Bordered by market gardens and a giant sewerage farm, the former farm town of Werribee is experiencing irresistible population growth.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Kris Coventry peers down the sheer side of a concrete canal at a powerful stream of murky grey water below.We are at the point where approximately half of the outflow from Melbourne’s toilets, taps and showers emerges from underground, at the northern edge of the Western Treatment Plant in Werribee.
Kris Coventry, acting head of the Western Treatment Plant, stands above the canal where half of Melbourne’s sewage flows.For 109 years, the plant used a method called land filtration to treat Melbourne’s sewage: its open paddocks were flooded with a thick layer of raw sewage that dried out and seeped into the soil over several days. Sheep and cattle then grazed on the paddocks, while the effluent flowed through a series of lagoons and eventually drained into Port Phillip Bay.
“It got rid of a lot of pathogens, it got rid of a lot of contaminants, but it certainly didn’t get rid of the smell.”Just a few hundred metres north of the canal, hundreds of houses are being built in one of Werribee’s newest housing estates. But Mason, who is managing director of one of the largest farming businesses in Werribee South, says the green wedge is no match for Werribee’s soaring urban population, which is creeping into farmers’ turf in troubling ways.
“This would be the greatest stand of river red gum riparian forest in Melbourne,” Forrester says proudly. Heather Marcus moved into a Victorian-era bungalow with a large and leafy backyard and a view of the river on Watton Street, in Werribee’s centre, in 1970.Heather Marcus lives in the last freestanding house on Watton Street, in downtown Werribee.Werribee was more country town than suburb when she arrived. Italian farmers would meet in the main street and drink coffee in the afternoon.
There is no heritage overlay on the property, which is zoned inside Werribee’s central activity centre.“I can’t be built out here.”late last year to curb unchecked housing development on the urban fringe and build taller and denser housing in established parts of the city, such as central Werribee.
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