A dusty road, a horse drawn cart, a bicycle or two, and someone ambling towards the train station in the background. This is what you would have seen if you stood on Main Street about a hundred and twenty years ago.
Mordialloc!
I first saw the name when I stood on the platform at Flinders St Station in Melbourne, twenty one years ago and watched the trains pull in and leave for Mordialloc. I wondered where this place was; the name was so strange. Two years later I moved house, looked for the nearest train station and – it was Mordialloc! Mystery solved!
What is Mordialloc?
It is where Mordialloc Creek ends and beach road begins. It is a shopping village with curious little shops, and a lane or two that leads to the beach. It is the sound of kids enjoying the playground and the smell of warm barbecues. It’s most definitely a place to learn patience as the train crossing stops you three times as you drive through the suburb.
Let’s journey back now more than a hundred years ago, when other people lived here, -people who grew up with an intimate knowledge of the land. They worked, hunted, ate, slept and went through the whole cycle of life as we do now. But unfortunately the Boonwurrung people did not survive in this area. Slowly they succumbed to the diseases brought in by settlers.
And yet I often think of them when I sit on the beach and watch the water flow onto the shore.
It’s the same place.
Just a different time.
Hundreds of years ago.
So too, the land that you walk on, work on and live on. It has been here long before you- and it will be here long after you have gone.
