Robert on the edge of the grassed over airstrip. Credit:Joe Armao Airport or no, this place is about to change. Property developers have already sold hundreds of houses off the plan in the two major local towns of Koo Wee Rup and Lang Lang, their future residents are just waiting for plasterboarding to finish. Melbourne is sprawling at the edges, the city hungrily gobbling up small towns and farms. These one-street towns are waiting for the other boot to drop. The plan: a $7 billion privately owned international airport, organised by a private investment fund and bankrolled by an as-yet-unnamed Middle Eastern and European consortium. "We're literally going to build and say 'here it is'," Paragon Premier Investment Fund chairman Alande Mustafa Safi​ said this week. "The funds are ready, the developers are ready." The two-runway airport is supposed to be the size of Canberra's, with cargo flights starting in 2020 and passenger services soon after.

The grassed over airstrip with cows and a road (neighbour's property). Credit:Joe Armao The government has long planned for a south-eastern airport. As far back as 1995 reports were claiming one would be viable, and an airport between Koo Wee Rup and Lang Lang was pinpointed by the government's Plan Melbourne strategy in 2013. About 85 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, it would cater to one-third of Victoria's population, and be near the Port of Hastings. "From Gippsland to Tullamarine it's 3.5 hours, but to the Koo Wee Rup proposed airport it will be a 45-minute drive and then overnight to the Asian market, where the demand is," Mr Safi said. But before these paddocks were to be the site of a new international airport, there was an old wartime airstrip here.

The cross-shaped runway runs right across Mr Bourke's property. There's not much of it left, just some old concrete drains and big chunks of gravel in amid the grass tussocks and cow dung. You can see it better from the air, or in spring when daisies bloom across its length. "You can see the mess," says Mr Bourke, squelching through the muddy paddock in gumboots, dodging a fresh cow pat. "If you can get a jumbo jet into here you'd have to be a very good pilot." The government bought the land off Mr Bourke's ancestor for about $25,000 during World War II, laid a gravel runway, and made plans to base a squadron of dive-bombers there. Local farmers were told to move their cattle away because the whole area was now a target for Japanese bombing raids. There were even plans for a full military aerodrome, although the war ended before work got seriously under way. The last plane to touch down here was a DC-9 that blew an oil tube mid-flight in 1947. By then the military had given the land back to Mr Bourke's grandfather. The pilot made an emergency landing. Mr Bourke remembers, as a child, watching passengers bale out into a field of curious cows.

The Bourkes run Angus cattle, like most farmers around here. Robert Bourke is too old for it now though. He wants to move somewhere easier, somewhere warmer. A little shack by the beach. That's why he's put the place up for sale. But he's having a tough time selling. "And we'll get less now," he says, given the threat of compulsory acquisition. "This won't help us." The house he's trying to sell is a beautiful white weatherboard, framed by a long row of trees that have lost their leaves. They're pretty, but they have caught a disease, Mr Bourke says. They'll all need to be felled. He leaves us sitting in the kitchen with his wife, Viv, as he wanders into the back of the house. "It comes up all the time, the airport. It's been going on for years and years," she says. He returns with a couple of scrapbooks. He's kept clippings of nearly every mention of a proposed Monomeith airport going back to the '70s. There are pages and pages of yellowing newsprint, pictures of men and women standing in his muddy paddock, waving their arms like plane wings, dollar signs in their eyes.

PAKENHAM-BERWICK GAZETTE, May 28 2003 "The theory that an airport commissioned during World War II could be brought back into play has been exposed as foolish, or overambitious at best. "Rob Bourke, who lives at Monomeith, argues the old airfield is lucky to carry a tractor when wet, let along a fully ladened passenger aircraft. It's pie in the sky stuff, he says". "I haven't been diligent with keeping the cuttings of the current ones, because I thought it would all drift away again," Mr Bourke says. The earth around Koo Wee Rup and Lang Lang is covered in green, except where construction machinery has torn great furrows into it for new housing estates, exposing the rich peat beneath.

The whole region used to be part of the Great Swamp, thousands of hectares of bog and bulrushes between Melbourne and West Gippsland. It was drained decades ago, leaving behind some of the best soils in Australia, the world even, locals say. Nearly all of Australia's asparagus is grown here. During growing season phalanxes of green spears push up through the soil towards the sun. They call it the "golden mile". This is the sort of produce the airport's backers are hoping to ship to China. But that's changing now. The bulldozers have moved in. New housing estates are being built on what was once farming land. Estate agent Matthew Robins is selling house-and-land packages from $410,000. He says he's already sold nearly 30 and he has not even built a display property yet. Wooden skeletons of what will one day be houses and shops, families and employees, dot the paddocks.

How big is this town going to get? "You cannot get a picture of numbers, it's too hard to work it out," Mr Robins says. A real estate agent, who did not want to be named, says he's had dozens of calls from land speculators since the news about the airport broke. They are trying to get in before prices go up. "The demand for land is huge, it's unprecedented," he says. People are coming, in their thousands. But Koo Wee Rup and Lang Lang are one-street towns, a servo, a shopping centre, a bank, a couple of real estate agents, a run-down church. They only recently got natural gas plumbed in. The area's infrastructure is not going to cope, says the agent. "You want to get down here in Christmas, Easter, the roads don't cope even then." Other locals say it can take up to three hours to make the round trip to pick someone up from Tullamarine airport.

There is an old railway line that leads out here, but that was decommissioned in 1993. Successive governments played hokey-pokey with South Gippsland's swing-voters, putting a rail revival on then off then on again for several years, until in 2012 part of the line was ripped up and converted into a bike trail. The towns are serviced by bus, which takes about an hour to get into Melbourne. "The big thing is, what is going to happen when all these people move in?" says Laura McBride, franchisor of Bendigo Bank's five local branches. The main streets here are still quiet on a weekday, the bakery's community noticeboard still telling small-town stories. Firewood sold by the kilo, dogs free to a good home. But Melbourne is coming. A craft-brewery-pub opened just last month, Ms McBride says.

"The growth in this area has been huge." It's growth that not everyone is happy with. Koowee, as the locals call it, is an old town, full of third-generation farmers and tree-changers. "It's split the community," one Lang Lang small business owner says. She does not want to give her name for fear of getting caught up in the conflict. Businesses are excited about an injection of activity into the local economy, about how many thousand jobs the airport might create, she says; tree-changers, who came here to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city, are less thrilled. "It'll be good for the community – I just don't want to be in the flight path," she laughs. With Patrick Hatch