Spencer Street Station, Melbourne's historic gateway built between 1859-1965 by engineers like G.C. Darbyshire and featuring Harold Freedman's celebrated mural, was demolished in 2004 and replaced by Southern Cross Station under a 30-year public-private partnership deal signed in 2002. This case illustrates how public infrastructure can be sold to private entities (IFM Investors through Civic Nexus), with Victorian taxpayers paying $34 million annually in availability fees until 2036, while the original station's heritage elements like the mural were relocated and the water tower clock was exiled for 47 years. The documentary reveals that the new station has severe air quality issues, with nitrogen dioxide levels 3.5 times above EPA's 'extremely poor' threshold, demonstrating that privatized infrastructure may prioritize profit over public welfare.
The Rise and Fall of Australia's Greatest Train Station: Old Spencer Street StationAñadido:
In 2004, the cranes are above Spencer Street.
The brutalist concourse is coming down in sections. The wrecking ball swinging through 42 years of polished concrete and ticket counters, and the smell of country booking halls.
Up on the north wall, a team in high-vis is cutting Harold Freedman's Cavalcade of Transport Mural into pieces. 36 m of oil and gold leaf eased off the plywood under emergency CFMEU supervision.
The stationmaster is standing on the platform shouting, "You can't take it away. It's our only asset." 62 years earlier, on the 21st of March, 1942, that same platform held 360 American soldiers in dress uniform, an Australian Army band, and 6,000 Melburnians.
General Douglas MacArthur stepped down from a broad-gauge carriage and into the war.
How did the station that received MacArthur get traded for a roof Victorians will still be paying rent on in 2036?
This isn't just a demolition story. This is how Australia learned to sell its own assets back to itself.
If you care about the Australia we used to build, please subscribe to keep these stories alive. Every video on this channel honors one place we lost.
Chapter 1 The Engineer Nobody remembers.
Try and name him. Go on. Try and name the man who built Melbourne's gateway to a continent. You can't. Nobody can.
His name was G.C. Darbyshire.
In 1856, the colony of Victoria had just bought back the failed assets of the Melbourne, Mount Alexander, and Murray River Railway Company, a private outfit that had collapsed 3 years after being chartered, leaving Batman's Hill Reserve and a handful of survey pegs. The new Victorian Railways Department needed an engineer-in-chief.
The job went to Darbyshire.
The land, about 30 hectares around the old reserve, cost the government 125,085 pounds in 1856 money.
An astronomical sum.
The largest single railway land transaction in colonial history to that point.
Working alongside him was Captain Charles Pasley of the Royal Engineers, colonial engineer of Victoria from the 17th of September, 1853.
Pasley arrived in Melbourne fresh from the Royal Engineer establishment at Chatham. With a brief from London to build a colony that would not embarrass the empire.
He was 29 years old. The Australian Dictionary of Biography gives him three columns.
These were the men who chose the site.
These were the men who let the contracts.
These were the men who, in November of 1856, signed off on the Williamstown and Bendigo lines that would feed Spencer Street for the next century.
And here's the thing.
There is no Darbyshire Street in Melbourne.
There is no Pasley Avenue.
There is no plaque on the corner of Collins and Spencer.
Darbyshire barely makes a footnote in the railway histories.
86 years later, an Air Force flight officer named Harold Emmanuel Freedman would paint a 36-meter mural celebrating the history of Victorian transport.
He would not paint Darbyshire's face.
He would not paint Pasley's.
Freedman himself would die in 1999, the only man ever appointed state artist of Victoria.
His greatest work fighting for its life four years later.
We are about to spend an hour together watching what these men built get torn down.
We are going to learn the names of every consortium member, every minister, every architect of the people who tore it down.
We will know them by heart.
The men who built it, we won't know any of them.
They built the gateway to a continent.
Then the city forgot their names.
By the end of this video, you'll understand why.
Chapter two.
17 January, 1859.
On the 13th of January, 1859, the first government trains rolled out of Spencer Street terminus.
One service ran down to Williamstown Pier.
Another ran north to Sunbury via Footscray.
Four days later, on the 17th of January, public passenger services began.
Tickets were sold from five windows.
A single platform, 183 m long, walls of wood and corrugated iron, separate refreshment rooms for ladies and gentlemen.
The whole thing, the Herald sniffed at the time, was regarded as only temporary, to be replaced at some future period by more substantial structures.
That temporary station lasted 145 years.
Here's the impossible number.
In that first year of operation, 1859, Spencer Street sold over 300,000 passenger bookings.
The total population of the entire colony of Victoria at the time was 517,000 people.
More than half the colony walked through that wooden platform in the first 12 months.
Stand on the platform that summer and you would smell the eucalyptus from the Maribyrnong scrub, the coal smoke from the boilers, and the sweat of dock workers heading to Williamstown Pier in surge wool jackets that had no business in a Melbourne February. In December of the same year, Darbyshire's department opened the Maribyrnong River Bridge, a single span of riveted wrought iron 61 m clear across the river.
It set an Australian record. It would not be beaten for a generation.
The bridge is still there.
You can see the stone abutments from the train if you know where to look.
In 1883, an architect named Albert Charles Cook drew up a grand replacement, a Palladian palazzo of two and three stories with a central portico, the kind of building that would have made Spencer Street the most photographed station in the Southern Hemisphere.
The drawings were approved. Construction never started. The 1890s depression killed it before a single stone was cut.
The drawings sat in a Victorian Railways filing cabinet for the next 80 years, then were lost in the 1960s redevelopment. So, Spencer Street stayed temporary.
1859 6 years before the American Civil War ended 42 years before Federation 88 years before the United Nations.
Now, ask yourself, what have we built in the last 20 years that anybody believes will still be standing in 2150?
Chapter 3 The Sydney Express The 14th of June, 1883 The first Sydney Express departs Spencer Street at 6:55 in the evening.
Broad gauge to Albury Change of trains at the New South Wales border because the gauges do not match.
Onwards to Sydney Redfern, arriving 13:45 the following afternoon.
576 and 1/2 miles in 21 hours, including the break of gauge dance at the border.
It was the first time a passenger could travel between Melbourne and Sydney by rail in a single booked journey with one change of trains at the border.
In 1887, on the 19th of January, the Intercolonial Express departed Spencer Street for Adelaide on continuous broad gauge.
The first direct rail service between two Australian capital cities without a change of gauge.
828 km, 19 hours initially.
By the 1950s, the all-steel air-conditioned version offered showers in sleeper cabins, reportedly the first train in the world to do so.
Victorian Railways had been calling it the Overland since June 1926.
South Australian Railways got around to formally recognizing the name on the 4th of November, 1935.
The joint rebrand and new livery rolled out in 1936.
Through all of this, Spencer Street was growing.
In 1879, a single track ground-level link to Flinders Street was opened, but only at night, only for freight, with a level crossing at Queen's Bridge Street.
By 1888, the Flinders Street Viaduct was under construction.
Goods trains crossed it in 1891.
Passenger services began in 1894.
The two great Melbourne stations were finally connected.
1889 brought the number two goods shed.
Built by A.P. Tozer and Company for 72,943 pounds.
17 shillings and 5 pence halfpenny.
385 m long.
The longest single building in Australia at the time of construction.
Cast iron columns at 9-m intervals.
Wrought iron trusses.
Three parallel gable roofs with clerestories. Terracotta lumber in the upper floor for fire prevention. 26 arched doors on the east side and 28 on the west.
By the peak of the 1890s, it employed 1,500 men.
By the 1890s, Spencer Street had five platforms.
By the 1920s, it had 10.
Country trains, interstate trains, suburban trains all funneled through the same wooden refreshment rooms that had been built as temporary 50 years earlier.
And this was only the beginning.
Because in November of 1937, Spencer Street launched a train that broke the Australian speed record on its very first run.
Chapter 4 The Spirit of Progress The 17th of November, 1937.
Premier Albert Dunstan walks onto the parlor car at Spencer Street and turns a gold key in the lock.
The platform smells of fresh paint, new leather seats, and the faint diesel from the auxiliary generator carriage.
The press photographers fire.
The Victorian Railways Commissioner, Sir Harold Clapp, steps forward and reads a statement.
"This magnificent train," he tells the assembled dignitaries, "has been produced entirely by Australian people in your railway workshops at Newport."
This was the Spirit of Progress.
Australia's first fully streamlined, air-conditioned, all-steel passenger train.
4S Class 4-6-2 locomotive in blue and gold livery.
12 carriages with reclining seats, dining cars, a parlor car with armchairs and table lamps.
Built in its entirety at the Newport workshops in Melbourne's West by Victorian Railways tradesmen on Victorian Railways wages.
Boilermakers from Footscray, carpenters from Yarraville, fitters and turners whose grandfathers had built the Maribyrnong Bridge 80 years earlier.
On its demonstration run between Werribee and Laverton, the Spirit of Progress hit 79 and 1/2 miles an hour, 128 km/h, the Australian speed record. In service, it ran 190 and 1/2 miles from Melbourne to Albury non-stop, the longest non-stop run anywhere in Australia.
Average speed 52 miles an hour.
In 1939, 2 years after launch, the Spirit of Progress carried 222,371 passengers.
On its 21st birthday in 1958, it was still carrying 200,000 a year.
It ran for 49 years.
The final service was the 2nd of August, 1986.
By the late 1930s, Spencer Street was the busiest interstate terminus on the continent.
The Sydney Express, the Sydney Limited, the Overland to Adelaide, the Mildura, the Bendigo, the Albury.
Every long-distance train in Victoria came through here.
The country booking hall on the ground floor sold tickets to places most Melburnians had never seen.
The board behind the booking clerks listed Bourke and Broken Hill, and Mount Gambier, and Devonport. Destinations that today most Australians could not place on a map.
Built entirely by Australian workers at Newport workshops.
Faster than anything the country had ever seen.
And then the world caught fire.
Chapter 5 The day MacArthur arrived.
The 21st of March, 1942.
A broad gauge carriage pulls into Spencer Street Station at midday.
The Melbourne sun is fierce.
Late summer heat shimmers off the corrugated iron roof, and the platform smells of hot creosote and steam from the locomotive shutting down.
360 American soldiers in dress khaki line up as a guard of honor.
Brass instruments catch the light.
An Australian Army band stands at attention.
Behind the cordon, 6,000 Melburnians press against the railings, the murmur rising and falling like a tide.
The carriage door opens.
General Douglas MacArthur steps down onto the concrete.
Two weeks earlier, he had escaped from Corregidor by PT boat.
Two days earlier, he had crossed the Northern Territory in a converted bomber.
Now, he was in Melbourne, and and within a week the Australian military was placed under his overall command.
Spencer Street was his front door.
By 1943, there were 150,000 American servicemen in Australia.
Almost all of them arrived through one of three places: Sydney Central, Brisbane Central, or Spencer Street.
The federal government had taken emergency control of state railways in 1942.
The Spirit of Progress kept running, but its parlor cars were now packed with troops.
The Overland carried military mail and ordnance.
The Sydney Express ran AIF reinforcements north for the New Guinea campaign.
3 km south at Station Pier in Port Melbourne, the troop ships were loading.
The 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th divisions of the Australian Imperial Force all embarked or returned through Port Melbourne at some point in the war.
The rail link from the Spencer Street goods yards to Station Pier carried them.
The number two goods shed, built in 1889 and originally called A goods shed, was 385 m long and served as the central freight artery of the Victorian war effort.
1,500 men had worked there at its peak in the 1890s.
They were still working there in 1942, loading crates marked for Port Moresby, Darwin, Townsville, Brisbane.
One of the men who came through Spencer Street as a young Air Force officer was Harold Emmanuel Freedman, born in Melbourne in 1915.
He enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in 1940.
He served as an official war artist in the Pacific theater, sketching aircraft maintenance crews at Goodenough Island and Higgins Field.
He came home in 1946.
Remember his name.
But Spencer Street saw the other side of the war, too.
Italian and German internees were moved through these platforms in locked carriages on their way to camps at Loveday and Tatura.
Aboriginal stockmen, conscripted into the Army Labor Corps, departed for the north in cattle vans.
The platform that welcomed MacArthur with a brass band also dispatched men whose names were never recorded.
Three years after the war ended, the men who came back through this platform brought a wave of migration that would change the country forever.
Italians from Calabria, Greeks from Kalymnos, later Hungarians, Croatians, Vietnamese, Lebanese.
Spencer Street was the first thing they saw of inland Australia after the boat ride from Station Pier.
The country booking hall, the brass ticket windows, the smell of country towns wafting in from the platforms.
It was the front door of the new Australia.
Chapter 6, the mural and the modernist.
By the late 1950s, Spencer Street was visibly tired.
The wooden platforms from 1859 had been patched and re-patched.
The 1880s iron train sheds were corroding.
The country booking hall still had the original brass ticket windows from the gold rush era.
Everything worked. Nothing was modern.
In October of 1960, the wreckers arrived. Not Wayland the wrecker this time.
This was Victorian Railways doing it themselves.
The old iron sheds came down.
The wooden platforms were ripped up.
The Victorian Railways architectural branch, in-house, no individual architect ever publicly credited, designed a brutalist concrete replacement.
New 413-m platform 1 for interstate trains.
A new mail subway under Spencer Street to the Melbourne General Post Office.
A new passenger subway extending under the country platforms.
On the 13th of April 1960, standard gauge opened to Sydney.
Three days later, on the 16th of April, the all-sleeper Southern Aurora began its nightly service to Central.
The break of gauge dance at Albury was finally over.
The full redevelopment was completed in early 1965.
In 1967, during the final stages of the rebuild, the water tower clock came down.
It had been made in 1882 by Thomas Gaunt and Company of Bourke Street, Melbourne.
Installed on a lattice tower at Flinders Street in 1883.
Moved to Princes Bridge Station in 1901.
Moved to Spencer Street in 1910.
For 57 years, it had watched the platforms below. Now, it was removed for the last time.
The iron lattice turret was sold to a scrap metal merchant for next to nothing.
The mechanism was donated to the Museum of Victoria.
The face vanished.
A station worker who saw it come down later wrote that it was the day Spencer Street stopped being itself.
In the new concourse foyer, three scale models were installed in glass display cases.
An EMD diesel locomotive, a Victorian Railways B class locomotive, the Southern Aurora Streamliner in full livery.
Over the next 40 years, they would become some of the most photographed objects in the building. Melbourne fathers lifting children up to see them, country visitors stopping in transit, school children on excursion pressing their faces against the glass.
Six years after the water tower clock vanished in 1973, the state government commissioned a state artist named Harold Freedman to paint a mural for the new concourse.
Freedman was 58 years old.
He had served as a Royal Australian Air Force war artist in the Pacific theater.
He was the only person ever appointed state artist of Victoria.
He spent 6 months in research before lifting a brush.
Then 5 years and two assistants painting in five separate sections at the East Camberwell railway substation.
>> [clears throat] >> 36.6 m long.
7.32 m high.
Oil on canvas mounted on plywood with gold leaf highlights.
$250,000 in 1970s money.
It was called the cavalcade of transport.
On the 30th of January, 1978, Premier Sir Rupert Dick Hamer cut the ribbon.
The mural showed the history of transport in Victoria from 1835 to 1935.
Horse-drawn coaches, Cobb and Co.
The first steam trains, the spirit of progress in mid-flight.
Faces of people Freedman knew personally were painted into the crowds.
Hamer said at the unveiling, "This is our story. This is who we are.
In 1978, the man who unveiled the mural was a liberal premier."
"In 2002, the man who signed its death warrant was a labor one."
"This is not about parties. This is about something deeper."
Chapter 7, the deal.
The 18th of September, 1999.
Jeff Kennett, the liberal premier who had spent the decade selling Victorian assets to private operators, lost an election he was supposed to win.
Steve Bracks, labor, walked into Treasury Place expecting to find a state in profit.
What he found instead was a public transport network that had been carved up and contracted out. Connex running the suburban trains, V/Line on regional, electricity sold, gas sold, the Spencer Street power station mothballed since 1982, awaiting redevelopment. The entire framework of state ownership replaced with leases and concession agreements.
The Bracks government inherited the Kennett model.
And in February of 2000, they used it.
The premier stood up and announced that Spencer Street Station would be redeveloped under a public-private partnership.
The state would not pay for the construction directly.
A private consortium would build it, own the lease, operate it, and collect availability payments from Victorian taxpayers for 30 years.
The mechanism was set up by statute.
On the 1st of July, 2001, the Southern Cross Station Authority commenced operations.
Its July 2001 planning study, led by Flagstaff Consulting Group, identified the existing pedestrian subway as the key artery for the station's users.
That detail will matter later.
The 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games provided a hard deadline.
Three consortia were shortlisted.
Spencer Connect, Commonwealth Bank, John Holland, Australand, with architects Ashton Raggatt McDougall and Allsopp and Stormer.
Multiplex Rothschild, Multiplex Constructions and N M Rothschild and Sons, with architects Denton Corker Marshall and Civic Nexus, led and financed by ABN AMRO Australia, construction by Leighton Contractors, systems by Honeywell, retail and food by Delaware North, architects Daryl Jackson of Melbourne in joint venture with Sir Nicholas Grimshaw and partners of London.
In July of 2002, transport Minister Peter Batchelor signed the contract.
Civic Nexus had won.
The construction contract was worth approximately $294 million.
The total precinct value was approximately $700 million. The The 30-year operating lease ran until 2036.
The state agreed to pay Civic Nexus $300 million in regular availability payments across the life of the lease.
Architecture AU would later report the annual fee at $34 million per year.
Civic Nexus is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of IFM Investors, an industry superannuation fund manager that pools the retirement savings of Australian workers.
Day-to-day management is contracted to a separate IFM-owned company called Infranexus.
Here is the kicker.
Many of the Victorians who pay through their tax dollars to use the station are also paying through their super contributions to own it.
The same workers on both sides of the transaction paying themselves rent, paying middlemen for the privilege.
Construction commenced October 2002.
Practical completion was contracted for the 27th of April 2005.
The deal was announced as a triumph.
Within 2 years, Leighton had publicly announced a forecast loss of $122.6 million.
And the bills hadn't even started.
Chapter 8, the cost blowout.
The problems started almost immediately.
CountryLink, the New South Wales operator, had a refueling depot at the northern end of Spencer Street. Leighton wanted it moved so they could demolish the country platforms.
Country Link said no.
It took 12 months to resolve.
12 months of paid construction workers standing on the wrong side of a fence.
Then came the access disputes.
Leighton needed to move freight trains to clear work sites.
There weren't enough qualified drivers in Victoria to do it on the schedule Civic Nexus had assumed.
Six months gone.
The wave roof, Grimshaw's signature element, had been calculated for a certain weight of steel.
Engineers re-ran the numbers in late 2003.
The numbers were wrong. The roof was scaled back.
The Lonsdale Street to Telstra Dome footbridge was canceled.
The Bourke Street footbridge wave roof extension was abandoned.
Original plans for tiled platforms were laid, ripped up, re-laid, ripped up again.
According to a station worker quoted on the railway blog wongm.com, Leighton's laid the original tiles but ended ripping them up three times because they couldn't get it right, so they opted for asphalt.
By July of 2004, the project was $200 million over budget.
By late 2004, Lake Eaton contractors publicly announced a forecast loss of $122.6 million on Southern Cross. That figure comes directly from the Victorian Auditor General's report of the 21st of November 2007, page 48.
The Auditor General's report is one of the most damning documents ever published about a Victorian infrastructure project.
It documents the global settlement of the 31st of July 2006.
The state paid Civic Nexus $32.25 million in cash, $21 million for modifications and additional works, 8 and 1/2 million for disputed claims, 2 and 3/4 million for site access.
The state granted Civic Nexus 20 million in non-cash benefit by backdating its capital core service payments. Civic Nexus paid Leighton 30 million.
The state granted a 15-month time extension and waived liquidated damages.
Total Southern Cross Station Authority project costs to the 30th of June 2007 were 135 million dollars.
That is 32 million in project costs. 32 and a quarter million in legal settlement cash, 30 million in early capital payments, and 40.69 million in finance lease expenses.
The Auditor General notes, on page 52, that without the settlement, litigation costs were estimated by SCSA's own legal advisers to potentially exceed 200 million dollars.
And the pedestrian subway, the key artery the SCSA's own 2001 report had identified as critical, was filled in.
Commuters now had to cross Spencer Street at traffic lights.
People with prams, people with luggage, people in wheelchairs.
The single feature the planning study had warned was non-negotiable was the first feature sacrificed when costs got tight.
They paid 135 million dollars of public money to settle a contract Victorians had no choice but to sign.
And then, the diesel fumes started.
Chapter 9 The Wreckers In 2004, the demolition crews arrived at Spencer Street.
The brutalist concourse from 1965 came down in 8 months.
The cafeteria, the bar, the country booking hall, the mail subway, the 1963 passenger subway, the original brass and timber Victorian Railways signage, the wooden booking hall benches some commuters had been sitting on for 50 years.
The smell of sawdust and pulverized concrete drifted across the railyards for most of that year.
In the main concourse foyer, there had been three scale models in glass cases, an EMD diesel locomotive, a Victorian Railways B class locomotive, the Southern Aurora Streamliner in full livery.
Multiple commenters on Ken's Museum's recent video about the station remember these models from childhood, fathers holding them up to look.
"Whatever happened to the beautiful scale model EMD diesel locomotive that was adjacent to the northern entrance at Spencer Street Station, circa 1980?" one writes.
Nobody [snorts] knows.
No museum has them.
No public record tracks where they went.
Three pieces of working class engineering pride vanished in 8 months of demolition.
If you know where they went, leave a comment below.
The mural was the fight.
The cavalcade of transport, Friedman's 5-year masterpiece, was scheduled for removal in 2004.
The station master, his name has been lost from the public record the way these names always are, stood in front of the consortium's contractors and shouted, "You can't take it away. It's our only asset."
The Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, the CFMEU, intervened.
Bargaining followed. Conservators from the Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation at the University of Melbourne supervised the removal.
The mural was cut into its original five sections, each carefully crated and stored.
The sound of scalpels easing oil paint off plywood, a sound Harold Freedman, dead 5 years already, would never hear.
He had died on the 16th of July 1999, never knowing whether his greatest work would survive.
The agreement was that the mural would return.
In April of 2007, the five sections were reinstalled on the north wall of the new Direct Factory Outlet building, adjacent to the station, above the shop fronts.
Not at the station itself, not visible to passengers.
Across the river, the last fragments of Princes Bridge Station, which had operated since 1859, been absorbed into Flinders Street platforms 14, 15, and 16 in 1980, and finally closed in May 1997, were demolished for Federation Square.
Within 5 years, Melbourne had lost two of its three founding railway stations.
A few things survived.
The number two goods shed from 1889 was reduced by nine bays for the Collins Street extension, but still stands today as goods shed north and goods shed south.
67 Spencer Street, the 1893 Renaissance Revival former Victorian Railways head offices, designed by James Moore, is now a hotel.
The stone abutments of the 1859 Maribyrnong River Bridge are still visible from the train.
They saved the mural.
They lost everything else.
And the place that opened in 2006 wasn't called Spencer Street anymore.
Chapter 10, Southern Cross.
The 13th of December, 2005.
The station was formally renamed Southern Cross, a Commonwealth Games branding decision taken inside Civic Nexus boardrooms with state government approval.
No public consultation.
No Melburnian was asked.
The name that had been on the building since 1859, Spencer Street for the surveyor whose street it sat on, was retired.
The new name was borrowed from the constellation on the Eureka flag.
In August of 2006, the station was handed over to Civic Nexus to operate.
The Grimshaw and Jackson wave roof, 35,000 square meters of June profile stainless steel, ETFE skylights, and undulating tubular steel trusses rising to 24 meters above the platforms, was now Melbourne's defining new building.
In 2007, the wave roof won the Royal Institute of British Architects Lubetkin Prize, the most outstanding work of architecture outside the European Union.
It beat the Des Moines Public Library and the Hearst Tower in New York.
Later that year, on the 5th of May, it won the Australian Construction Achievement Award.
So Nicholas Grimshaw was photographed on the new concourse, smiling.
Queen Elizabeth II had arrived on platform one during the Bicentenary Royal Train Tour in 1988, waving from the carriage step to thousands of Melburnians.
That platform was gone, replaced with a different platform in a different building that nobody would ever again call Spencer Street.
Then, the people who actually had to use the station started to talk.
In June of 2024, Time Out Melbourne reported on a freedom of information request lodged by ABC News.
12 years of air quality monitoring data was released.
Nitrogen dioxide concentrations in the bus station section of Southern Cross average 1200 parts per billion over 24-hour periods for those 12 years. The Victorian EPA classifies anything over 360 parts per billion as extremely poor.
Southern Cross was running three and a half times that figure.
In some parts of the station, nitrogen dioxide exceeded the World Health Organization guideline by a factor of 90.
The conversation, citing the same data, reported in 2024 that the air at Southern Cross was alarmingly bad.
The station had been designed by Grimshaw to vent diesel fumes through gaps in the wave roof using prevailing winds.
The wind did not cooperate.
The diesel V-Line locomotives idled for up to 40 minutes at a time between services.
The fumes pulled.
wongm.com, the railway blog run by Marcus Wong, who has been documenting this station for 15 years, collected the testimony of station workers in his comment section.
One writes, "The perpetual exposure to diesel fumes.
This is carcinogenic and continuously denied as a problem by the powers that be and various stakeholders."
Another, "Dingy, oppressive, and ugly as we wanted it."
A third, "Pure evil.
They're killing and sickening thousands of workers and travelers because they refuse to do the right thing."
The Direct Factory Outlet Centre, which had been built into the station precinct as part of the Civic Nexus retail strategy, relocated to South Wharf in 2009 taking the foot traffic that had been used to justify the retail design with it.
The Friedman mural, which had been reinstalled on the DFO building's north wall in 2007, was now visible only above the back fittings of what became the Spencer Outlet Centre behind the racks of Harris Scarf and Trade Secret.
"Hidden," wrote Marcus Wong, "from view at the back of a discount shop behind a forest of light fittings and air conditioning ducts."
In May of 2014, the water tower clock came home.
Restored.
Mounted on a new stand at the Collins Street entrance.
Within months, digital advertising screens were installed around it cycling campaigns for energy drinks betting apps and superannuation funds.
The 1882 timepiece by Thomas Gaunt and company of Bourke Street, the same clock that had watched MacArthur arrive watched the Spirit of Progress depart watched two world wars come and go was now visible only between ad cycles its face dimmed by the LED glow above it.
The roof won every award in the world.
The station became one of the most polluted public spaces in Australia and Victorians will be paying for it until 2036.
Chapter 11 >> [clears throat] >> What Melbourne lost Stand at the corner of Collins Street and Spencer Street today.
Look north.
The water tower clock is on its stand at the Collins Street entrance, returned in May of 2014 after 47 years in exile at Scienceworks Museum in Spotswood.
Its iron lattice frame is gone lost to the scrap metal merchant in 1967.
The mechanism inside is electric now.
Above it and around it, three enormous LED advertising screens cycle through campaigns for energy drinks and superannuation funds.
The clock is visible only if you know to look for it.
Walk south along the concourse.
The diesel haze from the V-Line platforms drifts up through the gaps in the wave roof and settles in the bus concourse, where the nitrogen dioxide concentrations make the air taste metallic in the back of your throat.
Above the back of the Spencer Outlet Centre, behind a forest of light fittings and air conditioning ducts, you can just make out the upper edge of Harold Freedman's Cavalcade of Transport, a slice of horse-drawn coach, a slice of streamlined locomotive, gold leaf catching the fluorescent light from the discount shop floor below.
Walk west across the bridge.
The number two goods shed from 1889 still stands, divided now into goods shed north and goods shed south.
67 Spencer Street, the 1893 former Victorian Railways head offices, is a hotel.
The Maribyrnong River bridge abutments are still in the river.
Everything else built between 1859 and 1965 is gone.
So, what do you make of it?
Lesson one.
The PPP trap.
In July 2002, the Victorian government signed a 30-year contract with Civic Nexus.
In 2036, that contract will finally end.
Until then, Victorian taxpayers pay availability fees of approximately $34 million per year to to industry superannuation fund, IFM Investors, that owns the station as a cash flow producing asset. We did not buy a train station. We did not lease one from someone else.
We sold the lease on a public asset to a fund manager and then rented it back from ourselves through middlemen who took a margin.
The public-private partnership was sold as a way to deliver infrastructure without state debt.
What it actually did was convert 30 years of future tax revenue into a private income stream.
The asset was always going to be paid for by Victorians.
Either way, the PPP just added a layer of consortium profit on top.
And here is the deepest part of the trap. IFM Investors pools the retirement savings of Australian workers. Many of the same Victorians who pay availability fees through their tax dollars are also receiving a fractional return through their super contributions. We are paying ourselves rent minus the management fees, the consortium profit, and the cost of the legal settlements.
This is what privatized infrastructure looks like in 21st century Australia.
Not a foreign company stealing from us.
Ourselves taking a percentage off, paying lawyers and fund managers to administer the loop.
Lesson two.
The wreckers are named.
The builders forgotten.
Try and name the architect of the 1859 Spencer Street Station.
You cannot.
The Victorian Railways architectural branch designed the 1965 building.
No individual name survives in any public record.
The 1889 number two goods shed has only its contractor on the record, AP Tozer and company.
The 1893 head offices were designed by James Moore, a name almost nobody in Melbourne would recognize today.
G.C. Darbyshire, who built the gateway to the colony, has no street, no statue, no plaque.
Now, try and name the wreckers.
Civic Nexus, ABN Amro, Leighton Contractors, Honeywell, Delaware North, Daryl Jackson, Nicholas Grimshaw, IFM Investors, Infra Nexus, Steve Braks, Peter Batchelor. Every name documented, every signature on the contract, every dollar accounted for in the Victorian Auditor General's report.
The men who built the country are erased.
The men who sold it are everywhere.
The Australian Dictionary of Biography lists more property developers from the 2000s than railway engineers from the 1860s.
The corporate names of consortium members will outlast the names of the surveyors who chose this site by the Yarra.
Lesson three.
The greatest station replaced by the hated station.
Spencer Street launched the Spirit of Progress.
Received General MacArthur on the 21st of March, 1942.
Sent the Australian Imperial Force off to two world wars through Station Pier.
Ran the Overland to Adelaide for 119 years.
Hosted Queen Elizabeth II on platform one during the 1988 Bicentenary Royal Train.
Held three scale model locomotives in glass cases that Melbourne fathers showed their sons.
Housed a mural that took five years to paint and required a union to save it.
Southern Cross won the Royal Institute of British Architects Lubetkin Prize.
It is one of the most decorated buildings in Australian architectural history.
And the people who use it every day call it dingy, oppressive, ugly, dangerous, and full of poison gas.
The Victorian Auditor General has published page after page of cost overrun.
The diesel fumes are documented at three and a half times the EPA's extremely poor threshold.
The pedestrian subway that the station's own planning study identified as essential is filled in with concrete.
This is what we traded.
A station that worked, built by men whose names we don't know, for a station that wins awards and slowly poisons the people who pay for it.
Above the Collins Street entrance, the water tower clock from 1882, the same clock that watched MacArthur arrive on platform one in 1942, that watched the Spirit of Progress depart for 49 years, that was removed in 1967, and exiled to Spotswood for 32 years, and returned in 2014, is still keeping time.
Behind it, the LED screens cycle.
Below it, the commuters hurry through the diesel haze to catch the V-Line train home.
And the people who use the station every day still call it Spencer Street.
They always will.
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