NEIGHBOURHOOD

31 July 2026

Willagee (an indigenous name for swamp lands) was developed as a social housing community in the 1950s. The houses were built for the workers in the nearby industrial zones and we are still surrounded both north and south with factories and shops with big floor prints such as Bunnings and Officeworks. What I didn’t know was that many of the earliest homes in the area were prefabricated wooden houses imported from Austria. There have clearly been waves of “urban renewal” since that initial housing development. The original blocks of land were large and as one by one, the old houses have been demolished, bigger houses have been built on smaller blocks. Our house is one such example, built in 2010, with the house taking up most of the land footprint. Building works in the neighbourhood continue with a major two story town house development at the end of Archibald St and at least six building projects along our street alone.

But while the architecture and the building stock may have changed, it’s still a suburb with a very mixed demographic because there is still social housing. With the census coming up, I was inspired to look at the 2021 statistics to see if my sense of that mixture was justified. There are more women than the WA average which may be a combination of single parents and pensioners (6.6% over 80 years of age compared to the state figure of 3.9%). There are more indigenous people (3.8%) than on average in WA (3.3%) but also less people with both parents born overseas than average. The one figure I wasn’t expecting to see was that there are more professionals here than on average which may be the sign of growing gentrification.

It will be interesting to compare the 2021 figures to the 2026 results when they are published.

In the meantime, a sign of what is going on in our suburb was painted over a number of fences this week. Luckily, our “fence” is a hedge so we didn’t have to suffer the indignity suffered by our neighbours of telling the world that Sandy is prego to her Uncle Jarmin! Luckily, the council were onto the announcements fairly quickly and all sign of incest had disappeared within 48 hours.