Wattle Glen: Hills, snakes and one shop in this sleepy suburb ripe for tree-changers

It’s hard luck being the neighbouring suburb to Diamond Creek. How can wattle ever compete with diamonds?

Wattle Glen the suburb doesn’t even boast a particularly large number of wattles. This small bushy ‘burb sits between aforementioned Diamond Creek, and the “end of the line” suburb of Hustbridge. In fact, if you’re looking for the main shopping precinct of Wattle Glen, you’ll probably accidentally end up in Hurstbridge itself. Wattle Glen doesn’t even have a shopping strip.

So, apart from the train station (which seems to consist mostly of a portable cop shop, thanks PSOs and the former state government), what is in Wattle Glen?

Well, snakes, according to Diamond Creek local Mark “the Snake Hunter” Pelley. “I find tiger snakes almost all over Melbourne, especially in Wattle Glen, Eltham and Diamond Creek area,” he reports. But don’t get too cocky, inner-city folk. Pelley says they’re very common in inner suburbs like Northcote, Fairfield and Ivanhoe, too.

Glen Ferrarotto moved from Eltham onto a large property in Wattle Glen last month, and found himself with an interesting mid-winter house-warming present

“I’d had the keys for two days and was moving some building materials from around the house and heard an audible hiss from under a piece of wood,” the new resident says. “I went back to have another look, and lo and behold, a small tiger snake popped his head up again and hissed at me!”

Ferrarotto’s wife called up The Snake Hunter, and, while waiting the few minutes for him to arrive, the family of four practiced their “snake drill”.

“I didn’t expect to see one this time of year,” says Ferrarotto. “We’re likely to see them in summer, we have two dams, and I’m happy to have snakes in and around the property – that’s a given where we live. But that close to the house is not ideal!”

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Wattle Glen isn’t all bush blocks. Head up or down Kamarooka Drive and it’s full-frontal suburbia, albeit very hilly. Expect power lines and large, almost bumper-to-bumper brick houses. Kamarooka Drive brings you straight down Main Hurstbridge Road to Diamond Valley. Live here and you don’t really get even a bit of a country feel on the daily commute.

It’s the location and easy commute that drew the Ferrarottos to the hood. “It’s a very convenient place to live,” says Glen. “We have a young family and we were very keen to enable an upbringing on some property that kept us close enough to the airport, and the city, so that my wife and I could get to work.” For this family, Wattle Glen provided the “perfect postcode”, right in between the Yarra Valley and inner city suburbs.

There’s some fun to be had on Wattle Glen’s back roads. Head up (and down, and up) the Reynolds Road roller coaster to Lorimer Road and you’ll feel like you’ve truly hit the country, with llamas (or alpacas) and the odd cow (the Ferrarottos’ new property came complete with two). There are plenty of horse-statues on the gates.

Lorimer Road is home to one of the few Wattle Glen homes for sale right now. Number 10 is a bucolic mudbrick home with features including Ironbark repurposed from railway bridges and the Port of Adelaide … oh no, it sounds like the fitout of a hipster cafe already. Watch out Wattle Glen, the tree-changers may be on their way.

Four things you didn’t know about Wattle Glen:

• It’s a small burb, made up of some 500 families.
• The street sign on Main Hurstbridge Road says “shop”, and it’s completely accurate: Pepper’s Paddock, which does coffee, food and newspapers, is the one and only shop in town.
• The Wattle Festival on Sunday, August 27 has steam train shuttle rides from Hurstbridge to Eltham on the day of the festival (selling fast!).
• The Wattle Glen Memorial Park recently benefited from a renovation to its facilities – though its oval looks drier than concrete.