Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size John and Sonja Rutherford remember the old Broadmeadows.
The one where few families owned cars and those who did got bogged on its dirt roads. The “Broady” of the 1960s, where workers left a neat line of gumboots on the train station platform and travelled to town in clean shoes. Back then, loitering gangs of “Broady Boys” were the least of their worries.
“When people came here, they all got dogs, and we’d have packs of dogs going all around – we had more trouble from the dogs than the gangs,” Sonja recalls. Broadmeadows was already a diverse mix of post-World War II European migrants when John, a plumber, and Sonja, a school teacher, bought their ex-Ministry of Housing cement workers’ cottage in 1964. The couple, now both 86, have witnessed six decades of constant change as waves of migrants from every corner of the world were drawn to readily available housing and work.
Advertisement A local manufacturing industry grew from migrant labour, then gradually died. Ericsson, Hard Yakka and the Kraft biscuit factory shut down in the early 2000s. The Ford Broadmeadows Assembly Plant followed in 2016.
A ‘hard’ suburb with community spirit Amid all that change, some things have remained constant. One is the way Broadmeadows is “demonised” by other.
