MY WORD
TROUBLED BRIDGE OVER WATERS
PHOTO BY ISTOCK
MELBOURNE VENDOR STEPHEN B TREATED THE WEST GATE BRIDGE AS HIS CHILDHOOD PLAYGROUND.
AT PRECISELY 11.51 on the morning of 15 October 1970, I would have been making my way to lunch with my schoolmates at Yarraville West Primary. At the same time, the red light on the switchboard at Melbourne Ambulance Headquarters began to blink. Before the operator had a chance to speak, a voice on the other end screamed “She’s gone! The bridge is gone!” At 11.54 Russell Street police headquarters received the chilling message: “Disaster at West Gate. West Side. Span collapse. Send all services.” I remember a kid running around the schoolyard telling everyone that “the Lower Yarra Freeway has collapsed”. We looked at each other, we didn’t know what the Lower Yarra Freeway was so we went back to playing footy, oblivious to the carnage and mayhem breaking out less than one mile south of us. The men working on the western side of the bridge were also on their way to lunch when the eerie pinging sound of metal rivets could be heard shooting off like machine-gun fire. The men still on the bridge looked at each other, they noticed a vicious and inexplicable buckle that appeared down the very middle of the bridge. It began to spread along the entire length of the span. Some of the men started to run and momentarily even contemplated jumping the 90 metres or more to the mudflats below; others stared at each other, they knew there was nowhere to
run and there was nothing they could do. Time had run out. Five Years Later
THE WESTERN SUBURBS of Melbourne never did seem that big, population wise. We grew up less than 10 kilometres from the city, but on certain Sundays the suburb of Yarraville was more like a country town. It seemed most people knew everyone else. As a youngster, the abandoned factories and deserted creeks seemed to have no end. Across this playground we’d roam, finding “every lock that ain’t locked when no-one’s around”, as the song said. I remember my brother pulled back the wire mesh to give me a small hole to wriggle through. We’d found our way to the biggest thing ever, the West Gate Bridge, even if it wasn’t finished yet. It had been designed high enough to let massive container ships pass underneath. Now frozen in time, the gap between the two spans was a grim reminder to everyone of what had happened here. We proceeded on hands and knees to the edge of the precipice, the very edge where the bridge had broken years before. I felt like the wind could lift me at any second like a speck of dust, a feather. You could feel the bridge moving, alive. The view was amazing, we could see the whole world from the Docklands to the Angliss Meatworks in Footscray, and
along the river to the new commission towers at Williamstown. We could see the curvature of Port Phillip Bay, taking in Middle Park, St Kilda, Elwood all the way down to Black Rock, the entire CBD looked like a magical city of tiny lights. Peering over that edge, swaying, we could see the dark yawning gap where 35 men had been killed, giving their lives to the bridge. Years later we could drive over the bridge and pay for the privilege. I had a friend who refused to pay. “I’ve already paid,” he would say. “We all have.” Post Script IN 2005, I was cutting panels at a factory in Brunswick when an older fellow was chatting to me about where I lived. Between us we worked out that I lived not far, just around the corner in fact, from a character named Bob. It was his Anglicised name. Bob I knew well enough to say hello to, but it was really my mum Joy who knew him better, from their shared habit of walking the dogs. So, the bloke asked, “Did you know Bob had worked on the bridge?” No, I didn’t know that. “Also, did you know that Bob was on it the day it fell?” No, I didn’t know that either. Not only had he ridden the bridge down, but he had survived. Now that’s a story.
» Stephen B sells The Big Issue in Melbourne. #VENDORWEEK 26 JAN–8 FEB 2018
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