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Alamora, Sayers and what lies beneath …

Tarneit’s Sayers Road, home to Villawood Properties’ Alamora, was Nissen huts, quail-shooting, roadside eucalypts, wire fences and little else a few years back. Different now.

Mount Cottrell was to the north, beyond Cowie’s Hill and its brace of MMBW water tanks. The Spring Plains swimming hole was to the west across the Werribee River carving its way across the plains from Korweinguboora up near Daylesford down to Port Phillip.

The river was choked with fallen trunks, victims of what locals knew to be Victoria’s fastest river when in flood. The same wisdom contended that Bungee’s Hole, downstream in Werribee proper, was bottomless.

Sayers Road was designer-made for my rock bandmates as we happily plied our Santana and Doobie Brothers decibels across the wide-open spaces, rousing approbation from nothing more than the local mudlarks offended by thundering old valve amps. Raucous parties upset no-one.

Tarneit and its neighbouring Truganina were tough, rocky, grazing runs. Well out of town and aligned with Melton as much as Werribee, what little community infrastructure there once was was long gone even then – the old Trug township, post offices, old timber houses and bluestone homesteads, the odd hall and even school.

Remiremont                                                            Chaffey brothers George and William 

Some ruins remained, and still do, my ancestral home ‘Remiremont’ for one – a bluestone double-storey pared back to one for safety reasons but burned out in the 1969 fires. My grandmother grew up there, my mum stayed there with her uncle/aunty in the 1930s and ’40s and travelled to church not in Werribee or Melton but Yarraville.

For kids back in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, Werribee stopped at Shaws Road. Tarneit was somewhere out on the dusty Never-Never. But we rode out to explore the farmyards behind the CSIRO and the cemetery along Railway Avenue. Long before Glen Orden/Birdsville or Werribee Plaza existed, let alone Orchard Place, the first of Villawood Properties’ many Wyndham communities.

Cobbledicks Ford                                                Tarneit Primary School

We pedalled all the way out through Tarneit to Cobbledicks Ford, a hard trundle up Derrimut to Dohertys Road then down Dukelows and a precipitous grassy hill to the river. You could make out the Eynesbury stand of endangered grey box eucalypts across the river from the top of Dukelows. The Eynesbury old station’s since been transformed into an urban outpost south of Melton, south of Melton South and finally south of Exford. Urban sprawl will catch it soon enough.

But while Tarneit and Trug seemed no-man’s land, there are old and familiar names tied to it – Chirnside, Shanahan, Hogan, Leake, Campbell, Davis, Lee, Lawler – and there’s a history.

For one, there’s the 1888 Chaffey’s Channel culvert, pump, sluice gate – west of Sewells Road and thought to be to be the first irrigation scheme built in the area and the first crack at the game by the pioneering Chaffey Brothers. Didn’t fly, however, due to pumping and servicing problems and was moved to the Glen Devon Stud and what is now the Riverbend Historical Park.

The North Base Stone at 1245 Sayers Road is of State significance. It was laid in the 1860s by the Geodetic Survey of Victoria to facilitate the survey process used to subdivide land during the early days Victoria. Not much to look at but swags of map would be shot without it.

Wattle Park on nearby Sewell’s Road, was owned by the Chirnsides and leased to tenant farmers.  The Chaffeys efforts ran through it.

John Batman                                        Andrew Chirnside

The Werribee River’s been important forever, of course, as border, water and food source for Aboriginal clans of three language groups – the Marpeang bulluk, Kurung jang balluk and Yalukit willam. As a young Werribee reporter I recall covering Indigenous remains unearthed along the river by a mining operator.

In the late 1830s and 1840s, the Werribee River was the scene of conflict between Aborigines and the European colonisers. The squatter Charles Franks and a shepherd were speared to death near Mount Cottrell in July 1836. This resulted in the Mount Cottrell massacre – a punitive party led by John Batman which came upon a large party of Aborigines and indiscriminately shot and killed at least 10. There are accounts of arsenic laced flour being given to local aborigines.

Today, the river waters the Werribee South market gardens, is popular with anglers and bushwalkers and provides a rich flora and fauna habitat.

Alamora’s part in the reshaping of Sayers Road draws people to an area where its background is little known and little appreciated but where it remains a vital player in the lives of its residents in terms of location, geography, environment and natural resources.

  • Noel Murphy is Villawood Properties’ PR & communications manager

Three decades of innovative, creative design

Now here’s an interesting project: 70-plus stories on what it takes to build some pretty special new towns, suburbs and communities.

Think planners, designers, engineers, artists, landowners, bankers, investors, clubs and community groups, sales crews, marketers, maintenance crews, apiarists, traditional owners, mums, dads, kids …

Think also creativity, innovation, experience and a good bit of commonsense nous. Villawood Properties has the lot in spades.

This book, 30: Fun, Happy, Communities, marks three decades since Villawood’s beginnings in Bendigo. Over those years, it’s expanded across Victoria, Melbourne, NSW and Queensland.

All up, it’s 164 pages showing a vibrant developer who’s about creating lifestyle and community, not just blocks and houses. A few features:

. A block donated to the national forest system for every block they sell;

. A huge amount of support to community groups, including a house-and-land every year to the Good Friday Appeal;

. Getting people together through activities, facilities and under-the-bonnet design detail;

. Folko Kooper’s extraordinary artwork;

. Getting kids outside for healthy, adventurous childhoods in great parks and playgrounds;

. Sustainability with 70% water and 60% non-renewables cuts.

LINK: https://villawoodproperties.com.au/

 

New home, new life, new hope

It was once the cradle of civilisation. These days, there’s little that’s very civilised about the country that hounded Milad Butrus and his family from their home.

Bakhdida, in northern Iraq, became simply too dangerous for this Christian family, a Catholic family, and they fled to Jordan in 2014.

It was a harrowing flight to safety marked by hellish traffic jams in a baking desert, feverish passport negotiations with Baghdad bureaucrats, three businesses and a handsome double-story home left behind, friends, family too …

The alternative presented by Islamic State forces, who had been rocketing Milad’s Bakhdida home town for days, with shells landing as close as 500 metres away, was impossible.

“It was just like Baghdad, where most Christians left — some were killed, some were kidnapped, other had their properties stolen,” Milad says.

“I heard the same story over and over. They came in Hummer cars, they’d say ‘You’re Christian, sign these papers signing over your home or we’ll kill your son’.

“It happened with so many families, and it wasn’t only Islamic State, it was people from the government, the Iraqi army.”

Milad reveals two photographs on his phone that point all too vividly to the fear, anguish and horror of living in the shadow of IS.

The first is of a priest, dressed in brightly coloured robes, in his coffin. It’s Milad’s cousin. He was shot by IS while at Mass, trying to close the church doors against the terrorist intruders.

“They killed between 45 and 50 people in the church that day, some of them as young as two years old,” Milad says, raising his phone to show the second photo, of the church’s appallingly bloodstained and shattered interior.

Milad’s wife, Maherah, nods in agreement as he describes the anxiety of fleeing Iraq, hunkering down in Jordan for close to two years while seeking refugee status to just about anywhere that would take them.

They had their lives, their young children Neamah and Karam, now 11 and six, and they had prayers and hopes.

They’d left behind an IT services and internet provider business, a travel agency and a new furniture store. Their home was shelled but not obliterated. Milad’s father’s home was obliterated. Milad ponders whether he might be sell what’s left of his but he’s not sure if he can.

Fast forward five years and the Butrus family is resident in Geelong, infinitely safer than where they once called home. Geelong was their first stop after arriving at Melbourne Airport. They’re still pinching themselves about living in Australia.

Milad is working in IT at GHD, Maherah is studying English at The Gordon, the kids are lapping up school at Bell Park’s Holy Family Primary.

And they’ve just bought up at Villawood Properties’ new Wandana community between Highton and Ceres, where they’re planning to build soon and consolidate their new life in Australia.

Milad and Maherah grin shyly as they admit they’re even contemplating more kids.

Talk about turning your lives about.

Bioplanters and new ways with waterways

DEALING with the water run-off from a 200-lot hillside residential estate at Wandana is an engineering challenge.

Melbourne environmental engineering company Biofilta, whose Geelong projects have included Leopold’s Gateway Plaza and several indoor feature gardens at GMHBA Stadium, has taken the challenge by designing an integrated system involving water harvest, storage and treatment.

Biofilta has been involved in innovative stormwater harvesting and wetland projects across Melbourne, but the Wandana project, the Villawood Properties estate above Highton overlooking the Geelong Ring Road, presented a new level of complexity.

“There’s nothing as compact and as highly engineered as this one,” Biofilta chief executive Marc Noyce said.

“Our system works really well where there are tricky sites, steep slopes, areas where you can’t get a wetland in.”

He said the integrated system that has been installed includes 200 cubic metres of underground flood detention storage, gross pollutant capture, and a 50sq m bio-planter to biologically treat all the low flows from its steep upstream catchment.

“It also includes a separate tank holding 20,000 litres of filtered water to recirculate in hot weather to keep the plants alive without the need to use potable water,” he said.

The system provides flood protection, stormwater treatment and sustainable natural treatment in a compact footprint.

The bio-planter is a lush affair, featuring local coastal plants and sand dune plants adapted to wet and dry conditions. Two lots of microbes in the planter effectively treat the water.

“Water goes in at the top, it looks like dirty dishwater and it has the heavy metal nasties,” Mr Noyce said.

“It stops on top, soluble pollutants soak through one set of aerobic bacteria, and they really transform the pollutants. That flows to the bottom, where there’s no oxygen — that promotes anaerobic bacteria that does another polishing job of the pollutants.”

By pollutants, think everyday materials such as metal dust from roads, oil from cars, rooftop sediments, brake dust and the like — things that would eventually pose problems elsewhere.

Villawood was the first Victorian developer to receive UDIA EnviroDevelopment accreditation and is recognised for its high level of conservation and ecosystems and dedication to saving water and energy.

Chief executive Rory Costelloe said Villawood was always striving to investigate and implement any means of saving water and energy.

LINK: http://regionalnews.smedia.com.au/geelongadvertiser/default.aspx?publication=NCGA

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