Stand still and marvel at the changes
When you live and work in a city day after day, change just creeps up on you. An industrial wasteland becomes a boarded up work site, cranes toil, construction workers place pieces of steel, concrete and glass, and then one day the scaffolding and hoardings are removed and a new office building, or shopping centre, or casino, or apartment complex is revealed.
We spent some time on the weekend in the new South Wharf area of inner Melbourne. It’s where the Polly Woodside museum was (the Polly Woodside has survived, albeit somewhat landlocked…see the pic below).
From the South Wharf looking upstream the Yarra River, we were startled to realise how much of what we saw was not there when we first moved to Melbourne almost twenty years ago. Almost all the development on the right side of the river in the cityscape photo is new. It was a light-industrial area way back then (old-time Melburnians may recall the lolly factory which was there).
All the development in the foreground to the left is new…apartments lining the riverbank, but as yet lacking any substantial infrastructure or life. Walking through there on a Saturday afternoon we were reminded of a time we walked through the Canary Wharf area of London in the mid-1990s on a weekend. It had a similar kind of atmosphere.
What you can’t see in the photo (as it is off to the left) is the new Docklands development with Whatever-Sponsor-Has-Naming-Rights-Now Stadium, shops, restaurants, apartments. Again, on an area which was near to derelict when we arrived here.
I don’t know if Melbourne is unusual in the amount of development that has occured in the past 20 years, but if you’d been transported 20 years ahead of time back in 1989, I doubt you’d recognise the place.
But when change occurs around you, it just kind of grows on you.
