Glen Iris: Don’t call the road through it a Freeway
- scraze
- Sep 26
- 9 min read
My Glen Iris research for my next book is slowly moving forward. I’ve decided to break it into themes: the Creek, the Railway, the Pool… you get the idea. A few weeks ago, I visited the Stonnington History Centre to see what I could find on another theme: the Freeway.
Interstate terminology is a curious thing in Australia. Do you call bathing attire swimmers, bathers or togs? Is a battered disc of deep-fried potato a scallop, potato cake or potato fritter? Did you go to the milk bar or the deli? The tuckshop or the canteen? And where do you stand on the whole Jatz vs Savoy debate?
Freeways are the same. It never occurred to me that only WA and Victoria call high-speed highways the American term ‘freeway’. In my defence, I’ve only ever lived in those two states and, to be brutally frank with you, I’ve never really thought about freeways all that much until now.
It turns out all the other states use ‘expressway’ or ‘motorway’. And that using the American term ‘freeway’ in Victoria was very deliberate.
Fortunately, there is a 2004 book all about the impact of cars and freeways in Melbourne: Car Wars, by eminent historian Graeme Davison. [1] You can read it for free with a State Library of Victoria membership and I promise you, it’s a lot more interesting than you might think. As there is no-one who knows more about Melbourne’s urban history than Professor Davison, I decided to start my enquiry into the relationship Glen Iris has with its Freeway with his book.
A Brief History of Freeways in Melbourne
Cars did not really begin to proliferate into everyday Melbournians’ driveways until after WWII. But the idea of Victorian roads unencumbered by traffic lights, pedestrians, cyclists and speed limitations dates to 1924. This is when the Chairman of the Victorian Country Roads Board, William Calder, returned from an overseas visit convinced that the American road system was ‘one of the outstanding wonders of modern transportation.’
Melbourne’s urban planners realised it was only a matter of time before they would need to think about how to manage traffic, so Calder’s successor, William McCormick visited California, the Freeway Capital of the United States, in the mid-1930s.
He returned enthused by how Californians had built roads that exhibited ‘directional, free-flowing lines that give velocity and rhythm, and no obstruction to traffic’. After WWII, the rapid proliferation of cars in Melbourne meant Victorian engineers visited the Bureau of Highway Traffic at Yale University to learn about this new field of ‘traffic engineering’.
But this new-fangled ‘freeway’ idea could not eventuate without political support.
Before Federation, private companies and their investors built Melbourne’s railway and tram lines. Roads fell under the domain of local government bodies and the archives are full of resident complaints about their tolls and taxes not being spent to maintain them. After Victoria became a state of Australia, responsibility for infrastructure provision and maintenance moved to the State Government’s purview. None of this was straightforward or without a lot of issues but the main point is that it happened.
However, in the first decades of statehood, Victoria did not have consistent leadership from one political party that allowed the Government to envision, design, plan and implement large scale infrastructure projects until the Liberal Government of Henry Bolte (1955-72).
Bolte was a freeway fan. He was the one who chose the word ‘freeway’ for the new highway-style roads he had planned for the inner-city suburbs of Melbourne.
But unlike the American model of tollways, Bolte rejected the idea of Australians paying per use as a “rude assault on a long Australian tradition of publicly funded, publicly accessible roads and railways.” He liked the word ‘freeway’ instead of the words ‘motorway’ or ‘expressway’ used up in Sydney because it also aligned with the free market principles of his Liberal Party.
He probably also wanted to stick it to Sydney, who had that fancy eye-catching bridge across that annoyingly beautiful harbour and had already begun building the Cahill Expressway.
Bolte’s government went all in on freeways for Melbourne. In 1954, Bolte and the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works proposed a lavish network of freeways and a network of inner-city arterial roads that was short on funding availability and long on ambition. It would involve demolishing numerous houses in working class, inner-city areas like Collingwood and Richmond. The Government took the view that these properties were at the end of their lives anyway.
The Freeway plan had a lot of support from the rapidly proliferating car-owners of Melbourne. But the affected inner-city residents regarded the plan with horror. They began to perceive freeways as an unnatural intruder vandalising their community. The Freeway plan also vexed public transport enthusiasts. How was Victoria going to afford to build new freeways and still maintain its public transport system? This knotty question would continue until... well, it still does.
Driving in Glen Iris
Despite being well-served by public transport, the middle class residents of Glen Iris were early participants in car acquisition in Melbourne. Graeme Davison wrote in his book how Albert Walker, a British-born Glen Iris resident was by 1956 one of the few people left suspicious of the relentless advance of automobilism.
“All the people in Ashburton Road [his street] have a car, and some of them have two,” he said. “We are the exception in this respect, even though we have a double garage.”
But even Albert acknowledged that it was becoming increasingly difficult to take his family out for the day without a car. “Bus fares are high and trams are chaotic. Trains are in many instances sadly out-of-date and altogether travelling by public transport is very wearing. The only consolation is that I am able to read more than if I had a car, although this doesn’t console me on hot days in summer when it would make it so much easier to go to the beach with the family, and street corners can be awfully cold in winter, waiting for buses and trams.”
We don’t know whether Albert ever gave in and bought himself a car. But we do know that long before the Monash Freeway, 1950s Glen Iris drivers were well served by road access to the places they wanted to go. They had Toorak Road, High Street and Dandenong Road to take them to and from the City. Heading the other direction gave them access to Mt Dandenong and the Yarra Ranges. The bay and the beach were accessible down Warrigal Road and Nepean Highway.
The idea of a new road from the City following the trajectory of the Glen Iris railway line and Gardiner’s Creek had floated around for a while but nothing much had yet come of it.
Meanwhile, the American-trained traffic engineers learned that freeways were best built on the natural trajectory of rivers and valleys because they were the last trajectories of continuous, undeveloped land. Enthusiasm for freeways tended to override the fact that these areas contained valuable parkland, sports fields and homes for native flora and fauna.
Bolte commissioned the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works to undertake a comprehensive study of the city’s traffic needs. The green ribbons of park and farmland along the Yarra River and its tributaries became the main corridors for Melbourne’s proposed urban freeway network. From this study sprung a City Ring Road, a Freeway to the new airport at Tullamarine, a bypass for Sydney Road, and an eastern suburbs bypass along the route of the old Outer Circle railway. Rounding out the study was the South-eastern Freeway, proposed to run through the Gardiners Creek Valley and join up to the Mulgrave Freeway coming up from the south.
For Glen Iris residents, a road through the Valley was one thing but a multi-lane, high speed Freeway through their backyards was quite another.
But they were the Liberal Party’s supporter base and philosophically aligned with Bolte’s ambitions for Victoria. Besides, the South-eastern Freeway was still years away. No-one in Glen Iris or Malvern thought Bolte’s plan to compulsorily acquire housing for freeways would affect them.
Now our 2025 eyes might look at this naiveté cynically. But back then, few Australians had experienced sudden homelessness and dislocation caused by wars, disease and natural disasters in other countries. It had not occurred to them that their own Government could acquire their houses and demolish them to build a freeway. And in Malvern and Glen Iris, a Liberal-voting heartland, it came as quite a shock when plans for exactly that eventuated.
Protesting the Freeways
The first anti-freeway protests broke out among the working class living around Carlton, Collingwood and other Labor-voting inner-city suburbs about the overpass at Clifton Hill. Despite this, Bolte pushed on, eventually developing the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan. This was described by Graeme Davison as "the most expansive and expensive freeway experiment in Australian history." By the end of Bolte’s reign in 1972, these inner-city areas were home to influential middle-class professionals capable of organising and lobbying against the destruction of their suburbs. A large proportion of the 1969 Plan did eventually get built but this article tells more about the protests that ultimately defeated the F19 Freeway Plan in the inner-city suburbs.
By the early 1970s, the now adult children of the inner city could no longer afford to buy in the neighbourhoods they grew up in. They were pushed further out, choosing to move closer to the freeways that could knock a few minutes off their commute to the city. Meanwhile opposition to more freeways grew to a fever pitch, coinciding with the huge amounts of social and political change occurring in Melbourne. The Whitlam Government forced the incoming Hamer Government (also Liberal) to nix some of the inner-city plans. Hamer ended up lopping Bolte’s plan in half and the roads that survived were duplicated instead. This secured the amenity of inner-city suburbs and caused property values to rise further.
The South-eastern Freeway plan was caught in the middle. Work had already begun on connecting Punt Road to Toorak Road in 1972. The cutting of the Freeway program in 1973 fatally compromised the plan to extend the South-eastern Freeway (the F9) past Toorak Road to the Mulgrave (F14) Freeway at Warrigal Road.
For the next decade, Glen Iris stood in the middle of a 10 km stretch of no-man’s land that became the longest and hardest battle to save a Melbourne creek valley from being turned into a freeway.
The F9: the South-eastern Freeway
KooyongKoot/Gardiner’s Creek after Toorak Road ran through a tattered landscape of brickyards, playing fields, powerlines and industrial sites. By the time it reached Warrigal Road though, it was a bustling little creek of surprising beauty and a habitat for waterbirds and oak trees.
But that 10 km gap frustrated many a motorist. Exiting at Toorak Road forced traffic off into smaller streets and arterial roads, ill-equipped to deal with such volumes.
Residents endured clogged streets and car horns as they agonised over how to link the two freeways. And unlike the inner-city residents, these were conservative voters who believed in the rights of private property and the sanctity of the home, everything the ruling Liberal party said they stood for too.
It was one thing for the Government to brave the opposition of Labor-voting residents of the inner suburbs but taking on their core supporters was a whole other story.
Unlike all the other freeway plans, lobbying from residents from the Government’s supporter base caused KooyongKoot to become the subject of every possible study available: noise, air, traffic, safety, open space, the financial and human costs of property acquisition, and community impact. The Government hoped to persuade nervous householders to rise above self-interest and accommodate the interests of others who lived further out of Melbourne.
Every resident had a different point of view. Some valued and sought to preserve the green space, others wanted to abate the local traffic congestion. Noise was a big objection but for others, it was the visual impact of the freeway. Eventually two schemes emerged: the C3, a six-laned freeway that clung to the Glen Waverley railway line and the C1, a freeway that hugged the eastern side of the Creek’s path. Either proposal meant the destruction of up to 180 buildings, mostly private homes.
As well as a physical split of the suburb, the two Freeway proposals ideologically split the Glen Iris residents too. Those in eastern Glen Iris (in the City of Camberwell) supported the C3 on the other side of the Creek, and those on the western side (in the City of Malvern) supported the C1. When the C3 was eventually chosen, some Glen Iris residents woke up to discover a freeway was going to be built a few metres from their back fence. Instantly, the value and amenity of their home was destroyed. Others discovered their house would be demolished entirely.
Obviously, the Freeways were eventually connected but not without a fight, as you can see from this example of the hundreds of articles collected by the Stonnington History Centre.
Better get started reading them all!
If you or your family was affected by the building of the freeway, drop me a line, I would love to chat about it.
[1] Davison, Graeme, Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2004).
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