CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | Contact
The Betoota Inlet Train Station sits on an arterial commuter railway line that is 5 stops away from the CBD.
Several lines converge on this one station, so there’s approximately 8 tracks, plus storage. It makes for close to 10 acres of steel and concrete, which is luckily hidden from sight and sound-proofed by the dense parklands and heavy foliage.
In fact, there’s so much train station that there’s no station street. This particular stop services far less people then any other station on this line. That’s why there’s been talk of bridging the entire carriageworks and building 20 floors of affordable housing with a new proposed development.
It’s a bold decision, but it’s speaks to the creative thinking that town planners will need to embrace if we are ever going to solve the housing crisis.
Sadly, there is a very loud minority of locals who think that this suburb does not have ‘the infrastructure’ to host a new shopping precinct, apartment towers, and new public school. All within ten minutes walk of a major train station.
Betoota Inlet Grandparents Opposed To Towers (BIGOTT) say this proposed development is lazy, short-sighted, and quite frankly, corrupt.
Their spokesperson Diedre Bewmer (64) says decentralisation has to be the solution.
“You can’t keep cramming people into the city” says the stay-at-home wife of a retired commercial pilot, neither of whom have never actually needed to live in a metropolitan area.
“It’s destroying heritage”
However, from Deidre it’s not so much the hideous eyesore of these proposed medium-density apartments that worries her the most, it’s that apartment towers tend to attract apartment dwellers. And this has always been a suburb of young families living on quarter acre blocks.
“It doesn’t make sense to have these kinds of dwellings in a family suburb like this” says the empty-nester grandmother of 5 kids that are now being raised on the other side of town due to housing in-affordability.
When asked if she’s talking about multigenerational immigrant families who have migrated from countries where nobody is above living in an apartment complex, Diedre is quick to refute such claims.
“No. I’m talking about urban professionals. Apartments are meant for people who work in the city. This isn’t the city”
“The only other people I can see living in this development are university students. And this isn’t the right place for them either, quite frankly”
When asked if by university students, she means Mainland Chinese and Indian foreign students, Diedre again says no, wholeheartedly. She’s talking about the possibly fictional inner-city high-rise archetype that she as has only ever seen in TV shows like Sex & The City.
When asked who on earth she is talking about, Diedre changes the subject, and begins clutching at straws by asking if anyone has ever considered the First Nations perspective.
“I’m not sure what the local tribe’s name is… But I know connection to country is so important to the local people. I wonder what they would say about this beautiful suburb being colonised by medium density housing”
“Let alone our neurodiverse neighbours who may be triggered by the sounds of jackhammers and nail guns for 18 months”
“There’s so many more things that need to be checked off before we can build something like this”
