Wedge issue: the fight against a 350ha freight hub in Melbourne’s green fringe

‘When will this country stop barrelling toward the extinction of our unique species?’: Little River’s Merryn Pike is worried about the Western Plains plan. Photograph: Nadir Kinani/The Guardian

The land west of Melbourne is flat and productive. No mountain range hems in the city’s growth. Instead, the border is built by planning policy, a promise set down in the 1970s to maintain 12 “green wedges” to serve as the city’s lungs and its food bowl. Two of those green wedge zones – Western Plains South and Werribee South – sit just outside the urban growth boundary, a dotted line on the planning maps that crosses the M1 freeway just outside Werribee. They contain some of the last of Victoria’s critically endangered grasslands and are intended to be off limits to major development.

So it was a shock to locals to discover the area was set to become home to a large freight hub.