mobiltown

I don't know if I ever showed you this picture I took about 50 years ago of Mobiltown station. I remember going there to see it because it was in the Gregory's (street directory) and I was just intrigued. I have mentioned this to you previously but I don't think you have seen the picture. So, what this tells me, piecing it together like Guy Pearce in Memento, is that I was the kind of kid who was entirely happy to wander out into the world on my own and take trains to obscure industrial parts of Melbourne, and I had film in the camera and I got there and I was like, 'I have to record this place, no-one will ever believe me otherwise', and did so, and kept the photograph, loose, for almost half a century. I found it a few days ago and I don't know that there's really any point in keeping it for anything, although I might consider putting it on Wikipedia. 

Although there is one thing I do legitimately remember. As I told you in 2010, I really did get surrounded by bikies on the station platform, or rather, they rode their bikes around me but they didn't stop or say anything to me. I guess they were riding in a group down Kororoit Creek Road and they saw a kid on the station platform and decided amongst themselves but wordlessly to terrorise him a bit so it was just kind of, mildly threatening behaviour but I guess they didn't know where to take it. Then they left, and after a while a train came, I got on it and went back to the city and then I suppose I went home. 

It was a nothing station. It didn't have any buildings on it or anything. It was just, as you see, an asphalt platform (on the left you can see one fuel storage structure, I don't know what they're called). It's weird that the train even stopped there every time. I have tended to assume, there being no date on the photograph, that it was 1978 that I went there, but I can't be certain about that. That date is just arrived at through knowing that 12 (1977) is too young for me to be travelling around by myself and by 14 (1979) I just wasn't so into this kind of foray. The Wikipedia entry I linked to above mentions that VicRail or whomsoever was responsible for this, had expressed its intention to close the station down in 1977, which I don't remember being aware of when I went there but it's possible. If there had been an announcement in the newspaper, I probably would have seen it. As far as I can tell, there was really only one mention of Mobiltown in any article in the Age in the 1970s, and it was a non sequitur in this article about people who'd been relocated from Darwin to the Wiltona hostel after Cyclone Tracey: 

The article is by John Larkin and without any further information I can only assume that this 'Mobiltown?' is a call for common sense along the lines of 'There's a Mobiltown!? Wtf is Mobiltown?'* 

My sense is not that I went there because I thought 'I have to record Mobiltown station quickly because they're about to close it!' more like, 'I have to experience what on earth exists at Mobiltown station because my imagination just doesn't stretch to comprehending what on earth could possibly be there.' 

I note that the photograph has a weird, I'm going to call it a stain, on it, that looks a little bit like a sack tied with a drawstring. Pretty sure that is something on the surface of the print, not part of the image captured by the camera. I cannot imagine what might have made that stain but I guess it could be any one of a massive range of things, as I said, this photograph has been floating around, loose, in my stuff, for many decades. It's extraordinary it still exists, espectially considering what doesn't, anymore. There are a few surface abrasions on it. Down the bottom right hand corner, there is a bit of glare from me taking a photograph of the photograph with my phone a few days ago. 

If I took more than one photograph, I don't seem to have any others anywhere, but then I would have said I didn't have any at all before I came across this one. 

*John Larkin, '"Little Darwin" of the south' Melbourne Age 12 February 1975 p. 9

angry of east malvern

Starting a new project, or trying to, I am beginning by looking for new angles on the broader story of the Metropolitan Town Planning Commission by prodding around the edges. In this case the machinations and protestations of the East Malvern Ratepayers' Association in the early 1930s. Long story short, the state government passed a bill in the mid-1920s to extend the railway line from Darling to Glen Waverley, but the funding was to come in part from the local landholders, who would pay a tax/levy/whatever on their land under the assumption that their property would increase greatly in value with the new railway line. 

In the abstract it kind of makes sense, but of course by the time shit got real in the early 1930s, many people who were arguably land-rich had often become really cash-poor.* So there was major unhappiness about the situation and the people of East Malvern got really radicalised over it all. 

I was originally interested because of the Metropolitan Town Planning Commission's plan for the area (and at the moment, I still can't entirely see where the connection is between the plan and the funding strategy, but I am pretty sure there is one) but I'm also always really interested when ordinary 'decent' people get up in arms about something attacking their solid view of the world, so the EMRA's papers really grabbed me. Though for now, my main interest is the way people were a hundred years ago when their photo was being taken. It wasn't 'I'm part of the delegation to see Stanley Argyle, got to look serious and determined' it was 'gosh, I'm having my picture taken! What larks!' 

 

The good old days! Even if you were being screwed by the government for a railway you never wanted (but by the way which would ultimately make your property worth a lot more and indeed make your region a middle-class wonderland) still everyone you knew was white and protestant (presumably) and you all wore hats. 

*Probably there were also a lot of people who would have resisted the whole idea even if it hadn't been the Great Depression, but who knows.