Exploring my own city: Westgate Park by The Resident Judge of Port Phillip
I hate driving over the Westgate Bridge. It’s a real white-knuckle drive, what with the steep drop over the sides and all the B-doubles thundering past.
But if I’m a passenger, that’s a different matter. I always look down at the park below and think that I must visit it one day- and today, on a warm, still Anzac Day- I did.
The lake, a former sand mine, turns a brilliant pink at the end of summer, but there was no colour in it today.
There were no noisy miners, and so there was lots of bird life: wrens, honeyeaters, wattlebirds, mudlarks, magpies. It’s hard to believe that it was ever the blighted place it was forty years ago. The Age described it in 1979 as In 1979, the Age described the land seen from the newly opened bridge as ‘scrofulous scenery indeed … dead water, swamp, sick factories, dead wood, haze, gasping barges, wretched refineries, wheezing chimneys, dead grass, institutional putrefaction’. It’s not like that now.
There’s been lots of hard work done here by the Friends of Westgate Park since 1999 – a real gift to the people of Melbourne.
Site of Westgate Park 1984 Weston Langford
You can read more about Westgate Park here.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip
Apr 25 , 2022
