When Indian-born designer Bharath Chellayya and his family of four moved from Sydney to Melbourne three years ago, they settled in the outer western suburb of Manor Lakes, in an estate so new, many of its streets couldn’t be found on Google Maps.
At the time Chellayya, who had spent his first seven years in Australia living near Parramatta, knew virtually nothing about Melbourne’s west, beyond what he had gleaned from real estate searches.
“I never came to the western suburbs before I bought this property,” he says from the modern two-storey house 33 kilometres south-west of Melbourne’s CBD he shares with his wife, Gisha, and their two daughters, Anushka and Akansha. “I bought here because it was a bit cheaper for me … I thought, let’s move to the western suburbs and see if it works.”
Since moving cities, Chellayya has learnt that he has joined Australia’s largest Indian diaspora. Today, nine in every 100 residents in the western suburbs are Indian-born.
He has learnt that the roads in his suburb are horribly congested, and the diesel trains which service it are overcrowded and infrequent.
But the shift to Melbourne’s west has mostly paid off for the Chellayya family. Next year, they will move to a larger home in the neighbouring suburb of Mambourin, where the housing estates are even newer and further from the city.
In their small way, Chellayya’s family personifies the story of Melbourne’s extraordinary growth in the 21st century, and how that growth has tilted Melbourne’s axis from east to west.
In this series, The Age explores why the west has become the nation’s fastest-growing region and how life there may change in a decade as the number of homes more than doubles in some suburbs.
We examine what makes it the place to be – proximity to the CBD, affordability, multicultural communities and hidden pockets of nature – and the challenges holding it back from its full potential: pollution, lack of public transport, and the services necessary to support housing growth.
Population boom
Melbourne’s population has grown by a third since the turn of the millennium, exploding from a city of 3.5 million to 5.2 million people.
The west has absorbed far more of that growth than any other area of the city, surging at twice the rate of the east. Between 2001 and 2023, Melbourne’s west leapt ahead of the outer east and the south-east to become the most populous part of the city, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
“I don’t think people yet grasp just how big this region is and how rapidly it’s growing,” says Peter Dawkins, who was vice chancellor of Victoria University, the west’s only university, between 2011 and 2020.
The growth will intensify. The Labor government this year heaped some of the state’s highest housing targets on western municipalities as part of its ambition to build 800,000 homes in Victoria over the next 10 years.
The number of homes in Melton will grow by 190 per cent, Maribyrnong by 114 per cent and Wyndham by 110 per cent.
Five years ago, there were plans that Mambourin, one of Melbourne’s newest suburbs built on a greenfield site eight kilometres west of Werribee, would be a 20-minute city. But the promise of residents’ everyday needs being met within a short walk, ride or public transport trip has been broken.
“It’s crazy, you should have seen kids walking for kilometres to catch a bus. They’re paying $1 million for a house, paying all their taxes and then living like [in] a third-world country,” western suburbs bus campaigner Senthill Sundaram says.
Most residents of the western suburbs live in family groups. According to the 2021 census, couples with children make up 52.1 per cent of the western suburbs’ population, compared to 45.5 per cent in Victoria.
RMIT urban planning professor Andrew Butt says that throughout the 21st century, Melbourne’s demographic (population) centre has been moving westwards, but the region hasn’t seen the investment in infrastructure and services to match the growth.
“That’s what worries me most,” Butt says.
Melton and Wyndham are still serviced by diesel trains. The City of Melton has one library for every 28,000 young people, compared to one for every 3000 in inner Melbourne. The City of Wyndham has one aquatic centre for every 48,000 young people, compared to every 5000 in inner Melbourne.
Melbourne’s west, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, is bounded by the Maribyrnong River and Port Phillip Bay. It stretches from inner-city Footscray, through gentrifying Newport and Maribyrnong, bayside Williamstown and Altona, established communities of Sunshine and St Albans and out to the greenfield estates of Melton and Wyndham.
In 2001, the west had 453,290 residents, almost 100,000 fewer than the south-east.
Since then, its population has more than doubled. By last year, the west was home to 922,756 people, overtaking the south-east’s 915,734 residents.
According to .id’s forecasts, by 2046, it will be home to 1.47 million people, about the population of today’s Adelaide.
It’s an extraordinary trajectory for a region that was described in 1954 by the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works’ first planning scheme as “unpopular … for living purposes”.
The board’s report noted “the marked and increasing preference over the past 50 years for living in the eastern, south-eastern and southern suburbs and the relative unpopularity of the western suburbs”, and recommended planners continue to look east for residential development.
“There’s a whole range of historical [and] environmental reasons why Melbourne grew to the east and south-east to start with,” urban economist Terry Rawnsley says.
Bert Boere has lived in the same house in Brooklyn since 1956.Credit: Justin McManus
“There was better rainfall in the east. The soils were better. There was more access to fresh water … The first generation of train lines and tram lines went into the east … And then the west was the place we put the abattoirs, the heavy industry, the petrochemical plants.”
Bert Boere, 78, is well aware of the west’s reputation, but this doesn’t marry with his experience.
He’s lived in the same house in Brooklyn since 1956, long enough to remember when the Point Cook residential estate of Sanctuary Lakes was still the Cheetham Saltworks, where he would ride his bike.
And at the quarry where Altona Gate shopping centre now stands, Boere would skim stones over pools of water and watch older kids try to catch ducks with homemade slingshots.
He lived on a dirt road with paddocks at the end of his street.
“It was like a country town,” he says. “There weren’t many people or much traffic to worry about.”
As The Age’s series reports, Brooklyn is just 14 kilometres from the CBD, but is now Melbourne’s most polluted suburb. Boere says there were always odour issues from abattoirs, but the dust and truck fumes became a problem as the west continued to grow.
Melbourne’s boom is at its most intense further out. Melton and Bacchus Marsh grew by 22 per cent, or 40,450 people, between 2019 and 2023. Wyndham grew 18 per cent, or 50,500 people in that time.
Rawnsley says there is a simple calculus to why Melbourne’s outer west is growing faster than the rest of the city.
“The greenfields are sitting there, and the housing can get rolled out without any worries from NIMBY complaints or challenges around what planning allows. It’s affordable,” he says.
As for more established suburbs like the gentrifying Sunshine, a three-bedroom house has a median price of $800,000. In the east’s Camberwell, which is the same distance from the CBD, families pay more than $2 million.
A political heartland under threat
LeadWest, an advocacy alliance of Melbourne’s five western councils, has long argued that the region has been neglected by successive state and federal governments.
The alliance wants more funding for public transport and the cycling network, investment in Airport Rail and supports making Sunshine a jobs and housing hub. It is asking for delivery of the East Werribee business precinct and key freight projects to create better links from the Port of Melbourne.
Each of these projects, planned for many years, are yet to materialise. The alliance is calling on the Victorian government to give western projects the same priority as the $35.4 billion section of the Suburban Rail Loop being built in the city’s east.
Peter Dawkins is now the chair of the West of Melbourne Economic Development Alliance (WoMEDA), a group pushing for greater economic development.
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Analysis for WoMEDA, by Victoria University’s Centre of Policy Studies, has found that as the west has grown, it has emerged as one of the powerhouses of Melbourne’s economy, with a workforce participation rate exceeded only by residents of Melbourne’s CBD and inner south.
“It’s a bit of a hidden secret … the west has got this traditional view of being the poorer region, but it’s amazing how many qualified workers there are available now in that professional, scientific and technical services area,” Dawkins says.
This category of employment generally includes people who are highly educated and earn above-average wages, the report said.
But it also noted that this category of jobs was hard to find in the west. Every day, 236,000 workers – roughly half of the area’s total workforce – travel elsewhere for work, mostly to the CBD.
Dawkins warns that until policymakers and industry leaders build local job opportunities, the west’s potential will be hamstrung.
There are 11 state seats in Melbourne’s west and five federal seats. The ALP holds all of them in its decades-long heartland.
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But among those safe seats, Labor suffered its largest swings at the state and federal elections in 2022.
There were swings against Labor in four federal seats in the west. The biggest anti-Labor swing – 4.27 per cent to the Liberal Party – was in the outer-western seat of Gorton, based around Melton.
Kos Samaras, a director with polling and research company RedBridge and former deputy secretary of the Victorian Labor Party, says newer residents in the west are less wedded to Labor than older generations.
“If you were to look at where would be the lower-income, working-class constituency that starts to vote Liberal, it will be there.”
Samaras predicts that Labor will keep its grip on the west for perhaps two more election cycles. “You have vast new communities … and if you’re not taking care of them, they’re going to dump you.”
Gurpreet Verma is the vice president of Rockbank’s Sri Durga, Australia’s largest Hindu temple with a capacity of about 4000 people.
“Now, every suburb you see near the temple, the land is gone fast,” Verma says.
Indian migrants represent an increasingly powerful voter bloc and Verma says they would vote for whoever best supported their needs: wider roads, faster trains, better education.
“Our community would like to see growth in infrastructure keeping pace with the population,” he says.
Gurpreet Verma (right) with a Hindu priest at the Sri Durga temple in Rockbank.Credit: Jason South
Across Melton, Bacchus Marsh and Wyndham, 57 per cent of residents who travelled to work on the day of the 2021 census had a journey of more than 20 kilometres, compared to 31 per cent across all Melbourne areas.
Many residents are forced to drive on those daily trips, and 80 per cent of families have two or more cars.
More people will be able to travel on the Melton railway line from 2028, under a $650 million upgrade.
Melton Mayor Steve Abboushi is positive about the upgrades, but says they should be the first steps towards delivering electrified Metro services.
“We’re in a very desperate situation where we need to see more investment as we continue to grow.”
David Southwick, the Victorian Liberals’ infrastructure spokesman and Caulfield MP, has strong family ties to the west: his father ran a manufacturing business in Laverton and was a councillor at Werribee Shire in the ’70s. Southwick says campaigning in the west has begun.
“There’s no question now that we’re hearing a lot more enthusiasm for us to put up good candidates and run hard.”
Victorian Labor says it has invested billions of dollars in Melbourne’s west since coming to office in 2015.
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It has opened 35 new government schools in the west, and upgraded 217 schools, a government spokesperson says. It has opened a new hospital in Sunshine, and is building new hospitals in Footscray and Melton.
Every level crossing on the Werribee and Melton lines is being removed, and the West Gate Tunnel and Metro Tunnel are both expected to open next year.
With a byelection looming in Werribee following the departure of long-time local member and treasurer Tim Pallas, Labor will soon find out if voters will reward or punish the government for its treatment of the western suburbs.
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