The Maribyrnong River Trail

I ran from Quest Maribyrnong due west. The thing that strikes me the most as the difference between Melbourne and Brisbane are the kinds of houses that make up suburbia. Brisbane’s dotted with elevated wooden Queenslanders, airy, light, impossible to really ever be ahead of the upkeep of. Melbourne by contrast is almost all single-storey brick and places without garages so much as just tiled front courtyards in which lives a sedan or a coupé perfect for city driving. Of course Melbourne is more populous than Brisbane. Australia’s largest city by population in 2024, provided you don’t ask demographers in Sydney who’ll get the rulers out to measure LGA boundaries.

It’s past these that I ran as I started Sunday runday for Gold Coast Marathon training at like 7pm, when even in summer in Brisbane the sun would be well on its way down, and at the end of that first street I headed north. I ummed and ahhed about taking the next left down through some more suburbia to the edge of what Google Maps promised me was a golf course that could I skirt the edges of to get to the water of the Maribyrnong — or at least the trail above it for the time being. Instead I veered left at Village Green Playground that emerged on the left where a family played in a small circle track I considered doing a loop of when I saw it on the Strava map ahead of me. I ran along the back fences of homes that backed onto the park, a dog barking at me, and I ducked down the hill across a path that intersected with the trail itself and there I turned right and began to descend towards the river.

It was there that I noticed how beautiful the track was already, barely a kilometre in and away from a main road on the edge of an industrial part of town afflicted by strange warehouses that barely seemed to house the businesses whose logos they wore but who also had BMW X4 visitors in the late Sunday afternoon. What I ran through was green, lush, bright, filled with colour and warm in the sun but with a cool breeze. I came along this track across the back of the suburb itself, running north until a bridge that crossed west, and I followed it over the water, crossing at gated community whose homes promised river views, spas, gyms, and pools all in the same place. Its gate read Rivervue and its font reminded me of fresh new homes in Woodlands developments on the edge of Greater Brisbane with decks with wide fans whose owners my parents were friends with before we never seemed to see them — or their houses — after the GFC. That could just be my aging out of tagging alone to everything once I’d turned sixteen.

Ahead began the half of the run that was more trail than track. A carpark beside an AFL oval sloped down towards the river itself where it became dirt entirely and almost level with the water. I ran along what must have been an older, wider river’s bottom with white rocks rising up above me to my left and sloping green hills over the water to my right. I ran past people walking here, people walking their dogs, and I followed it through bushland that felt alien to a Queenslander, grasses and shrubs and brush rising high and Australian enough but unfamiliar enough too to know I wasn’t home. All I could think was that I could see myself running this more often. I say this like Maribyrnong is not that expensive. A three-bedroom townhouse beside Quest for sale for like $750,000. Actually not bad. 

I followed this track for a while before it snuck off up a hill back inland and weaved back in the direction of the river over a creek. The bridge here met with less curated but still distinct dirt paths that seemed to emerge from the bush. All I could think was that the council here, smaller and more focused than Greater Brisbane’s, must have had a bit more maintenance budget than the Paddington Ward. Back along the river I followed it easily, peacefully, simply, until it curved away again and gave way to a great rise up towards an intersection halfway up the hill that went left under the road ahead, forward up to the side of the road, back down the way I came, and right the way I wanted to go. 

It has been a good while since I’ve run any real elevation except for the climb up to the Story Bridge from behind Felons. This caught up with me here, especially as I watched a man run back down past me with a speed I suddenly craved. But atop was the reward of the view with Melbourne’s skyline stretched out before me like I’d not expected. Maribyrnong green and undulating all around in each direction about me and the state capital tall and shining against a bright blue sky that I checked in and brought with me on the plane.

I followed the ridgeline here through Lily, Preston Street, and Ashton Street Reserves before tapering back down to the flat where it becomes The Boulevard. I’d read about this online when I’d Googled, like ninety minutes before I’d gone running, Maribyrnong running tracks. They all recommended this eastern side of the river, following The Boulevard, and I emerged onto it at a bridge I’d not noticed or planned for that would have taken my back over to the side of the river on which I was staying. I didn’t cross it, even as I watched someone come around from The Boulevard ahead of me and run over, and I kept on straight ahead along the edge of Essendon. Here I realised the trail run was over, all three kilometres of it, and I was back on the flat track having done like eight kilometres or something so far with like three left to go. It’d been about forty minutes. 

Most of my running for the last little while has been basically 8 kilometres, give or take, so it was here that I had to start working for it again. But it’s funny how much muscle memory, how much instinct, can kick back in. When I was running a half-marathon every Sunday, twenty-one recreational kilometres just for pace and for clarity and to escape what was a life sort of in freefall at the time, I used to joke that it took me like seven kilometres to really get into the flow of it. I was reminded of that as I passed the Essendon rowing club, the terraces that must be tiered picnic spots for families and friends watching the regattas, the walkers, the runners, the couples, the dogs, all out to enjoy the same early autumn Melbourne afternoon I was. I remembered then too that there are places in Australia that do, in fact, have seasons. 

Just past that, as I started to wonder when I would again have to cross, a bridge appeared and I stepped back up away from the river and onto the roadside, getting over the street at a fast little green man. Over the bridge I went left down to what I recall to be Pipemaker’s Park. I remember this where I’ve had to write placeholders for the names of the other parks and reserves through which I ran because the warehouse past which I entered into the place was the kind of derelict beauty I’ve not seen since Europe. Heritage listed according to a sign whose headline was all I could read.

I followed the water’s edge for a way before I realised I needed to cut across back west to start bringing this thing to an end without getting lost or winding myself sort of uselessly and aimlessly about the park. I cut across some small trails over beaten tracks and I passed what seemed to be a couple on an early date. I remark on this because I thought I was imagining what was atop her legs but it really was the bottom of her ass just, like, hanging right out. To each their own I guess. I stepped around them and onto dirt steps up to the winding road through the park that came all uphill, naturally, towards Highpoint at whose hotel I’d ended up having lunch a few hours ago. 

From there it was all pretty straightforward: get to the roundabout the top lefthand corner of the park, run around it to the right which was maybe not ideal given that I wound up on the left side of the road before I crossed over to run past closed shopfronts with the sun starting, finally, to set. I got the edge of the shopping precinct, Bunnings ahead of me and diagonally over the intersection, and I ran past that odd accumulation of warehouses past which tram tracks trundled and at the edge of the street was, to the right, Quest Maribyrnong where I’d started.

For service, the Quest was fine. But the Maribyrnong run, half track and half trail, was gorgeous and if I was to find myself in Melbourne again on a Sunday runday — and the more I visit Melbourne the more I like it… — I might even find myself tackling a full 21 kilometres along its winding banks with a bit more preparation, a similar amount of fuel, and much less being in my head about the whole thing. And when I say “if” I was to find myself in Melbourne again…