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The story starts in the 1927, when the open paddocks between Mason, Mills and Hansen Streets and Blackshaws Road were subdivided for speculative development.

1929 Plan for General Development

The 2017 Hobsons Bay Heritage Study stating.

This estate was originally made up of two Lodged Plans, LP 12379, and LP 12834, which were subdivisions of Crown Portions C & D, Section 6. They were declared by solicitors, Bullen & Burt, lodged by the surveyor GT Little (later Little & Brosnan) in 1927, and the consent of Council was given in the same year. The official stamp was given in 1929 and there was even a ‘Little Street’ included in the plan named after the surveyor.

However the Metropolitan Town Planning Commission then became involved, and the street layout was redesigned.

1929 Plan for General Development

In what became a poster child for new subdivisions in the 1929 ‘Plan for General Development’.

Many subdividers and owners of land in the past have viewed with suspicion the efforts to induce them to adopt town planning principles. In some instances subdivisions which are intended to be town planning layouts are fantastic, and do not comply with requirements from a general development standpoint; in other cases they are extremely wasteful, and not in the interests of the city, the future residents, or the owners. These “so called” town planning schemes have retarded the general adoption by many owners of more scientific subdivision of land.

As examples of the above, the plans on page 261 are submitted. Scheme “A” the layout which was surveyed and forwarded to the Council for approval and seal in accordance with the usual practice, and the sealing was duly authorized. Prior to the subdivision of this area, the Commission had given considerable attention to the problem of road transportation in the western suburbs, and had adopted a general scheme of thoroughfares. This scheme was not known to the subdividers nor to the Council at the time this particular subdivision of the area was approved by the Council. As the approved subdivision seriously affected the Commission’s scheme, the subdividers were approached, and although they had incurred the considerable costs of subdivision and had received the approval of the Council as required by existing law, so satisfied were they with the proposal that they agreed to replan the area in accordance with the Commission’s general scheme.

Scheme “B” shows the amended subdivision, including two main roads, ‘”The Highway” and “Broadway”, each 84 feet in width. The general design of the subdivision is a marked advance on the old checker-board layout which was previously intended, and is an excellent example of the benefits to be gained by adequate control.

It should not, however, be necessary to amend plans on which large sums have been spent,and usually subdividers are loth to change their plans when expense has been entailed. Those who do are to be commended for their interest in the development of the metropolis on sound lines, and they are realising that it pays them to do so.

Some sources state that the estate was planned by Walter Burley Griffin’s Company, though the heritage study states that it is more likely the work of well-known planner, Saxil Tuxen.

In the years that followed little happened – this 1945 aerial photo shows empty paddocks.

Victorian Department of Lands and Survey photo map

And this MMBW plan from 1947 reinforces this – a sea of empty streets, with the nearest houses back at Newport station.

MMBW Plan No. 282

However the end of WW2 saw development take off, land along Blackshaws Road first to be sold from the mid-1950s.

The Age, 28 February 1955, page 8

Real estate agents promoting Newport West as “the district of the future”.

The Age, 11 October 1958, page 45

Land sales soon ramped up.

The Age, 18 July 1959, page 40

And supporting infrastructure followed soon after, including a Dutch speaking doctor who set up shop at The Circle, and a library branch in 1966.

MMBW Plan 9D

The shopping centre was finally built out by 1970.

The Age, 28 March 1970, page 48

Resulting in the suburb of 1950s weatherboard and 1960s brick veneer houses seen today.

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Footnote

The 1945 aerial photos shows nine large circular tanks located at the north west corner of the estate, at the corner of May Street and Blackshaws Road. I’ve got no idea what they were for – any ideas?

Victorian Department of Lands and Survey photo map

And an update

I dug up the plan of subdivision for the area once occupied by the mysterious tanks – it was lodged in February 1962, and B.P Australia of 131 Queen Street, Melbourne was the vendor.

So oil tanks it is!

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We’ll jump back to 22nd May 1970, when The Age covered the opening day of the South Eastern Freeway, which then run between Punt Road in Richmond and Toorak Road in Kooyong.

Even in the 1970s ending a freeway with traffic lights was the butt of jokes.

Fine and fast on the freeway
But, oh that dead-end corner

Their job done, police watch as traffic lights take over at the Toorak Road end of the new freeway section

Motorists were delighted when they used the new $19 million second stage of the South-Eastern Freeway for the first time last night. Until they came to the gasometers at the Toorak Road intersection! Here the 60 mph freeway almost ran into a dead-end.

Motorists had to wait five minutes at the lights before they could go on to Tooronga Road or turn into Toorak Road. Traffic from the freeway also disrupted traffic travelling east in Toorak Road. And cars were banked up from the freeway intersection back to Kooyong Road at the height of the peak period.

The Minister for Local Government (Mr. Hamer) opened the freeway. He said it would save the community $15,000 a week by reducing accidents and cutting travelling time. “The Board of Works was justified in using all reasonable means to get the road ready and in use at the earliest date,” he said.

While one wag managed to run out of petrol, blocking the new road.

One chap just had to run out of petrol

Mr. Paul Armstrong, with thousands of others, is hurrying home from the city along the new $19 million, four-lane section of the South-Eastern Freeway yesterday.

He is 50 yards from Toorak Road when suddenly his rented car (below) splutters and stops. No petrol. Mr. Armstrong, a 21-year-old Canterbury estate agent, is the first to break down on the 2.5 mile expressway from Burnley to Tooronga Road – half an hour after its opening.

“The gauge said the tank was still half full, but I knew straight away that I had run out of petrol,” he said. I had to rent this car when my own broke down, otherwise I don’t think this would have happened.” Mr. Armstrong walked 300 yards to a service station in Toorak Road and got enough petrol to get home.

But the reasons for rejecting freeway building were also the same – they are expensive and polluting, delivering marginal savings in travel times while moving congestion elsewhere.

Quicker

Mr. Hamer was jeered by a small group of banner-waving trainee teachers as he cut a blue ribbon to open the new section. One of the demonstrators, Andrew Moffat, of Hallam, said the money should have been spent on schools. “Freeways, with the increased number of cars they handle, add to pollution of the atmosphere. “I can’t see why this money could not be spent on schools or something else more worthwhile,” he said. The chairman of the Board of Works – (Mr. Croxford) said rain had stopped workmen painting traffic lanes on the new freeway.

Travel time

He advised motorists to drive carefully and not to overtake other cars until the lanes were painted. The new freeway section cuts about 2 1/4 minutes from the travel time to the city. From the traffic light forest at the Toorak Road intersection it lops less than a tenth of a mile off the trip. Last night’s times along the freeway averaged 10.5 minutes.

In off-peak traffic – even with the level crossing trams and four sets of traffic lights – the average time was 13 minutes. Under the yellow sodium lights cars ducked and weaved to keep up to the 60 mph speed limit. They banked up 20 and 30 deep at the Toorak Road intersection and other bottlenecks. There were no lane markings, apart from two short strips of reflecting “cats’ eyes”. And warning lamps guarded an unfinished section of one ramp.

Still, some people thought the new freeway would solve Melbourne’s traffic problems, such as MLC Geoffrey John O’Connell for Melbourne Province during the 25 March 1970 debate on the Richmond and Hawthorn Lands Bill.

My party has no objection to the Bill. The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works has performed good work on the South Eastern Freeway. When this four lane highway is fully operative, many of Melbourne’s traffic problems, particularly in this area, will be solved.

But the traffic problem was never “solved”.

Throughout the 1970s the Mulgrave Freeway was progressively extended toward the Melbourne CBD from Dandenong towards Chadstone, reaching a dead end at Warrigal Road in 1981.

Melway Map 69 Edition 14, 1982

During a 1981 debate on funds for rural roads, Labor MP Steve Crabb questions whether ‘salami tactics‘ were driving the expansion of Melbourne’s freeway network.

Mr CRABB-

The fact is that everybody in the community is disadvantaged in terms of roads because the Government continues to pursue the construction of crazy freeway schemes
that have been on the planning books for a decade. The people who are disadvantaged are the people who want to use the ordinary, basic infrastructure of roads both in the city and its suburban areas and in the country.

Mr Maclellan-

We have stopped building freeways.

Mr CRABB-

I am surprised that the Minister keeps raising this matter. He raises it every time we discuss this subject.

The Government has never come clean on what it proposes to do about linking the Mulgrave Freeway with the South Eastern Freeway, but it intends to proceed with a project which will
cost some $120 million and which will require, by definition, an expansion of the capacity of the South Eastern Freeway to at least three lanes in each direction.

That will inevitably lead to a linking of the F19, the West Gate Freeway, with the South Eastern Freeway by means of a tunnel under the Yarra River. Nothing is surer than that, if the Country Roads Board is allowed to continue with the policy the Government has given it, that is where we will end up!

Insufficient road funds are spent in both country and suburban municipalities, as all honourable members know. The money that ought to be spent on those roads is being expended on the grandiose schemes of a Government that has not got the capacity to reorient its policies from those established ten or twenty years ago.

The “missing link” between the South Eastern Freeway and the Mulgrave Freeway was eventually opened as the “South Eastern Arterial Road Link” in 1988, but in a nod to freeway objectors, was built with traffic lights at intersections instead of flyovers.

Melway Map 59 Edition 20, 1990

But even that wasn’t enough to solve Melbourne’s traffic – a flood of other upgrades have been completed on what is now known as the Monash Freeway.

• 1994 – Warrigal Road traffic lights replaced by overpass.
• 1996 – Tooronga Road, Burke Road and Toorak Road traffic lights replaced by overpasses.
• 2000 – CityLink project widened freeway to three lanes between Toorak Road and the city, along with connection to West Gate Freeway via the Domain and Burnley Tunnels.
• 2010 – freeway widened to four lanes between Dandenong and the tunnels.
• 2018 – freeway widened to five lanes between EastLink and the South Gippsland Freeway.
• 2019 – work starts on widening to five lanes between Warrigal Road and Eastlink.

Money well spent?

Footnote

Here is a map showing the development of Melbourne’s freeway network from 1970 to present day, from the North East Link Project, Appendix C “Transport Assessment – Existing Conditions and Future No Project Scenario” report dated February 2018.

It only details the opening date of freeways, not the endless procession of widening projects.

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In the case of the state of Victoria, the current favourite way to get finance is via Public Private Partnerships: the government contracts a private consortium to build a piece of infrastructure, then pays them an exorbitant sum over a defined period to operate the facility, before it finally gets handed back to the taxpayer at the end of the term. The best known examples in Melbourne are the CityLink and Eastlink tollways – the desalination plant and the Royal Children’s Hospital are others.

The government says Public Private Partnerships work out cheaper for the taxpayer in the long run, and push the risk onto the private sector – but in reality we end up with socialised losses and privatised profits – greedy bankers making off with the loot when they succeed, and when they fail they sue the government claiming they were misled. In the case of the state of Victoria, we are currently paying a equivalent interest rate of 10 per cent to service PPPs, when the government could borrow money directly for just 3.5 per cent. (see this piece by The Age columnist Kenneth Davidson)

So how the governments fund infrastructure in the old days? When I was looking a newspaper advertising from the early 1980s I found the answer – government bonds. The way they work is simple: an investor loans money to the government, who in return receives a regular stream of interest over the term of the bond, and once the term is up, the investor gets their money back.

So what parts of the government issued bonds?

Telecom Australia was one, with their loans being backed by the Commonwealth Government. This was the “The Telecom Phone Loan” No. 17 from 1982 – as for what Telecom Australia intended to do with the money? They probably installed the now clapped out copper wires Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition wants to reuse for their FTTN version of the National Broadband Network!

Another government-owned utility to issue bonds was the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. Responsible for the electricity supply to almost all of Victoria (more about the sole exception), back in the early 1980s the SECV was in the middle of building the massive Loy Yang power station and open cut brown coal mine in the Latrobe Valley.

The other big state-owned energy utility was the Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria – and they were no stranger to selling government backed debt to the public. With natural gas connected to metropolitan Melbourne by the early 1970s, by the time of their 1983 bond issue they were probably in need of funds to extend their gas pipelines to the smaller regional centres.

Another pillar of Melbourne before the changes of the Kennett years was the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW). Responsible for water supply and sewers in the city, as well as town planning, management of parkland and other open space, maintenance of metropolitan highways and bridges, and foreshore protection and improvements – the board was another government authority that needed big money to fund capital works.

Victoria wasn’t the only state to have state owned agencies issue bonds: over in Tasmania the Hydro-Electric Commission also ran adverts to gain investors. Given the early 1980s timing, the loan money was probably intended for the Franklin River Dam!

And if you throught public utilities were the only ones to offer loans to the public, the Australian National Railway Commission advertised their Public Loan No. 4 in 1981. Responsible for operating the railways lines inside South Australia, as well as over to Western Australian and the Northern Territory, they probably spent the money on their new fleet of BL class diesel-electric locomotives which were delivered a few years later.

However, I’ve saved the most interesting public loan advertisement for last – that of the Melbourne Underground Rail Loop Authority (MURLA). Established by the government to fund and build what is now known as the City Loop, in 1978-79 it decided to raise $30 million in funds through bond sales to the public, raised further money in the same way in the years to follow.

“Leaving your mark on Melbourne forever” – can you imagine today being able to invest your money in the infrastructure that Melbourne needs, and get paid handsomely for doing so?

Unfortunately it no longer works that way – the proposed Melbourne Metro tunnel is using $3 billion in funding committed by the Gillard government, but it is contingent on $3 billion from an unwilling state government, and another $3 billion via another sketchy Public Private Partnership.

Footnote

If you think interest rates of 10 to 15 per cent are high, you probably didn’t have had a home loan during the 1980s. Back then, high interest rates were the norm.

Further reading

• Need roads and rail? Then borrow and build by The Age economic editor Tim Colebatch
• Hospital PPPs show no signs of good health by Kenneth Davidson, The Age

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