My suburb's gated enclave is known as the Toorak of the West. It wants to secede
I was an RAAF baby. You don't have to feel sorry for me, but it did kinda suck. By decree, RAAF families got bounced around the country every few years with the carefree malevolence of a Bond villain stroking his cat, ignorant of a 10-year-old introvert's terror at once again having to fit into a new friend group.
I saw my fair share of different states, schools and RAAF bases: Sale, Canberra, Richmond (NSW), Laverton and Point Cook. The last, built in 1912, and Australia's very first Air Force base, was by far my favourite and eventually became my home suburb.
Every RAAF base is its own little gated fiefdom, a self-sufficient universe manned by soldiers, where outsiders aren't allowed in. At that time in 1996, the population of Point Cook was 580, of which 552 were at the airbase. My life was sealed-in but had a vibe of plenty – shops, cinemas and swimming pools merged with the dozens of picture-book homes. Dad remarried there in the local church, while my stepdad later worked at the RAAF Museum. Family fringe benefits for this starry-eyed 10-year-old once included an interstate ride in a Hercules C-130 military transport plane.
But a radical change came to those sleepy grasslands that were once home to the Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation. The telltale rumble of air traffic became less frequent, replaced by the sounds of nail guns and other power tools, as budget house-and-land deals birthed concrete slabs and their protruding wooden ribs, replicating across the fields, from the freeway to the sea.
Back when a housing deposit wasn't equal to the GDP of a small nation, first homebuyers came in their droves to the affordable bayside suburb just off the Princes Freeway, about 22 kilometres south-west of the CBD.
Like some emirate that had struck oil, Point Cook's population exploded from little more than nought to 66,781 at the 2021 census, making it Australia's biggest suburb by population. It's predicted to keep growing to about 82,000 by 2040. But not all of Point Cook is egalitarian.
Within the megasuburb lies Sanctuary Lakes, a manicured enclave with aristocratic airs that the blue-collar Werribians call the 'Toorak of the West'. It has twice been knocked back by Wyndham council in its attempts to become an official suburb, a status surely befitting its waterside mansions and long, winding fairways. Built around a 60-hectare man-made lake (Melbourne's largest) and a Greg Norman-designed 18-hole private golf course, the commercial housing estate was a gleaming Valhalla of abundance to this starry-eyed teen.
So when the opportunity arose years later for a mate and I to score a prized waterfront rental on one of Sanctuary Lakes' gated man-made islands (conveniently linked to land by a road bridge), we jumped at the opportunity – even though neither of us had a job.
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