Once were westies

As a guest on a western Sydney community radio program recently, I noted the ease with which the young radio jocks - each born and raised in the city's west - referred to themselves as 'Westies'. They transformed the pejorative term into one of identity. The Westie was a creation of the 1960s and '70s as young, working families were encouraged westward into the newly built, rather austere public and private housing subdivisions on Sydney's urban fringe. It was a term of division and derision, and became shorthand for a population considered lowbrow, coarse and lacking education and cultural refinement.