Around our ears

The mighty Parramatta Road tumbles down around our ears, as the city spews ever further west and eschews shopping strips for the ubiquitous mall. Australia doesn't have a term like 'High Street' or 'Main Street', but our city suburbs and our country towns are designed around the shopping 'strip': that one popular area where shops proliferate on both sides of the street, if only for 200 metres.

In Sydney, the first road to radiate out of the city to the west became known as Parramatta Road, and it was hewn out of the undergrowth by convicts within two years of settlement in 1788. Many modes of traffic proliferated, and the road became an essential part of the economy of the city. The mercantilists and the small family shopfronts followed, and by 1865 Parramatta Road was a burgeoning thoroughfare. The vast majority of the terraces and shopfronts that strip Parramatta Road today in the inner west, were built between 1850 and 1914.

Their age, and our lack of respect for them, is showing.