Filming in Hobsons Bay

Hobsons Bay is a hot destination for film making, with about 50 film permits being issued a year, injecting a considerable amount of money into the council’s coffers as well as the local economy.

Channel 10 series “Rush” location manager Peter Muston said Hobsons Bay’s mix of lavish homes and industrial areas made it a popular choice for Melbourne-based TV shows. “It offers a great variety of looks from sleek, modern houses with fantastic city views across the bay on The Strand, gritty industrial landscapes around Spotswood, Newport and Altona North and bustling urban centres in Newport and Williamstown. Because the area has developed over so many years, it also offers quite specific pockets of residential development periods from the 1950s through to the current McMansion housing estates.” (Ref 1) Hobsons Bay Council planning and environment officer, Peter Hunt said, “A broad array of heritage streetscapes, coastal landscapes and wide parklands all within close proximity of the city has caught the eye of many film makers.” (Ref 2)

This post attempts to cover the movies, TV programs and commercials being filmed in Hobsons Bay, based on what I could research from the internet. As such, it will not be a comprehensive coverage. I will cover filming in Altona in a separate post. I have provided video links and links to official websites as well as articles on the filming. You may be able to identify familiar areas and neighbourhoods in these videos. For many of these films, other than knowing that they were filmed in Hobsons Bay, I do not know the specific filming locations and dates. You are welcomed to share via comments if you have such knowledge.

Filming in Williamstown

Williamstown accounts for the bulk of the filming in Hobsons Bay, featuring box-office movies and TV series such as Charlotte’s Web, Where the Wild Things Are, Knowing, Mad Max, Rush, Underbelly, City Homicide, Blue Heelers and Stingers. I will elaborate on the specific filming locations after this table.

This is a 2009 box-office American fantasy movie directed by Spike Jonze. It is adapted from Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s classic, about a mischievous boy named Max, who creates his own magical world inhabited by enchanting creatures who crown him as their ruler. After scouring the world for 18 months, Spike Jonze chose 11 Victorian filming locations, including Discovery Bay, Gembrook, Williamstown and Newport. A two storeys high, American style house at 16 Tobruk Crescent, Williamstown, matching the description in the book, was selected to be the home of Max. Two other key conditions were also met. The resident family had to be relocated for 6-8 weeks and the neighbours had agreed to have 100 tonnes of snow dumped in their street for 3 days because the film is set in winter. Scenes where Max runs away from home and crosses the ocean were filmed at Newport Lakes. The film’s production generated $57 million for Victoria’s economy and created more than 670 local jobs (Ref 3, 4).

Blue Heelers

This police drama series on Network 7 depicted the lives of police officers in the fictional Victorian town of Mount Thomas. It was Australia’s most popular TV drama, drawing more than 2.5 million viewers weekly at its peak and has the most episodes produced of a weekly prime time drama.

To contain production costs, coastal Williamstown with its notable Victorian and Federation architecture was chosen for the location scenes as it is near to the South Melbourne studios of Network 7. The scenes in the police station and pub were filmed inside Stags Head Hotel in Williamstown. The outside scenes of the first Mount Thomas Police Station (10 Thompson St) were filmed at the old, disused Williamstown Police Station, which was then a private residence. Scenes at Mount Thomas High School were filmed at Williamstown High School. Mount Thomas’ fictional Commercial Hotel was filmed at the Willy Tavern (55 Nelson Place) in Williamstown. The second Mount Thomas Police Station, adopted during the programme’s reform of 2004, as well as the site of Maggie Doyle’s iconic death in the railyards, is located at Newport Railway Workshops. The Mount Thomas Hospital is actually Werribee Mercy Hospital and the basalt plains around Werribee were used to represent farming and bush country (Ref 5).

Other Williamstown Filming Locations

• Williamstown Livesaving Club as the Pearl Bay Courthouse in ABC’s comedy SeaChange, (Ref 6) and in the short film Golden Girl.
• Williamstown Sailing Club in movie I Love You Too for shooting a senior citizen’s dance (Ref 7).
• Gem Pier in the TV mini-series My Brother Jack. A World War II minesweeper was redressed as a WW I troop ship for a 1919 homecoming scene. 170 extras, dressed as soldiers and nurses, made up the greeting crowd. There was a brass band, police on horseback and a couple of military advisors to ensure authenticity (Ref 8).
• Williamstown Botanical Garden in ABC’s documentary Gardening Australia
• Electra Street in science fiction movie Knowing
• The Strand in Channel 10’s police drama Rush

Filming in Newport

Filming in Spotswood

The Spotswood Pumping Station opened in 1897 as a key component of Melbourne’s first centralised sewerage system. It was decommissioned in 1965 after the opening of the new station at nearby Brooklyn. The buildings were left largely vacant for the next 25 years but found a new use as a versatile filming location for numerous productions. These included becoming the Main Force Patrol (MFP) “Halls of Justice” headquarters in the Mad Max film, the Blackmoor Prison in the TV series Prisoner and the Balls Moccasin Factory in the film Spotswood. Soon after, the buildings were handed over to Museum Victoria, to become part of Scienceworks (Ref 10). The Spotswood Pumping Station was also filmed in ICQ and Video Underground in 2001.

Spotswood is a 1992 Australian comedy film which told the story of the decline of manufacturing in Australia by focusing on the declining fortunes of a footwear factory in the western suburbs of Melbourne. It was released in the US as “The Efficiency Expert“. Prisoner (1979-1986) is an Australian TV soap opera set in the Wentworth Detention Centre, a fictional women’s prison and was shown on Channel 10. It achieved worldwide cult status after 692 episodes. Mad Max is a 1979 action film which starred the then unknown Mel Gibson. It became a top-grossing Australian film and has been credited for further opening up the global market to Australian New Wave films.

Harvie Krumpet is an Australian clay animation made in Melbourne written, directed and animated by Adam Elliot, which won several awards. The story revolves around the life of Harvek Milos Krumpetzki, born in Poland in 1922. At the outbreak of WWII, he comes to Spotswood in Australia as a refugee, and changes his name to Harvie Krumpet. Despite a life filled with bad luck (such as having Tourette’s Syndrome, being struck by lightning and losing a testicle), Harvie remains ever optimistic, living out his own eccentric way of life, marrying a nurse he meets in hospital and raising an adoptive daughter, who is a Thalidomide baby. Throughout his disaster-ridden life, people around him come and go, but Harvie delights in the simple pleasure of life right to the end.

Unknown Filming Locations