Long double-laned roads hedged with factories, strip malls and mega stores with garish signs harangued one to come and spend. The whole area was largely devoid of tree cover, and the greenery that did exist was somehow deflated looking, powdered with dust. The houses in the central areas of Hoppers Crossing are largely of a kind, with nothing predating the 1960’s. A significant proportion were either brick veneer or clad in rendered board, material that in many cases had aged poorly and gave an impression of flimsy impermanence. Gardens were full of water thirsty non-natives and maintenance-hungry lawns. In other more salubrious streets squatted oversized faux colonial mansions, repressively maintained, and appearing to have distinct ideas above their station. The new houses, which would appear almost overnight, were bland and markedly cubic. They seemed cardboard-like—patched together with plastic tape and crammed onto tiny plots with the frequent addition of artificial grass carpeting tokenistic pockets of front yard. Everything looked to have been trucked in and positioned upon the surface like objects arranged upon a play mat.

The land had already been well-denuded before these houses had sprawled across the terrain. Once these far-reaching open plains had been awash with native scrub and delicate grasses before being brutalised by stock and agriculture. As a consequence, these suburbs had manifested themselves upon a dustbowl. The earth seemed sandblasted and dehydrated, and I felt disorientated, irritable and desiccated. Yet for all my internal turmoil at the uninspired practicality around me and the lack of unadulterated nature to source nourishment from, the place piqued my curiosity. There was a particular type of eeriness to this desperation for home, which inflamed the desire to stamp ownership upon a substrate clearly unintended for such use, and lacking the ability to truly support these demands. I thought perhaps I should try to document the area before what was left of its native character vanished even further under these bullish estates. So it was in taking aimless drives with my camera and an unsettled spirit that a different vision began to take form. As I travelled into the outlying areas, something eclipsing the immediate sense of affront began to penetrate.

Beyond the mushrooming building sites there is acres of rubbish; that which had not yet been despoiled for maximum utility took the form of neglected paddocks full of dried out weeds festooned in bits of plastic trash propagated by the countless building sites. As far as the eye could see, a vanquished wasteland. There are many dirt roads that are furrowed and almost impassable due to corrugations and erosion. I didn’t even know what these surrounding places were called. When referring to a map I could see place names—Eynesbury, Mount Cottrell, Quandong, Little River— but when out amongst it the boundaries were formless and unmarked. The treeless plains and long straight roads had a kind of familiarity, and it occurred to me that in spirit and form this place felt more like the outback than the fringes of Melbourne. It seemed incredible that this uncanny other world existed in such close proximity. Numerous remnants of agricultural days remained; old farm houses boarded up and coated with reddish dirt, amongst other evidence such as wooden fences, sheep pens and dry stone walls. Where the farmers had left, others had moved in with forbidding gated mansions, like barricaded compounds. Most with roller shutters on windows, some which I never saw opened. I had stumbled across a unique land of failed pastoralists, angry hermits, probable criminals, or maybe just solitary dreamers—likely all and more. Some of the evident hostility no doubt sprang from the feeling of being encroached upon from every angle with new housing projects being marked out every week, ensuring ongoing alterations to what had been a predictable environment. Rapacious developers were continually pushing at psychic boundaries too; numerous signs on fences expressed an aggravated weariness at frequent badgering to sell, with statements like ‘not for sale don’t bother asking’ on display.

On every drive on these back roads, I would spot abandoned, stolen cars, usually burnt and frequently upturned. Secretive looking churches of obscure denominations stood sentinel. Houses with bizarre modifications and numerous out buildings were prolific, showing clear disregard for concepts such as planning approval. And everywhere, illegal rubbish dumping. The feeling at times was dystopian enough to chill my older brother into saying, “This is real Mad Max country” when we were out exploring one day. Later, I discovered how literal that remark was; parts of the original Mad Max movie were filmed in the Little River area in the late 1970’s. The funny thing is how unmistakable it was that Mad Max was the fiction that came and went. So many iconic elements were provided by the location itself; this place was, in parts, still genuinely menacing all these years later. Something untamed was out there, where at first glance it had seemed utterly subjugated.

Slowly, the magnitude of the geomorphology impressed itself upon me. These plains, once so verdant, had been so comprehensively altered that it took time to fully grasp what I was seeing. A smallish rise dotted with towers and satellite dishes intrigued me, and some research revealed that this was Mount Cottrell proper— an unusual shield volcano and one of the largest in Victoria. I belatedly awoke to the fact I was in a volcanic landscape, and in fact geologically connected to the country I had lived upon as a child—the very same Western Volcanic Plains, stretching from these fringes of Melbourne almost to the border of South Australia. The third largest volcanic plains in the world, bested only by the Deccan Plateau in India and the Snake River Plateau in the United States. My ignorance up to this point struck me as an echo of my experiences when younger, spending hours exploring the glassy crater lakes of the Camperdown region with little understanding at the time that they were volcanic remnants. Taking photographs of Mount Cottrell whilst standing amongst bags of dumped rubbish and broken toys, I imagined native plants, orchids, lilies and kangaroo grass shimmering in the wind and thriving in what would have been rich volcanic soil. It seemed remarkable the utter desecration of such a fragile landscape that had taken place in such a short span of time.

As has occurred so tragically on numerous occasions elsewhere on these plains (and nation-wide), the Mount Cottrell area has seen harrowing frontier violence, with a massacre of Wathaurong people taking place in 1836. A dawn ambush saw members of a Wathaurong clan fired upon from a distance—a surprise attack supposedly in retaliation for the murder of a squatter and his convict shepherd, who had recently appropriated land in the district. Approximately ten Wathaurong people were murdered, although estimates vary, with Aboriginal oral history recounting the number of those who died as thirty-five.

This is a venerable landscape, badly brutalised but intelligent and resilient, always graceful. The low plains spreading out from the base of the You Yangs towards Mount Rothwell feature one of the oldest surviving man-made stone arrangements in the world. In an unassuming paddock, not visible from any road, a series of stones with the largest not more than waist-high, has been carefully placed to mark the positions of the setting sun at the solstices and equinoxes. It’s accuracy is to within a few degrees. Known as Wurdi Youang, this stone arrangement is unique due to its unusual shape, and is perhaps the oldest surviving astronomical observatory in the world. Carbon dating at nearby sites indicates that the arrangement could be as old as 11,000 years. This is far older than the Egyptian pyramids, or neolithic monuments such as Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange) in Ireland. A remarkable accomplishment on a global scale, created by Wathaurong people from times past, who have lived on this land for many millennia.

When travelling around, the granite ridges of the You Yangs rising in the distance were visible from many vantage points. I began to see them as a single massive formation similar to Uluru. I found a peace still existed that I had only ever experienced in the most ancient places. I sensed the same inaudible hum resonating. Hints of other aeons danced together in the fragile pastels of the sky at evening time, which then darkened to smouldering glows as night took shape. The flaxen grasses in late afternoon would switch to burnished golds, and other variations of shades would come to life and create a mesmerising display of intricate complexity. The whole place was awash with a primal constancy.

Back in the suburban streets it took more time to soften to the visual aesthetics, but I began to see small beauties everywhere. Acts of care and devotion towards the domiciles, like the effort put into some outlandish but subjectively pleasing colour scheme. The touches of whimsy in the garden—the rambling solar lights and carefully placed ornaments and statues—there was a tenderness to many of these places, as well as an invitation to partake. From my bedroom window I could see a house with only oval windows and a perfect front yard of concrete, with exacting rose bush beds at diagonal points across the impeccable expanse. I discerned in these types of designs an obliviousness to conformity in exchange for a genuinely unique aesthetic designed to give nothing but visual satisfaction to the residents. These myriad variations in concepts of taste and the unfeigned creativity I saw everywhere, even in the somewhat bastardised takes on colonial sensibilities, were a great pleasure to me. I admired the originality at every turn. Ostentatious, proud monuments to sanctuary. A kind of chaos, with such disparity between each property yet every one it’s own pocket of perceptual order.

As I explored the ever-burgeoning estates, I remembered also falling under the spell of newness, and the potency of this particular magic. Some of my favourite times as a child were going to look at properties when my parents planned to upgrade from the small house that barely contained all six of us. The display homes we would visit were kind of of wondrous to me. I remember looped wool carpet, immaculate laminex, and a frisson of delight at the smell of new paint. The pristine blissful nothingness of neutral carpets and pale walls. The great calmness and potential they promised. Fresh starts and new dreams. As a teenager, I maintained my passion for exploring houses, but more often at night. New builds, or old wrecks—the bones and the bodies of places that had nurtured lives or were about to provide shelter for the first time. I understand well their powerful conjuration of optimism and hope.

Those six months at the outside became years. I remained throughout the numerous pandemic-related lockdowns that Melbourne residents endured. The Hoppers Crossing postcode at one point had the highest case numbers in Australia. The populous was unfairly vilified in the media for this; again that prejudice against the western suburbs reared its head. Restricted for months to a five kilometre radius, I retreated frequently to the Werribee river and the old red gum giants bordering it’s girth as it curved towards the ocean at Werribee South. Werribee became a grand place, almost like Kakadu in it’s life generating capacity because of this waterway. I noticed other bordering suburbs like Wyndham Vale had been heavily planted with rapidly growing gums. I saw indigenous plants which had been offered free as part of a council initiative a year or two earlier begin to sprout in neighbours yards. I realised that I could hear sea birds at night while I lay on the concrete outside, trying to shake off the continual feeling of compression. A couple of times during the day I was captivated by groups of pelicans flying overhead.

Already, many of the areas I photographed no longer exist in the same way. In the span of a few years, whole communities have formed where I took questionable pictures of weirdly appealing drainage pipes. The old farms continue to be swallowed up, and the development continues at the same frenzied speed. The hunger for clean slates remains; the old must give way to the new, and so on goes this repeating cycle. But while these rapidly erected houses and streets appear to obliterate the past, there is solace in knowing these enterprises are barely perceived by an ancient, deeper strata, which rather than being ruined, lies dormant.