3.3 Frankston and the Outside World

Air Travel

Not content with the manner in which cars had been permitted to reshape much of the suburban landscape, Frankston residents, councillors and businessmen actively promoted the need for better air transport. R.M. Ansett informed council in 1959 that land should be set aside for a heliport.1 Others insisted that not only would helicopters be familiar, within ten years they would become the basic form of transport in Melbourne's suburbs; a go-ahead council needed to provide heliports.2 In 1963 J.W. Rogers applied for permission to take joy rides over the bay from Frankston and an air strip and heliport did operate for a time.3

These dreams of airborne commuting of course never eventuated. Frankston went ahead with a by-pass around the shopping centre (immediately criticised by local police as a danger to children from nearby schools and to traffic at its exit intersection). Melbourne's massive freeway schemes of the 1960s brought major new roadworks. Still, in the 1970s, long after the first fears of holiday traffic, Frankston had to join with the Road Safety Council in publicity campaigns in an attempt to reduce the massive death and injury on local roads, not only on holidays, but throughout the year.

35 Westerfield, symbolic of a new type of large seaside property in Frankston: the modern equivalent of Yamala and others of the 19th century.

Where most suburban areas around Melbourne owe their basic form to the railway, this was not the case with Frankston. The annual holiday traffic crush and the suburban expansion away from the railhead during the 1960s made motor transport a more influential factor in the shire. The activities of council in providing parking around the commercial core augmented the motor car influence. Frankston is today a suburb largely shaped by motor traffic and its streets, shops and houses reflect that all-pervasive influence.