I truly have so many emotions about the West. I was born in Werribee and grew up in Altona & Altona Meadows. I moved to Geelong when I was nine, and so during my teenage years the West was a never-ending source of childhood nostalgia for me. I met my partner when I was 19 and he was living in Werribee. We decided to move in together, and so I found myself back in the West. It was surreal to me, because since moving away I had hardly spent any time there, and so many things were unchanged from my childhood. But at the same time so many things were very different - the population boom and never-ending development had seen to that. It felt like being reunited with an old friend - we had both changed so much, but despite it all we could still recognise each other. At first we were living in Werribee, and I remember thinking to myself that it was the perfect place to move out of home for the first time - it felt like its own little town, kind of removed from the chaos of Melbourne, but not entirely. The buzz of the city radiates, and so you could definitely still feel it in the far West. At times life in the West drove me crazy; I’m not a city or suburb person, and I often found myself feeling suffocated by the area, particularly the industrial areas around which I inevitably spent so much time. We decided to move away (back to Geelong) at the end of last year, and it was in the process of doing so that I discovered just how connected I had become to this industrial, suburban side of the city. Film photography has been a hobby of mine for several years, but during lockdown I came to the realisation that I had been using it as a means to document the places around me that I felt a deep connection to. These photos were all taken during the last year of living in Altona Meadows.
