It’s a typical Sunday at the Mona Castle, a local pub in Seddon. Families sit in the dining room enjoying the usual Sunday roast. The horseshoe bar is filled with customers watching whatever sports team is on the television, usually the Western Bulldogs. The 150-year-old pub lies within a suburb that has now become a foodie hotspot for many Melbournians. With farmers markets and grocery stores that boast of fresher produce than the supermarket giants, Seddon has become a trendy suburb for hipsters and families.

But it wasn’t always like this. Prior to the 1990s, the western suburbs were deemed unappealing by many Melbournians. The whole area was seen as the home of blue-collar workers, immigrants, industrial sites and high crime rates.  But today, suburbs like Yarraville, Seddon and Footscray are seen as quirky, cool areas that people from all over Melbourne love to visit and to live.

In the ‘90s, the western suburbs closer to Melbourne’s CBD experienced a surge in popularity and influx of new residents. Professor of Urban Planning at Melbourne University, David Nichols, believes affordability played a big part. In 1993, McKinnon, a south-east suburb of Melbourne, had a median house price of $158,500, while Yarraville had a median house price of $93,000.

However, he also says it was just a part of the gentrification process.

“A place has to go down in the general estimation before some trendsetters or gentrifying pioneers find out that it’s a good place to be and start to move in,” he tells upstart.

Now, Yarraville and Seddon have become trendy spots with a rustic appeal. House prices in these areas skyrocketed. A house in Yarraville can now put a family back more than one million dollars. Yet Nichols remembers Yarraville, five years before it had begun to gentrify, in a very different light.

“I’d be worried about just sort of wandering the streets of Yarraville, not necessarily for any other reason than that I didn’t know it. But the west did have a bad reputation in the late twentieth century.” 

Some western suburbs haven’t had the same  kind of rebrand, though, and continue to face old—and new— stereotypes.

Tarneit, located on the outskirts of Melbourne’s west, is one of those suburbs that hasn’t escaped the stigma. Part of the Wyndham Council, it has the largest African immigrant population in Victoria. It is also home to the largest Indian population, with over 65 thousand members of Melbourne’s Indian diaspora calling it home. 

Nichols feels that a big part of what creates stigma is a fear of this kind of multiculturalism. 

“There’s always a particular stigma about whoever, broadly speaking, is the latest arrival in Australia of migrant groups,” he says. 

Despite being one of Melbourne’s fastest developing suburbs and a go-to area for first home buyers, Tarneit is often associated with violence, home burglaries and general danger. This has been partly fuelled by previous political campaigns and poor media reporting, painting the area as teeming with African gangs and violence. 

While Tarneit has seen an increase in crime, with the suburb reporting 3,419 criminal incidents in 2025 compared to 2,572 in 2024, suburbs like Footscray and Dandenong have both recorded more, but don’t always receive the same level of coverage. 

As Nichols points out, many immigrants often choose to live close to others from the same origins.  

“That also means that places become known as the place of a particular ethnicity.” 

This has also meant residents of suburbs like Tarneit and its surrounds also face daily discrimination based on this. When Wyndham TV reported on Facebook that a teenage girl had been hit by a car outside a school in Truganina (a suburb of the Wyndham Council), many in the comments immediately leapt to racist assumptions about the driver, who had not been identified.  

“The driver had a towel or clothing over their head obstructing their view,” one user wrote. 

“People who do not know how to drive and especially don’t get their license in Australia and have no idea how to follow road rules!!!!” said another.  

IndianCare is a community organisation and registered charity who help support the welfare needs of Indian migrants in Victoria, including one in Wyndham.  

General manager, Dr Vasundhara Kandpal says one program is focusing on discrimination towards the Indian community, after a recent report found that 45 percent of Indian migrants’ experience racism in Australia. Part of this is helping the community to understand Australian cultural mores. 

“It’s better to help the Indian community to understand the culture here and the etiquettes, so that there is less conflict,” she tells upstart. “We know there is a cultural shock, and we try to fit in within society.” 

Despite IndianCare aiming to help Indian migrants assimilate to Australian culture, Kandpal notes that there are still things out of their control, and understanding is needed on both sides. 

“We can try to read more and improve our English, but I think it has to be worked both ways.” 

So, while western suburbs like Yarraville have gentrified, others like Tarneit continue to face stigma, and Nichols still believes there’s one big, unavoidable reason for it. 

“It’s racism, basically.” 

Article: Joshua Grobbelaar is a second-year Media and Communications (Journalism) student at La Trobe University. You can follow him on Twitter @josh_grobbelaar.

Cover Photo: Grand Final Eve in the West by MARGARETE’S found HERE and used under a Creative Commons license. This image has not been modified.

Photo 1: Yarraville Trees by Christoph Hensch found HERE and used under a Creative Commons license. This image has not been modified.

Photo 2: Tarneit from the Sky by wanderingchina found HERE and used under a Creative Commons license. This image has not been modified.