21 hours Ago By John Weldon
When I landed at Monash University in 1983, I was, as far as I knew, one of only two kids from Melbourne’s west in first year arts. As I sat on the lawn outside the Ming Wing trying to fit in with the other first years it soon became apparent that I hadn’t gone to a school that anyone else knew, nor did I come from a suburb anyone had heard of (St Albans). The blank stares and turning of heads made it abundantly clear that where I came from was not on anyone’s radar, nor was it likely to be.
In year 9 my family had moved from Sunshine to St Albans. My friends at school (in Braybrook) left me in no doubt that, by moving to Mini Malta, I was taking a downward step on the social ladder. St Albans, right next door to Kealba, was not considered a nice place to live, even by other Westies.
Growing up in St Albans we were constantly reminded that our part of Melbourne was second-best. Credit: Penny Stephens I had always lived in the west. After my family migrated to Australia in 1978 our home was in a section of the housing commission estate off Ballarat Road in Braybrook that was reserved for migrants.
The words “Wog Flats” spray-painted on the side of our building told us in no uncertain terms that this was not a nice place to live. In year 11, our maths teacher came back furious from an in-service day with other maths teachers. They had questioned why he was “wasting” his time teaching pure and applied maths to kids from the west.
Everyone I knew back then, knew that the west was not a nice place to live. It was barren in many ways, deprived of utilities, transport, places to go, things to do. Those of us who lived there in the ’80s and ’90s could have warned you that the neglect of this large swathe of Melbourne would lead to infrastructure shortfalls in the years to come.
As much as the west was misunderstood, in many ways it never even existed. To outsiders, maybe the west seemed like one great homogeneous smear, but just as there was no single “east” of Melbourne, so was there no “west”. We weren’t a team.
We weren’t united, necessarily, by anything other than a vague geography and the discriminating gaze of those who watched us from over a bridge they would never deign to cross, other than to head to their holiday homes. St Albans, pictured in 1973, when it had an 80 per cent migrant population. Credit: The Age Archives There was no name for those that came from the east, but they had one for us: Westies.
It wasn’t an awful epithet, but it was meant to other. Perversely, we basked in the aura of its wrong-side-of-the-tracks cool. “West is best, east is least” we’d growl, hoping for James Dean but coming off more like rebels without a clue, as we sat in Sunshine Park on Friday nights drinking stubbies.
What else was there to do? We dared not go to the St Albans pub after a friend from school was so badly beaten there that he’d been hospitalised for days. Not a nice place. As much as we wore the name Westie with pride, we all left as soon as we could, swearing we’d never go back.
But many of us did. In dribs and drabs, accidentally or sometimes on purpose. In winter, we’d still gather at the Geelong Road end of the Western Oval to watch Footscray, the team which for so long had epitomised the rest of Melbourne’s view of the west: uncultured, undesirable, unlovable.
And, on game day, as we parked our cars in the nearby suburbs of Yarraville, Seddon, and Footscray – places we’d looked down on as hopelessly old-fashioned as kids – we found ourselves drawn to what were then cheap workers cottages. As Footscray became the Western Bulldogs in the late ’90s and the west became gentrified, so did we and our little cottages. Loading A quarter of a century later my kids have grown up in the west.
They’re Westies too, but they have reclaimed that name, much as wog was rehabilitated by the Wog Boys and others. I’m sure they’d say their home, the inner-west, is a great place to live, but then nobody has ever suggested to them that it might be otherwise. Apart from one Eastie mum who, so I’m told, won’t let her daughter visit her friend in Seddon because it’s too close to that scary Footscray.
The more things change ...
John Weldon is an Associate Professor specialising in curriculum design and development at Victoria University. The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here .
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. License this article City life Development Opinion For subscribers St Albans John Weldon is an Associate Professor specialising in curriculum design and development, and the digitisation of text, at Victoria University, and president of the International Block and Intensive Learning and Teaching Association. Most Viewed in National Loading.
