SATELLITE CITY
When I was growing up in Melbourne, they had this concept of Satellite Cities or Towns. Such a fancy, futuristic name for what were suburbs 20 km or 30 km west of the centre of Melbourne. The idea being you had no need to go to into the city because you had everything you needed in, shall I say, the town of Satellite. I always loved the name so, when I was twenty-three and moved over to WA on my own and was lonely, I looked at the map and saw that Rockingham was 30 km from Fremantle, where I had made my home in a small flat.
Rockingham was home to the monstrous Nickel Refinery with its steam, shining steel, smoke chimneys, hazy futuristic lights, these massive pipes that curled around like a huge water slide or stood straight up. It reminded me of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
