Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. I’m standing with Williamstown barista Scott Kilmartin looking out over what we both agree is one of the most dramatic and contrasting panoramas in Melbourne. The sun is thawing out a painfully cold winter morning on the waterfront.
Smoke curls out of the solitary smoke stack at the Newport power station backgrounded by the great, proud span of the West Gate Bridge. Half a dozen enormous cargo ships sit beneath the strange, alien-like container cranes. The shimmering blue Hobsons Bay stretches to the soaring CBD skyline.
Hundreds of tidy yachts rock gently at anchor in front of brutalist public housing towers. Puffer jacket-clad retired couples walk spindly dogs along the water’s edge, in view of multimillion dollar mansions along the winding coastal road called ‘The Strand’. Nearby, a gigantic 250-metre oil tanker sits moored at Gellibrand Pier, bringing in fuel to the Mobil Altona refinery.
Scott Kilmartin and his water side coffee van in Williamstown. Credit: Simon Schluter “Some mornings over here, it literally feels like [film director] James Cameron’s gonna walk over and go ‘cut’,” Kilmartin muses, looking out from his water-side coffee van which serves pre-dawn brews to dog walkers, fishermen, tugboat drivers, and medical on shift work at the western hospitals. “There’s clouds and fog.
The container ships are like ghost ships that move in between. It literally feels like it could be C.