Back before Google Maps, the 2002 edition of the Melway street directory contained a hopeful dotted red line running through a park in Alphington and tracking towards the Yarra River. In a tiny font beside it were the words “Proposed Footbridge”.
Alphington resident James Thyer noticed that cartographic promise of a new walking and cycling path along the river that could include an off-ramp to his suburb. “When I saw it in the Melway, I thought, ‘That’s a really good idea,’” he said this week.
When Thyer dug into it, he discovered the plan had been shelved years earlier. That dotted line, though, lit a fuse. Dozens of other locals had first floated the path back in 1989. “I thought, well, people have been thinking about it,” Thyer said.
What followed would stretch across more than two decades of Thyer’s life, before finally stirring into action this week, when work began on the final “missing link” of this $27 million pathway.
Over that same period, I’ve been an intermittent observer of this protracted project. The year Thyer was studying his street directory, I began my first newspaper job, at the now-defunct Melbourne Times, which covered the area.
Along with riding a bike to work, I’d once been a committed golfer, and I was interested in how cities decide who gets use of our public spaces. It would all soon collide in a turf war over a riverbank.
Back then, where Darebin Creek meets the Yarra in Alphington was not today’s urban idyll. The creek was a victim of benign neglect, its banks choked with weeds. It was also a reliable source of lost golf balls. As a teenager in the late 1980s, I was a member at Alphington’s Latrobe Golf Club and exploited the creek enthusiastically – practice balls were expensive, and I sourced hundreds from its waters.
Where I saw a graveyard for wayward shots, Thyer and a band of cycling activists saw a vital transport artery waiting to be unblocked.
Their plan aimed to link the Darebin Creek trail to the other side of the Yarra, closing a two-kilometre gap in the city’s bike network. Success required five bridges and a ribbon of concrete through fiercely contested land. Advocacy group Bicycle Network provided the campaign’s backbone, and today, chief executive Alison McCormack says connecting the trails was one of the group’s “toughest, and sweetest, victories”. It also required the state government to stare down a coalition of opponents: Alphington Grammar, Latrobe Golf Club and the competing interests of three councils.
The golf club, which feared the liability of missiles launched at hundreds of kilometres an hour finding cyclists rather than fairways, came around by 2008. Alphington Grammar had also become co-operative, selling the state its creek frontage in exchange for secure fencing.
Across the Yarra in Kew, residents and Boroondara Council remained fiercely opposed. The project featured a new bridge into Kew, where residents warned of a “bicycle commuter freeway”, involved 63 trees being lost, and foresaw native wildlife retreating before a lycra onslaught.
In 2009, the state planning tribunal approved the project. But planners, unable to reach a deal with the school or golf club, surrendered the connection into Alphington – the link that had sparked the campaign.
Thyer remembers grasping what had happened. “I said, ‘Where’s the connection to Alphington?’ And the guy from Parks Victoria just had this sheepish look on his face.” He and others decided to support getting the main path built. “Then we’d come back for more.”
Land acquisition disputes stalled progress until 2016, when a fed-up Andrews government deployed a nuclear option – the Major Transport Projects Facilitation Act, legislation designed for multibillion-dollar roads and railways – to force the project through.
When the $18 million Darebin-Yarra Trail finally opened in 2018, it was magnificent infrastructure. But Alphington residents were locked out. A high fence along the trail’s boundary quickly acquired a nickname: the Great Wall of Alphington.
So the lobbying continued, gaining momentum when late Labor MP Fiona Richardson extracted a government commitment to build the Alphington connection, a push continued by current Labor MP Kat Theophanous.
Even then, things faltered. A flyover bridge approved in 2022 was abandoned for a scaled-back path that would take four more years and another $9 million to deliver.
As a child, Yarra councillor Sophie Wade attended Alphington Primary School and used to cross the creek before the “Great Wall” went up. The Greens member remains incredulous that such a well-funded project resulted in worse connectivity for some, and took so many years to finish. “It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. But we’ll all be glad to see it completed,” she said.
Latrobe Golf Club declined to comment this week. Its general manager would only say that the project was a “fait accompli”. The state government declined to disclose what it had paid Latrobe for the land, and while club annual reports show a $438,219 payment in 2021, it’s not clear if that was the only money paid.
On Friday, 37 years after Alphington residents first asked for a path linking their neighbourhood to the other side of the Yarra, the diggers finally moved in.
Thyer is philosophical about the time it has taken. “At school time, you just see the number of school kids go by on their bikes. Every time I see that, I just think, well, it was worth the effort.”
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Clay Lucas is an investigative reporter at The Age who has covered urban affairs, state and federal politics, industrial relations, health and aged care. Email him at clucas@theage.com.au or claylucas@protonmail.com, or via Signal +61439828128.Connect via X, Facebook or email.
