Sunshine North

Sunshine North is a residential suburb north of Ballarat Road, Sunshine, reaching to the Maribyrnong River, Keilor East. The river is also its eastern boundary, and the western boundary is the Western Ring Road. A freight railway line runs south-west through the suburb from Broadmeadows, crossing the Maribyrnong River on a massive steel girder bridge (1927) on its way to Albion and the Tottenham marshalling yards.

The southern part of the suburb was a spill-over space for Sunshine’s postwar residential growth. Sunshine high school on Ballarat Road opened in 1955, followed soon on Suffolk Road by State and Catholic primary schools (1956) and a State technical school (1960). In the north-west, on the other side of the freight line, Albion North primary school opened in 1961. Sunshine North post office opened in 1958.

Further north the land was lightly settled. There were quarries and a village drive in cinema (c1970) near the Maribyrnong River.

The drive in cinema closed in 1982 and the quarries ceased in the late 1990s. Their sites became respectively, the home of the Melbourne Knights soccer club, and parklands. In 2012, however, there was still undeveloped land between them and the Maribyrnong River. Whilst not far from a freight railway line, they are two or more kilometres from a suburban railway station.

In Furlong Road a school for deaf children opened in 1986 and a Catholic community centre and aged care facility opened nearby in 1994. Closer to Ballarat Road there are another elderly persons’ facility, a Victoria University campus on the site of the high school and bulky goods and hardware stores on the road itself.

Sunshine North is a multicultural suburb, with significant Vietnamese and Maltese populations. There is a Murugan (Hindu) temple.

The River Valley Estate was developed near the banks of the Maribyrnong River by YourLand Developments and marketed as having 'unrivalled amenities such as schools, shops and public transport' but was plagued in its early years (2013-14) by some anti-social behaviour and vandalism.

The census populations have been:

At the 2011 census, the languages spoken at home included:

Residents’ median income was 63% of the Australian median at the 2006 census and 61.2% at the 2011 census.