In the shadow of Northland

The Northland shopping centre sits like a grounded alien spacecraft on the suburban plains that extend seemingly forever north of Melbourne’s cultured heart. Once a modest configuration of three malls extending north, east and west from a central plaza, it is now the largest single-level shopping centre in Melbourne (excluding the cinemas, Timezone and the Pancake Parlour, which enjoy exclusive escalator access to their elevated position). Whatever sense once derived from its radial layout is now thoroughly undone by multiple add-on affronts to architecture. To explore its depths requires stamina and a homing instinct that will forever return you to the food court adjacent to your chosen entrance. Be careful though — they all look the same.

As a teenager living in nearby Rosanna, a trip to Northland was about all there was to do on a weekend. My sister and I would furtively search mum’s purse for coins so as to not waste our precious dollars on a bus fare. Once arrived, we would perform a ritualised circuit that started at Muffin Break and continued as a trance-like shuffle between Sportsgirl, Portmans, Miss Shop (inside Myer, which had four levels, its ground-floor mouth opening to the central plaza) and then aimlessly up and down the malls, just in case something was happening there. The money we earned from our junk-mail distribution job judiciously applied to the life-altering potential of purchases. Nothing could be committed to until all other options had been exhausted. No matter what we settled on, we made sure to get the branded store bag (Sportsgirl’s colourful stripes the ultimate) to redeploy when carrying our sports uniform to school, trying in vain for a scrap of social acceptance. We were dags of the first order.

Recently I visited Northland again to buy a punching bag for my son. After driving in to the wrong carpark (they also look the same — be warned) I found the megaplex surprisingly busy, despite Covid-19 restrictions still being in place. The food courts were wrapped in hazard tape (symbolic perhaps of previous crimes against gastronomy), yet most other stores were open. Like animals surfacing from months of hibernation, their awakened consumer animus unleashed across endless racks of clothes hangers and cardboard bargain bins. Floor staff anxiously circled their displays like birds hoping to attract a mate to their nest. The fragility of the retail experience was apparent for all to see. Even the hand-written fluorescent JB hifi window displays (a pre-Covid feature) seemed to carry a heightened air of desperation. Hey you — look over here. Please be enticed by 30% off retail prices with 12 months interest free. Please walk through our doors and browse the thousands of packaged products on our shelves. Please, please consume — without you we will disappear.

The young sales assistant looked me up and down and suggested we meet at the loading dock. He told me that his dad bought him a punching bag when he was young, he said I was a good mum for understanding my boy’s need to punch something, anything. I said we’d better get some gloves too. At the loading dock, I pushed the button for Rebel Sport. The roller door creaked open to reveal pallets stacked high with boxes, concealing even more boxes, which themselves contained the loot. The shoes and shirts and balls and racquets that give the store its meaning. The two women working to unpack the boxes looked at me suspiciously as I signed the release form. Maybe they sensed my bewilderment at the scene before me, they saw my eyes scanning the cavernous interior and knew that I was forming the thoughts that would end up here, as these words. After the strong young man deposited the heavy load in back of the station wagon I promptly reversed into a large pole, painted bright yellow, presumably to prevent such accidents. I recalled one teenage pilgrimage to this very site, when I threw my money in the bin with the wrapper of the Pollywaffle I had bought as soon as I arrived. It’s always one step forward two steps back with this place, I thought as I drove away.

The junk-mail distribution business was run from the garage of the dirty-haired woman at the end of our street. I was only twelve when we started, under the legal letter-boxing age so convinced my sister to job-share. The whole family was further subcontracted to the task, as every Friday night we would lay out the stacks of catalogues on our oval-shaped dining table, walking around it in endless circles taking one from each pile, filling boxes with rolled-up bundles held together with elastic bands. The exercise took the whole family hours to complete. On Saturday and Sunday mornings our father would drive the VW Kombi full of boxes to the highest peaks of Rosanna and Macleod, so that the heaviest loads should only be shouldered downhill. Our compensation for collecting, collating and distributing this junk mail to four hundred homes was on average $50 a week, divided by two. Mercifully we didn’t pay board until later. When I asked my sister what we spent it on, she said, “We were living the high life. You spent it on magazines and we bought donuts and milkshakes from the Warringal Village food court after school.”

Catching the 517 bus to Northland was an event of some significance. Digging through older sister’s wardrobes, we searched for something vaguely fashionable to wear, lest the neighbourhood boy we obsessed over was also catching the bus. Our giddy anticipation of this fact quickly turned to abject mortification if the boy did appear, robbing ourselves of the ability to speak or even look his way as he sauntered down the slope behind the bus stop for a cigarette. At Rosanna Station, more worldly teenagers would gather for hours, pushing each other off benches and swapping cans of coke for barely inhaled tailor-mades. Occasionally a pack of them would board the 517, their noisy exchanges drowning out the embarrassment of our existence. Without digital distraction, we were forced to look at our laps. Once arrived however, we were freed from our lowly station. The congregation of swarming shoppers gave us permission to look up, look out, to bathe in the wash of humanity that was Northland on a Saturday afternoon. 

Thirty years later I can recognise our Muffin Break sentinel as the site of an emergent economic world view. To consume is to take part, to be seen, to achieve acceptance. The corporate personhood of Sportsgirl, Portmans and our good friend Miss Shop never rejected us from their scene. We were always welcome to run our hands across their racks, to linger in their personal space. Our money spoke the universal language of desire. No matter how our peers felt about us, we had an unimpeachable relationship with the coolest girls in town. So long as we kept circling our dinner table every Friday night we could circle the arcades of Northland on Saturday afternoon. Exchanging our underpaid labour for the underpaid labour of unseen others, in this season’s latest styles and colours. 

Northland opened in 1966, the tail end of the so called ‘post-war boom’. Its foundations in the drainage basin of the Darebin Creek laying the groundwork for the culture of rampant consumerism we inhabit today. If we could go back to Northland’s beginnings, we might think it a quaint shopping experience, three humble malls around a central plaza. No doubt the people of Melbourne’s north (historically derided for its working class, immigrant population) had never seen anything like it, their habits of speech colloquially renaming it ‘Northlands’, as though the multitudinous offerings of the site deserved the plural form. One of the first self-contained shopping centres in Melbourne, it signified a union between marketplace, village square, temple and promenade to form a ‘destination experience’. A reason to leave the house. A place to see and be seen. To buy things we didn’t know we needed. Somewhere to be alone together. 

Since then of course Northland and other places like it have ballooned in size, in accordance with our thirst and capacity to consume. Their footprints increasing in inverse proportion to our sense of connectedness to one another. The impression they make on the physical and social landscapes of our cities confirm that ‘shopping’ is not a transaction grounded on need, but a spiritual devotion, an ego quest, a reaching out for confirmation of our place in the world. But at what cost? The unspeakable truth of the climate crisis is our dependence on acquisition of ‘stuff’ — the items that fill up our houses before they fill up landfill. None of it providing a lasting sense of satisfaction or connection. The corporate personhood of brands has infiltrated our social existence to the extent that the very nature of our public space has altered. Sportsgirl was never a real person but holding her bag made me feel like my personhood was not so tenuous. What if, instead, someone real had reached out and asked to take my hand? 

Yesterday I visited Northland again. This time no shopping was taking place. The underground carpark below Target has been set up as a Covid-19 testing centre, like many other suburban megaplexes. On arrival, we were asked to follow the car in front of us, speak to the person in the fluorescent vest up ahead. Soon enough we discovered that we were driving around in circles. Making loops of a path along a sidestreet, through the car park, entering and exiting the the loading bay (yellow pole still defiantly in place). This continued until space was available in the car park, when we were ushered into a space and asked to wait. I looked around at all the people in their cars, most of them alone. Most of them looking down at their phones. Scrolling up and down the interfaces of the apps and sites that congregate on their device. Their stillness defying the movements set off by their every touch. The thousands of digital eyes looking up, looking out at them. A person inside a phone, inside a car, inside a geo-location, all the while unaware, they have become the loot.