The Frankston Line
‘Did you hear about the dead girl on the Frankston Line? This other girl went up to her because she thought she was giving her an evil look, but the girl was dead!’
Growing up, Frankston was always spoken about like this, more urban legend than a real place. Because I lived in Frankston briefly when I was younger, I’ve heard every version of the ‘dead girl on the Frankston Line’ story. After a smirk at the mention of Frankston, the story is always told to me as though the teller is two degrees of separation from the girl who discovered the body. One would hope that a story like this happening to your friends wouldn’t be repeated as though it was a funny incident, so I’m pretty sure there’s no truth to the story at all. Though sometimes, like my most recent trip to visit family in the Mornington Peninsula, I catch myself wondering about it.
The fact that it’s a girl in the story who discovers the body is usually what I fixate on. The aggressive female energy rings true to me. Someone foul-mouthed you’re afraid to make eye contact with. I’ve seen that girl on the Frankston Line before. My parents separated in the late 90s and I caught the train every Friday after school to my Dad’s house until the mid-2000s. I’ve seen lots of disturbing things on the Frankston Line.
Take, for example, the middle-aged businessman in a navy suit who sat across from me on a Friday evening. His pupils were somewhere far off as he dug his nails into the sides of his other nails, drawing blood. This was peak hour with nowhere else to sit, so I just tried to keep my attention on my book.
Then during the school holidays this display — a Chopper Read type in Oakleys who smoked in the train carriage, watching delightedly as no one verbally objected but one by one moved away from him. Years later on the train, I would recognise his type when I overheard a man on the phone asking:
“What the fuck do I care if the baby is crying?”
The reality of these disturbances are not illicit enough to be deemed as suspenseful as finding a dead body probably. Even in hindsight, I try to piece the incidents together, to try and make my own judgment of how safe Frankston was then. But it wasn’t a feeling of being unsafe exactly, more an anxiety that troubled people exist and I didn’t know what to do, and no parent was present to make sense of it.
Of all my memories of catching the Frankston Line, one stands out the most. Year nine, and the last day of school before a term break. Somewhere around the Chelsea stop three teenage boys and one girl got on. The girl wore cheap make-up and a short black polyester skirt loose on her hips. She didn’t have shoes on, which sticks out most in my memory, and this was the first indication that they were all high on something. The second was that the girl sat on her, I assume, boyfriend’s lap and lazily gyrated on him. They called out to people staring at them to stop and made mild threats to those that kept staring. Then when the train got to Frankston they ran off somewhere and the feeling of longing I felt to follow them was sharp in my chest.
Disobedience has always been thrilling to me. The year before my mother moved from the Peninsula, I was nearly expelled from my high school. But I was sent to a Catholic girl’s college from year eight to twelve instead, and when I caught the Frankston Line I was in my private school uniform, complete with knee-high socks and a straw hat, which was how I was dressed when I saw the girl with no shoes. All I had to do was never mention the near expulsion, the smoking, the break-ins to the abandoned Mornington High School, and polite society in Melbourne’s inner suburbs would have no excuse to turn on me. Until you make the mistake of mentioning where you grew up that is.
I did try to laugh along at Frankston for a time, for the few years in my early twenties I spent as hipster scum. When I went to visit my older sister in the Peninsula back then she would pick me up at Frankston station. I would try to get a picture of a billboard advertising a gun store through the car window, but my sister would speed up so the picture blurred.
“Why did you do that?”
“You’re just going to make it a joke to your friends!”
She was right. More to that she loves the Peninsula. I didn’t at the time. I told my friends all about the two dead bodies found washed up at Frankston Beach the morning after my sister’s bachelorette party at a club nearby, and laughed about it. As though I didn’t once sit staring at people at the Frankston bus depot, looking for signs of untrustworthiness, feeling like a sitting duck.
As though when my friends in the northern suburbs of Melbourne told me the best op shops were in Frankston like it was a dirty secret, something inside me didn’t deflate realising the place I had to buy clothes at as a teen was something of a novelty to other people now. It couldn’t be a novelty to me if it was me.
I have to remember though, that you’re never aware when you are young of what will affect you later. I remember all the same things that other older millennials bring up about the early to mid-2000s in a nostalgic way. But for me, all that sits on an outer layer of myself, and though I have tried to let it seep in — to identify as a one-time obsessive Eminem fan for example, or by my old collection of glittery Lip Smackers — I find that nothing says more about my youth than catching the Frankston Line every Friday after school.
On a recent trip through Frankston, I noticed the shop front of a charitable organisation, ‘Pregnancy Assistance’, across the street from the train station. I admit I cringed a little, not because I found anyone who needed the service to be an embarrassment, but at the thought of someone not from the area seeing it and snickering, no doubt imagining a teenage mother pushing a baby carriage around while a cigarette dangles from her mouth. The ‘About’ section of the website for Pregnancy Assistance Frankston (PAF), says the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne sponsors them. I was not surprised when I looked it up later and saw that one of the services they offer is ‘alternatives to abortion’.
Just like old times, my older sister picked me up from Frankston Station on my last visit. Though because of the pandemic, years had passed since my last visit instead of weeks. I had noticed the earlier changes to the Frankston Line when I was still living in Melbourne but now the entire line as I knew it — and my youth — is gone. Each station from about Cheltenham has been refurbished to be above or below ground. Frankston Station now more closely resembles an exhibition centre, no longer just the brown and beige platform I remember, and miss for its practical qualities. I can’t find it in me to be impressed that a lot of money has been put into making the station a desirable place to hang around when one of my earliest memories of it was a council decision to blast classical music outside and keep undesirables away.
The classical music would play as I waited on Friday evenings with my younger sister for the often delayed Mt Martha bus. I remember a man wearing nothing but ripped jeans and a suit jacket dancing to the music as my sister and I looked on giggling. When I recounted this memory to my sister years later she said she wasn’t there that time, I had just told her about it soon after and that’s when we laughed. Perhaps it didn’t register to me as funny in the moment, I don’t see how it could, with no one else there to acknowledge the absurdity of it. The council’s actions worked I guess, though some would disagree, there are fewer characters at Frankston Station now. On my most recent visit, my sister drove us past a large sculpture of large red scripted letters near the bus depot that I had forgotten the city council put up. ‘To The Beach’ the letters spell out. The idea of some romantic notion of Frankston, because it is close to the water, made me laugh, though the image of Frankston being full of criminals is just not right either, and really, I wasn’t sure why I needed to get it right.
Just after my family moved to the Peninsula in the early 90s, before trips to the city my parents would sit on the platform, watching me as I ran on and off the waiting train. At that age (around five or six) I was captivated by things like railway keeper’s houses, signal boxes, and I thought one day I could live in one. It may be hard to believe that Frankston ever felt quaint to anyone, even harder to believe it after what I’ve previously mentioned, but wherever you grow up and wherever your family happened to be at any given time will be remembered fondly in some way. No matter the reputation of that place, no matter even yours. To some, Frankston is crime-ridden, drug-addled, full of the kind of people you see in a viral fail video, or ‘alternatives to abortion’ some would call them. But to me, Frankston is where I was taken for haircuts, where Toys ‘R’ Us was, and, if I had felt able to articulate it when I was younger, where there is a great deal of domestic violence, just like the entire country, and where those in the inner suburbs of Melbourne like to judge instead of acknowledging the catholic church’s outreach.
I am holding onto these memories and places too tightly I know. As though the Frankston Station of my youth was the same one Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner walked down in On The Beach (1959) (perhaps this is the romance meant to be evoked by those red scripted letters). But I’ve long thought that what you can’t help but feel, the annoyances that poke your soul as though with a pin, indicate where your allegiances lie, what you should pay attention to and not forget about yourself.
Because, who is allowed to be their ugly, messy, improper selves anymore? Publicly I mean, without fear of being judged. I think of the girl wearing no shoes with her boyfriend and I wonder, what would it have been like to not have to be conscious all of the time of what other people thought of you? To not be so focused on appearing happy and okay despite your home life to the point of exhaustion.
In the inner suburbs of Melbourne, it has always been very fashionable to dress like a stereotypical Frankston deadbeat when you were raised middle class or richer, but still not fashionable to have experienced anything that might give you insight enough to call out others on it. I have long been tired of what feels like an excavation of people’s character to conform to whatever current slapdash remodeling of Melbourne’s fashionable society. Being heavily tattooed may be very common now, even for those with access to their parent’s holiday houses, however, in attempting hardness these rich kids come across as merely cold-hearted. Personally, I find them just as disturbing as anyone I’ve ever come across on the Frankston Line.
