We went to Highpoint Shopping Centre, 120-200 Rosamond Road, Maribyrnong, Victoria, fairly regularly growing up, since it was much bigger and better than our local Werribee Plaza, now Pacific Werribee, ever was. It was always the west’s answer to Chadstone, never quite as big or as fancy, but a lot faster to get to from where we lived. Toys “R” Us, the arcade, the cinemas, the video game stores, that was the real drawcard. I don’t get out to Highpoint nearly as much these days though, Pacific Werribee has picked up a lot of the same stores over a couple of rounds of renovations and expansions, so there’s less reason to make the trip. But Highpoint still holds some great memories from the 90s and early 2000s, the kind of place people from all over Melbourne still look back on fondly, not just people from the west.
I started out just writing down my own memories of the place, but once I began digging around online I realised I’d barely scratched the surface. There’s a whole layer of old Highpoint that I either never saw, was too young to remember properly, or just plain forgot about until someone else brought it up.
So I went looking through r/melbourne threads where people had been swapping Highpoint memories for years, and between all of that, a bit of my own digging, and some great old photos people have shared, here’s everything I could piece together about the old Highpoint we all grew up going to. Old posts from Facebook groups like Australia’s Retail History, Old Shops Australia, Oz 90s 00s Nostalgia, and Australian 90s 00s Nostalgia turned out to be just as useful, if any of this kind of thing interests you, they’re well worth joining and getting involved in, not just following from the sidelines.
A quick note on the photos themselves: I’ve credited sources where I could, but a lot of these came from years of Reddit threads, Facebook nostalgia groups, and other people’s own personal collections, so I’m honestly not confident I know who owns the copyright on all of them. Plenty of them have been reposted across several different platforms over the years, often with no original source attached, so working out who actually took them is close to impossible in a lot of cases. I’m not trying to take credit for anyone else’s photos here. If any of the images below are yours and you’d like to be credited, or you’d rather I take it down, just message me on Facebook and I’ll sort it out straight away.
Highpoint West under construction, crane still up.
The Footscray Advertiser’s front page from 30 July 1975, previewing the $12 million opening.
The History of Highpoint Before It Was a Shopping Centre
Before any of this, the site was a working basalt quarry, operated by the City of Essendon from 1910 until it closed in the late 1960s. During the Second World War the area was used by anti-aircraft searchlight units helping defend Melbourne, which makes sense given the munitions works sitting just up the road at Maribyrnong and Maidstone. The 50-acre site changed hands around 1971 in a deal worth $1.85 million, and Highpoint West opened on top of it just four years later, well before I was even born. My own memories only really start in the early-to-mid 90s, and that’s where most of the focus of this piece sits, but I’ve included some of this older trivia for anyone reading who’s older than me and remembers this era firsthand, it’s not something I can speak to with much confidence myself.
Myer not long after the 1975 opening.
The original Target store around opening.
The Old Highpoint Drive-In Cinema (1955 to 1990)
The old drive-in itself, concession building and speaker posts.
Before Hoyts had its own cinemas at Highpoint, there was a proper drive-in just across the road, on Rosamond Road. It opened as the Sunset Drive-In on 28 July 1955, was taken over and renamed the Maribyrnong Hoyts Drive-In in 1967, and finally closed in 1990, a year after Hoyts’ own 10-screen cinema opened inside Highpoint itself in February 1989. The drive-in was eventually knocked down and the site is a Homemaker Centre now.
What Highpoint Shopping Centre Looked Like in the 1970s
Before getting into the specific shops and rides, it’s worth just looking at what the inside of the place looked like. Terrazzo floors, timber panelling, hanging light fittings, and shoppers dressed like they were heading somewhere formal rather than just picking up groceries.
Brashs and Edments, part of the original tenant mix.
Suzanne and the famous escalators, with the centre court signage overhead.
Going to Highpoint as a Kid
Once I was old enough to remember any of it, going to Highpoint was a proper family outing, usually with my mum, my sister, and my grandmother, and it always felt like a special treat compared to our own local Werribee Plaza. After Toys “R” Us started running Pokemon League, that became a near-weekly fixture for as long as it lasted. Lunch was almost always in the old food court too, right near the fountain and its statues.
The Old Highpoint Mini-Golf Course and Arcade
The desert and cactus section. The cinema board in the background lists Three Musketeers, Backdraft, and Assassins, putting this at around 1995.
This one comes up in nearly every thread about old Highpoint, and it’s clearly the single most missed thing about the place. There was a mini-golf course down in the basement level, roughly where the cinemas are now, and by the sound of it, it was a proper night out for a lot of people, not just a kids’ thing. u/Reva747 described it as a Saturday night hangout for games, mini golf, slot cars and pool, while u/gameloner remembered a pub and a TAB sitting opposite the course. u/Hypo_Mix mentioned a friend who services the cooling system at Highpoint having seen bits of the old mini-golf gear still sitting in storage several years ago, which is a strangely nice thought.
The tropical section, palm trees and hole 12.
I remember it strongly, though mostly from above, I used to look down at the course from the floor upstairs, and the cacti and the mannequin of a man in a golf cart have stuck with me more than the actual golf. I’m not sure if I ever played a proper round down there or not, I must have at some point, but looking down at it is the clearer memory. I don’t remember playing on the pirate ship either, though I can vaguely picture it existing.
The train track and carnival tent.
Down there with it was an arcade, and the one machine I remember clearly was the crocodile game, the crocodile-whacking cabinet where the heads slide out sideways rather than popping straight up like they do in a regular Whac-A-Mole. Namco released the original in Japan in 1988 as Wani Wani Panic, and it went out overseas as Wacky Gator, so by the time I was playing it at Highpoint it had already been around the arcade circuit for years. There was a later sequel called Wacky Gator Too around 2000, but the one I remember would have been the original. My whole family used to gang up on it together, all of us hitting specific crocodiles at once to rack up way more tickets than the machine was ever meant to give out, a proper bit of family teamwork in service of some low-level cheating. Other people remember this arcade as Playtime, which apparently later became a Timezone, and it’s still trading under the Timezone name today.
The crocodile game in action, exactly this style of cabinet.
Not the actual prize, just an example of what a plasma globe looks like, image via an Amazon Australia product listing. These are cheap and easy to buy online now, though the one pictured is likely smaller than the ones on offer at the time.
The real dream prize behind that ticket counter was always the plasma globe, one of those glass spheres with the electric filaments swirling around inside when you touched it. It was priced well out of reach for the amount of tickets I ever managed to rack up. Lava lamps were the other big want at the time, though you didn’t need an arcade’s worth of tickets for one of those, they were also just sitting on the shelves at shops like What’s New.
Running alongside the mini-golf course was a miniature train ride that circled the whole area. A few people in these threads had convinced themselves they’d imagined the little train, one saying they’d sworn for years it was a fever dream because nobody else they knew remembered it, until u/nowandagain_4eva and others confirmed it was real.
I managed to track down proof all of this existed, straight from Highpoint’s own website. An archived version of the site from June 2000 advertised something called the Funtastic Fun Pack, six dollars for a ride on the carousel, a ride on the train, half an hour at a kids’ play area called Kidmania, a game of billiards, a ride on Cinemotion at Hoyts, a game of mini-golf, a kids’ video game at a store called Video Game Play, and a kids’ meal at the Pancake Parlour. By the time of a later archive from August 2003, Highpoint’s site lists Playtime, which is the name most people seem to remember. Whether that was an earlier name for the same place, a different operator, or just Highpoint listing it oddly, I couldn’t say, and Kidmania is a completely new one to me either way, a whole separate kids’ play area I clearly never made it to. People who remember it describe a play centre for kids under 12 on the bottom floor, and have placed it roughly where the JB Hi-Fi on Level 1 is now.
Going back recently, that bottom level is now part of a dining and entertainment precinct called The Junction, which has the cinemas, bowling lanes, around fifteen food places and half a dozen dessert shops in it. Sitting down in the middle of it is a sushi train, Sushi Jiro, right about where I remember looking down at the mini-golf from. So the view is still there, it’s just people working through plates of sushi at the bottom of it now rather than cacti and a mannequin in a golf cart.
Looking down at the sushi train from a few levels up.
There’s also black safety netting strung across the void above it now, presumably so nothing thrown or dropped from the upper levels lands on anyone eating below. I don’t remember anything like that over the mini-golf, though to be fair, nobody was having dinner down there.
The netting over the void, with the sushi train below and a kiddie ride up top.
The same netting from underneath, standing at the sushi train.
The Picasso Fountain and Statues at Old Highpoint
The fountain and its Picasso-style face, up close.
I mentioned the food court water feature I remembered, and this is exactly the one, a fountain with what people describe as a funky, almost Picasso-esque sculpture built right into it. Like every fountain of that kind, people used to throw their coins in, and I always had my eye on them, though I’m fairly sure I never worked up the nerve to fish any out myself. Some people thought it was the similar looking, but different, statue at Southbank once it was removed during renovations, though that’s not actually the same piece. The statues did survive though, and they’re still at Highpoint, which I only worked out while I was out taking photos for this piece.
There was also a fountain near Target that other people remember fondly, plus a merry-go-round that u/nuttypip places in the middle of the food court near the McDonald’s. That’s most likely the same carousel the Fun Pack was selling rides on. Between that and the train down by the mini-golf, Highpoint in the 90s had more rides going than some regional showgrounds.
The same fountain and food court, wider view.
A 2003 archive of Highpoint’s own food and dining directory backs up at least one specific memory from earlier, a kebab shop called Ali Baba, which matches what u/Zodiak213 remembered too, just with the name spelled slightly differently, and I remember it myself as well, so that one’s confirmed. That same 2003 list also includes Finnegan’s Irish Pub, which I’m fairly sure was on the ground floor near the mini-golf course. Finnegan’s was still on the store list as late as 2008, so it clearly had some staying power.
The same spot today, now an indoor playground.
The space the fountain used to occupy has since become the indoor kids’ playground shown above.
Where the Old Highpoint Fountain Statues Ended Up
The plaque next to the sculptures, out near Toymate.
The statues are outside these days, in the garden beds near Toymate. They’re a set of tiled mosaic pieces called Family, by artist Deborah Halpern, installed back in 1995. Each face is its own distinct piece in bold, different colours, meant to reflect the diverse, everyday community that actually uses Highpoint, but they’re all intricately connected as one larger work.
Tracking them down took longer than it should have. I walked out of a lot of different exits having a look around and came up with nothing each time, then found them completely by accident on the way to Tom’s Confectionery Warehouse, the giant lolly shop next door to Toymate.
One of the individual faces that make up the Family sculpture.
The yellow and pink face below is the same piece standing in the middle of the fountain in that photo further up, so you can compare the two yourself. My first reaction on finally standing in front of them was that they looked much smaller than I remembered, but that’s just the trick of the thing, I was a much smaller person at the time and they were raised up on the base in the middle of the fountain, so of course they loomed over me. Sitting in a garden bed at ground level, they’re nowhere near as imposing.
Another of the faces, a completely different colour palette again.
The yellow and pink face, with another of the sculptures behind it.
Cinemotion: The Old Motion Simulator Ride at Hoyts Highpoint
A real voucher ad for Cinemotion at Hoyts Highpoint.
Before Highpoint’s Hoyts had the Director’s Suite, it had something called Cinemotion, a motion simulator ride where the seats moved along with a short film. u/Guido_Anchovy remembers it running a roller coaster through space or a dinosaur forest, and the marketing going for what felt like forever before the thing actually opened.
Not Highpoint, just an example of the kind of motion simulator experience Cinemotion would have been. Photo credit: Panorama Langkawi, via Klook.
Reviews of the ride itself were mixed, some found it genuinely thrilling, others thought it started fine and then got a bit much towards the end for something that was over in a few minutes and cost about the same as a real movie ticket. Our own local cinema growing up was Village at Werribee Plaza rather than Hoyts, so the two chains running different promotional tie-ins for the same films was something I noticed even as a kid.
Toys “R” Us at Highpoint: Pokemon League and Childhood Memories
The Highpoint store during its 2018 closing down sale. Screenshot credit to a YouTube video documenting Toys “R” Us stores as they closed down.
Toys “R” Us was the main event of most of my trips to Highpoint, not an aside. My best friend at the time, Anthony, and his little brother would head straight for Pokemon League to earn promo cards, and I’d usually tag along, while our two mums and our little sisters went off for coffee and to buy Beanie Kids at Kenny’s Cardiology. Looking back, we were completely unsupervised for a fair stretch of each visit, and nobody seemed to think twice about it at the time.
I liked the video game section of the store just as much as the card game side of things, and I’ve got a hazy memory of eventually picking up a couple of extra Pokemon League badges from a separate, older video game store down in the basement, after the official Toys “R” Us League events had already stopped running. My best guess is that whoever ran that little store had just been given the leftover promo stock once Toys “R” Us wound the events down, and was quietly handing it out to anyone who asked.
Star Wars figures were a regular purchase there through the mid-90s too, especially once the Special Edition re-releases hit cinemas in 1997 and demand ramped up again ahead of Episode I in 1999. I also picked up a few Nintendo 64 games on clearance at Toys “R” Us, they’d occasionally run some great deals on old stock once newer titles came in. There was also a photo kiosk in store for Pokemon Snap, the N64 game where you photograph Pokemon rather than battle them, that would print your best in-game shots onto little sticker sheets, a clever bit of tie-in merchandising for a game that was really just a glorified photography sim.
Toys “R” Us itself, which was still trading at Highpoint as late as 2012, closed during the 2018 nationwide wind-down that followed its parent company’s collapse, a process completed by 5 August that year. I’d originally wondered if the Highpoint store might have shut earlier than that on its own, but the closing-down photo above confirms it went under alongside every other Toys “R” Us in the country, not before. We did eventually get a Toys “R” Us at Pacific Werribee, but not until around 2017, by which point I was well into adulthood and had long stopped making the trip to Highpoint regularly anyway. It barely lasted, going in the same 2018 wind-down about a year later, so our local one was gone almost as soon as we got it.
Toyworld and Zig Zag: Old Highpoint Toy Stores
Before Toys “R” Us took over the toy market, there was apparently a toy store near one of the Myer entrances that people remember as either Toyworld or Zig Zag, sitting alongside a small cluster of arcade machines. u/otmshank_uk couldn’t pin the name down either, but remembers buying Ghostbusters figures there and playing Wonderboy on the machines nearby. Toyworld and Zig Zag were run out of the same stable, and this was right when the Australian toy market got a lot more crowded, with Toys “R” Us and World 4 Kids both expanding hard. Whether any of that had anything to do with the Highpoint store vanishing, I couldn’t tell you.
Toyworld did come back to Highpoint much later on, and for a few years it was the store filling the gap Toys “R” Us left behind after 2018. That one didn’t last either. Toymate opened its Highpoint store in late October 2022, and the Toyworld disappeared a little while after that. I don’t know that one caused the other, but two toy shops that size in the one centre always felt like a lot.
Jazzies and What’s New: Old Highpoint Shops We Miss
A What’s New storefront, same purple and yellow branding throughout the chain.
A couple of smaller shops keep coming up as background detail to bigger nights out at Highpoint. Jazzies was the definite go-to for lollies before a movie, and it was located right by the cinemas themselves, back when the cinemas didn’t sell much beyond popcorn and drinks. Once the cinemas put in their own pick n mix counters, Jazzies would have lost a solid chunk of its trade more or less overnight, because there’s not much reason to duck out to a separate shop when the same thing is sitting right there on the way into the session. Whether that’s what finished it off I couldn’t tell you, but it can’t have helped. What’s New was a gift shop remembered for its Garfield telephones and neon signs, magic 8 balls and fibre optic lamps too, exactly the kind of shop that felt exciting purely because of what was sitting in the window, and it also stocked Beanie Kids alongside Kenny’s Cardiology, so it might have been where my sister actually got some of hers.
The Old Disney Store at Highpoint Shopping Centre
A Disney Store interior, likely not the actual Highpoint store but representative of the vibe.
u/katiedelaneyx remembered the Disney shop near the food court simply as magical, and that’s exactly how it felt to me too. Other people describe a giant pile of plush toys sitting in the middle of the store that you could dig through. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that sticks in a kid’s memory far more than whatever was on the shelves.
The ABC Shop at Highpoint
Not to be confused with the Disney Store, there was also an ABC Shop at Highpoint, the retail arm of the national broadcaster, stocking merchandise for ABC and Nickelodeon shows of the era. This is where I used to linger over the Aaahh!! Real Monsters toys without ever quite talking anyone into buying me one. Back then that sort of merchandise had its own shop, rather than a shelf in the toy aisle of a department store. It was still on Highpoint’s own store list as late as 2008, so it clearly stuck around for years after my own visits. That same 2008 list also has a Teach ‘M’ Toys, an educational toy shop I know nothing else about, Starshots Glamour Photography, a portrait studio that was apparently still going strong that year too, and Australian Geographic, which we’d duck into occasionally, more of a browse-and-leave kind of shop than a regular stop.
The Sand Bottle and Rice Necklace Cart
One of the more oddly specific memories that turned up, from u/PiyoPiyoDuck among others, was a cart somewhere on the lower level selling colourful layered sand bottles and glass necklaces filled with fluorescent liquid, with your name hand-written on a single grain of rice inside. If you’ve never seen one of these, they were everywhere at shopping centres and fairs throughout the 90s, and by the sound of it, more than one person still wishes they’d kept theirs. I remember it, though it was never really my kind of thing at the time. What strikes me more now, looking back, is how rarely I see those little novelty kiosk carts in shopping centres anymore, sand bottles, rice necklaces, or otherwise.
The Old Spiral Staircase and Glass Lift at Highpoint
Out the front of Myer there was a spiral staircase curling around the big glass elevator, and between the two of them, that was how you got up and down in that corner of the centre. That part of the centre goes back to Highpoint’s early years, though the layout there changed a fair bit over time.
The staircase is long gone, but the glass elevator is still there and still doing the same job. My son Charlie was more interested in riding up and down in it on our recent visit than in anything we’d actually come to look at.
Charlie in the glass lift outside Myer, the one the old spiral staircase used to wrap around.
Centre Stage: Highpoint’s Live Music and Celebrity History
Centre Stage packed out on both levels, the oldest of these three photos.
Highpoint had a performance stage inside it, hosting live music and events, and I’d half wondered whether I was mixing it up with another centre until the old photos turned up. It was officially on Level 1, and also referred to as the Highpoint Stage depending on the event. I don’t think I ever stopped and watched anything on it, though I passed it plenty of times on the escalators heading up or down to Toys “R” Us, which was on the level above. One local described it as the spot for band performances and meet-and-greets with musicians early in their careers, and Santa also used to set up there every Christmas. The stage area is still there today, just remodelled so many times over the decades that it looks nothing like it did back then.
Quick word on all the names below. This lot came from Highpoint’s own archived website, old event listings, promotional material, photos, Reddit threads, Facebook groups and people’s own memories. I’ve cross-checked what I could, but we’re going back more than twenty years here, so I wouldn’t bet my life on every date. Where Highpoint’s own site lists something, that’s about as solid as it gets. Some of the rest comes down to people remembering being there.
Highpoint’s own archived news pages show Centre Stage was a massive deal for a good chunk of the early 2000s, closer to what you’d expect from an entertainment venue than a shopping centre foyer. In 2001 alone it hosted signing and performance appearances from Bardot, Sugababes, Vanessa Amorosi, Human Nature, Blue, and Nikki Webster, along with Tina Arena, who u/gavotron remembered seeing sing there. That same year, Santa arrived by helicopter, was escorted in by Humphrey B Bear, Maisy, and the Maribyrnong Highland Pipe Band, and settled into a purpose-built Christmas Palace for a full stage show called the Highpoint Christmas Starblast, starring Debra Byrne among others. Meet-and-greets with cast members from Home & Away also happened right there on Centre Stage. Ricki-Lee made her own Highpoint appearance on 4 February 2006, a little over a year after her run on Australian Idol’s second season in 2004, by which point she was well into building a music career of her own beyond the show.
Back in 2002, the programme kept up the same pace, with Star Search heats running most weekends through winter, plus appearances from Shakaya, TaxiRide, and even a live Kung Fu demonstration from the Shaolin Monks. Not everything happened on the stage itself either, cricketer Mark Waugh did an in-store appearance at Angus & Robertson, world boxing champion Kostya Tszyu turned up at Rebel Sport, and a band called The Hammerheads, probably a local act rather than anyone nationally known, played a gig inside the What’s New store. By 2006, Star Search was still running as an annual competition. That same July, there was also a full Barbie “Dreams Come True” live stage show. October that year was especially stacked, with the cast of sketch comedy show The Wedge appearing live on stage on the 20th, radio and TV personality Matt Tilley bringing his Gotcha prank segment in store the next day, and American pop singer Jesse McCartney performing live at Highpoint on the 31st.
A JB Hi-Fi Presents performance, Fox FM branding on the stage skirt, Safeway signage placing this well before the Woolworths rebrand.
By December 2006, the Christmas programming had grown into an almost absurdly packed schedule spread across what was by then being called the L2 Living precinct, a newer part of the centre added at some point after the original Centre Stage era, with evening performances and roving daytime entertainment running most days for the whole month. The following January, Highpoint also ran a nice little community fundraiser called Design-A-Brick, where anyone could donate two dollars to design their own brick at Centre Court in front of Centre Stage, with the money going to Western Health for hospital equipment across Footscray, Sunshine, and Williamstown, and the finished bricks later paved into the L2 Living precinct’s streetscape. It’s the same basic idea as the personalised bricks in the pavement near the Werribee River, or the fence posts at Presidents Park in Werribee with my name and my sister’s name on them, that kind of small-donation, name-on-something fundraiser for public spaces was everywhere at the time.
A section of the Design-A-Brick pavement, still there today.
There was also a giant swimming pool at one point, or at least the illusion of one. In early 2002 the centre court area was transformed by Garry Donnellan, a local artist working out of Iconoclast Sculpture Studio, into a giant painted mural designed to look like a swimming pool, created as a work in progress over several weeks before being donated to charity for auction.
An archived version of the Highpoint site from April 2000 has British pop singer Tina Cousins, who’d had a top-10 hit in Australia a couple of years earlier with “Pray,” playing Centre Stage on 14 April that year. David Hamilton’s Puppets, a touring children’s puppet show rather than a household name, performed there twice daily for most of the following week, and a Parenting Services Expo took over the surrounding Level 2 and 3 area for a stretch earlier in the month. In 2003, Highpoint was also used to promote that year’s Formula One, with a Kmart Holden Racing Team V8 Supercar and a Jaguar F1 car on display, and u/TaxiSonoQui was pretty sure they met Mark Webber and Greg Murphy there on the same day.
The Grand Prix got more than one run at it. An early February 2003 events page has a whole “Grand Prix Action” promotion running for four days at Centre Court, complete with a driving simulator, more F1 cars on display, and celebrity appearances timed to lead into that year’s Australian Grand Prix. The same month had Channel 10 running a Superstars of Summer promotion with branded Kombi vans parked outside the Riverbank food court entrance handing out McDonald’s vouchers, and another Country Food & Wine Expo back on Centre Stage with proper cooking demonstrations. Guy Sebastian and Rove McManus both made appearances that December too, Guy Sebastian’s timing checks out particularly well, since he’d only just won the very first season of Australian Idol the previous month. Highpoint also hosted Steve-O from Jackass in March 2004, right around the peak of the franchise’s popularity.
A later Highpoint-branded portable stage setup, a long way from the Centre Stage of the early 2000s.
People have also since told me about a whole run of WWE meet-and-greets that used to happen on the bottom level through the 2000s, which I had no memory of at all. Mick Foley signed there in 1999, John Cena and Torrie Wilson drew hundreds for a WrestleMania Revenge signing in 2005, with people remembering queues stretching from Level 1 out into the car park, Beth Phoenix appeared around 2006 or 2007 near where JB Hi-Fi is now, and CM Punk and Kofi Kingston are both remembered signing in 2011 while the WWE tour was in Melbourne, with Kofi’s appearance placed at Big W rather than on Centre Stage itself. One person also mentioned still having an album poster signed by Destiny’s Child and a DVD signed by John Cena from these same appearances. On top of that, Angry Boys, Chris Lilley’s TV series, filmed a concert scene for the character S.mouse at Highpoint, with at least one local roped in as an extra on the day.
Highpoint kept pulling in seriously big names well after my own visits stopped too. Khloe Kardashian did a public meet and greet there on 20 November 2013, promoting the Kardashian Kollection range, with hundreds of fans queuing and the whole thing filmed for Keeping Up with the Kardashians. People have also remembered appearances by The Wiggles and Hi-5, although I haven’t yet found an archived Highpoint listing confirming either one. Plenty of kids’ entertainment acts toured shopping centres in that era, so it would fit.
The Centre Stage Area at Highpoint Today
The same central void today, looking down at the timber steps.
Standing in that part of the centre now, the layout is noticeably different to how I remember it. The escalators run alongside the steps these days, where they used to cross in opposite directions across the middle of the void. That’s not just my memory playing tricks either, you can see them angling down either side of the crowd in both the black and white shot and the JB Hi-Fi photo further up.
The stage seems to have moved around a fair bit over the years too. I mostly remember it over near JB Hi-Fi, which is where it turns up in the later photos, but in the older shots it’s set up against those crossing escalators instead. So it may never have had one permanent home so much as a few spots it got built in, depending on what was on.
The timber steps in the old Centre Stage area, these days somewhere to sit.
There’s now a wide set of timber steps running up to the next level, and they’re built as seating rather than as a way of getting anywhere. There are always people sitting on them, eating lunch, waiting for someone, or just hanging around for a while, and they work as an amphitheatre for whatever’s happening at the bottom of them.
The escalators as they run now, alongside the steps rather than across the void.
As for whether they still put shows on there, I went looking and came up empty. Highpoint’s current What’s Happening page doesn’t turn up live performances, their Ticketebo event page has nothing listed at all, and there aren’t any recent event photos around either. Nothing in the current programme looks anything like the steady run of appearances it was putting on in the early 2000s, though I’d be glad to be corrected if that sort of thing is still going.
Rebel Sport’s Basketball Giveaway
When Rebel Sport opened at Highpoint around 1995, people remember it handing out full-sized basketballs to shoppers, with the queue reportedly stretching well past the store itself. Branded giveaways were everywhere at the time, but a full-sized basketball each is a lot more generous than the sort of thing you’d expect to be handed at a store opening now.
Borders at Highpoint
Inside a Borders store, the kind of layout the Highpoint location would have had too.
For anyone too young to remember, Borders was a big American book and media chain that traded in Australia from the late 90s through the 2000s, the kind of place with couches for reading, a massive magazine section, and usually a CD and DVD department alongside the books. I loved going to Borders stores on trips to the US as a kid and teenager, it was a great shop, and it’s a shame the Highpoint one is long gone along with the rest of the Australian chain. The Highpoint store also had a Gloria Jean’s set up inside it, which was a pretty standard pairing for Borders locations around the country at the time.
The chain’s collapse here wasn’t quite the same story as the American one. By that stage the Australian stores were run by a separate company, REDgroup Retail, which went into administration in February 2011, around the same time the US parent went under. Highpoint’s store was one of the ones marked for closing during all that. Borders also hosted a lot of author signings and events over the years, though none of the specific names that turned up in my research were ones I actually recognised, so I’ve left them out rather than list a string of names that won’t mean anything to most readers.
Borders wasn’t even the only bookshop at Highpoint either, an Angus & Robertson hosted its own author signings there too, and Collins Booksellers and Dymocks both show up on later store lists, so Highpoint has had a fair few bookshops come and go. u/dancing-on-my-own had a fond memory of their whole family signing up to Borders’ mailing lists with multiple email addresses one Christmas, specifically to rack up several sets of discount coupons, though I doubt that particular trick would work on anyone these days.
Old Highpoint Electronics Stores We Miss
A 2006 store list shows just how much shelf space Highpoint gave over to electronics and entertainment retail at the time, Dick Smith Electronics, EB Games, Ezy DVD, Game Rush, Godfreys, Geek Central, JB Hi-Fi, Radio Rentals, Sanity Music, Strathfield Car Radio, Ted’s Camera Store, The Shaver Shop, and Video Ezy were all trading at once. I really miss this era of electronics retail, that wide range of separate specialist stores made a proper outing of it, and there was a thrill to hunting around for a good deal across half a dozen different shops. Most of that has since been swallowed up by a much smaller number of shops, mainly JB Hi-Fi and EB Games, which is convenient, but it’s taken a lot of the thrill out of the hunt.
The Pancake Parlour at Highpoint
There was apparently a giant teacup-shaped piece of decor inside the Pancake Parlour at Highpoint, along with a large wall mural, and going by how many people specifically remember it without being able to find a single photo of it anywhere online, it sounds like exactly the kind of restaurant decor from that era that nobody thought to write down or photograph at the time. Honestly, I have trouble telling my memories of the Highpoint Pancake Parlour apart from the one in the city, both were far better themed than any newer Pancake Parlour I’ve been to since, better novelties, better decorations, the newer ones feel comparatively plain.
The thing I remember most clearly is the large chess set, with a set of fancy chairs around it. The city one definitely had one, I can picture it exactly, and I’ve always assumed Highpoint did too, though that’s one of those details I can’t separate cleanly between the two anymore. If you remember whether the Highpoint store had the chess set, that’s another one I’d love to have settled.
Kenny’s Cardiology
My sister used to buy Beanie Kids dolls, Skansen’s Australian answer to Beanie Babies, from Kenny’s Cardiology, a cards, gifts and variety franchise that had been in Australian shopping centres since 1986.
Highpoint’s 1993 Smoking Ban Controversy
Here’s a small piece of trivia from well before my own time at Highpoint. In December 1993, The Canberra Times ran a story about a regular Highpoint shopper named Merryn Wild, who’d suffered wheezing fits she attributed to passive smoking exposure at the centre, and threatened legal action over it. She specifically mentioned her nine-month-old daughter Phoebe being susceptible to the same kind of reaction. Highpoint’s manager at the time, Neville Mathews, confirmed they were investigating a full non-smoking policy for the entire centre the following year, and Wild’s solicitor, Eugene Arocca, called it out as strange that smoking centres would set aside non-smoking zones at all when a passive smoker couldn’t avoid the rest of the venue anyway. This was 1993, about eight years before Victoria got around to banning smoking in enclosed places like shopping centres, and years before the pubs and clubs followed. Somebody threatening to sue over passive smoking that far ahead of the law is an odd thing to read back now.
Peppermint Planet Club
Highpoint also had its own kids’ club, called Peppermint Planet Club, run out of the Level 2 and Level 3 information desks with free offers and giveaways for members, per that same June 2000 site archive mentioned earlier. I’d completely forgotten this existed at all until I saw it come up there.
Highpoint’s American Express Card
Here’s an odd one. That same June 2000 site archive has Highpoint billing itself as the first shopping centre in Australia to offer its own co-branded American Express credit card, complete with an 8.95% introductory rate for six months, a 15.50% standard rate after that, and the first year’s card fee waived.
Build-A-Bear at Highpoint
Build-A-Bear also had, and still has, a store at Highpoint, and going by how much space it took up on the old archived versions of the site, all those event listings and new doll announcements, Highpoint pushed it hard. Build-A-Bear’s first two Australian stores opened in Sydney in late 2004, at Bondi Junction and Castle Hill Towers, so Highpoint wasn’t the first in the country, but it looks like it was one of the earlier ones.
Being Robbed at Highpoint Shopping Centre: A True Story
Not every Highpoint memory is a good one. Around 2007, when I was about 19, my friend Chris and I were the kind of nice, helpful guys who thought we were doing the right thing by stopping when a group asked us for directions to an ATM, before it became clear what they were actually after, I think they were hoping to get us to withdraw money for them, but we were poor, unemployed uni students at the time, so there wasn’t much to get out of us that way. It happened outside, right about where Chickita is now, for anyone who knows the centre. I’ve never worked out why we ended up out there in the first place, the ATMs were near the doors and I’m fairly sure they were actually inside.
It turned into a minor robbery instead, the group of six to eight teenagers demanded cigarettes, and when we didn’t have any, one of them told me to hand over my iPod or he’d break my earphones. They also roughed Chris up a bit in the process, he ended up battered and bruised, nothing serious, but we did want to show the marks to police that day. The group were white, likely a mix of Italian and Greek background, not black, which I mention because people so often assume crime in the area is committed by people from African countries. Since the earphones were already basically done for at that point, I just disconnected them and let him take those instead, I kept the iPod itself. They patted us down looking for cigarettes as well. I still remember, almost twenty years later, that “Misunderstood” by Razed in Black was playing in my ear right as it happened.
The whole thing happened directly in front of a security camera, and I remember walking back to the exact spot with security afterwards to show them it was clearly in view of one. There’s still a camera out there today, though having checked recently, it’s not quite in the spot I remember it being. Walking around with security guards like that was oddly embarrassing in itself, anyone who saw us probably assumed we were the ones who’d done something wrong.
What I remember almost as clearly as the incident itself is how useless the response was afterwards. Highpoint’s own security staff told us they couldn’t review the footage without police instruction, and weren’t sure themselves how to actually get to the nearest police station. The random shop staff we asked were no better, none of them were from the area either, so nobody could point us in the right direction. This was 2007, so neither of us had a smartphone to look it up. We ended up reporting it at Werribee police station instead, well outside their jurisdiction, and nothing ever came of it, looking back, it’s pretty poor that they never even forwarded the complaint on to Footscray so the footage could actually be reviewed. Chris is a police officer himself these days, and I’d like to think he gives people a more useful response than we got that day. This kind of thing, low-level teen crime paired with security that couldn’t do much about it, is a big part of why Highpoint picked up nicknames like Knifepoint and Lowpoint over the years. It also kept me away from the place for years afterwards, that day left me with a real phobia of Highpoint for a long while.
How Highpoint’s Atriums and Skylights Changed
This one doesn’t come up much in the nostalgia threads, but it jumps out the moment you put old photos next to new ones. The older Highpoint was all white painted steel and curved, barrel-vaulted glass, which made the place feel much brighter and softer than it does now. Most of that has been swapped out for sharp angular glass on dark steel. Here’s one of the strips, before and after.
A different part of the centre again, the main atrium, went exactly the same way. These next two are the same spot as each other. The older one is dressed up for Christmas, white and ornate, with a big toy display built at ground level and the escalators running up through the middle of the void, that older arrangement again. The newer one is the same space with a big arched dome of dark steel and glass over it, the escalators pushed out to the sides, and the timber steps down the bottom. That makes this pair a before and after of the old Centre Stage void itself, and the clearest look I’ve got at how much that spot changed.
What’s at Highpoint Shopping Centre Today
A lot of what’s listed here disappeared well before the centre’s big 2013 redevelopment, and even more of it has vanished since. The old food courts have been rebuilt more than once, the mini-golf course is long gone, and Toys “R” Us closed for good back in 2018, as covered above. The permanent attractions I remember, particularly the mini-golf and the train, are either gone or changed beyond recognition. Timezone still carries on the arcade side of things, and there’s still the odd school holiday thing on, but the place feels a lot more about the shops than the Highpoint I remember. Bigger and glossier, certainly, but to me nowhere near as charming as the version so many people are still trying to find old photos of.
I made a special trip back with my own two boys recently just to get some current photos for this piece, and they spent a good chunk of it hanging over the railings looking down at the levels below, which is a nice, if completely coincidental, echo of me doing much the same thing over the mini-golf course as a kid.
Charlie doing a bit of balcony-gazing of his own, decades after I did the same thing.
These days there’s not much drawing me back to Highpoint specifically. Pacific Werribee covers most of what I actually need now. Highpoint does still have a few things Werribee doesn’t, a proper LEGO Certified Store, the big Toymate store, and an Apple Store for whenever my phone starts playing up. Outside of visiting one of those or trying my luck hunting down modern toys at the big box retailers, I don’t really have much reason to make the trip anymore.
Me and one of the old fountain statues, for scale.
If you’ve got photos of any of this, especially the Pancake Parlour’s teacup, I’d love to see them. And if I’ve got any of the above wrong, or you remember something that isn’t on this list at all, let me know and I’ll update it. Facebook is probably the easiest way to get hold of me. If you want to go digging yourself, Highpoint’s old interactive centre guide from 2004 is still sitting there on the Wayback Machine, well worth a browse.
