Knox.

As a kid, Knox was our ‘special occasions’ mall. If Chirnside Park was our regular weekly shopping mall and Eastland was our mall with the nearest Myer store, then Knox was our ‘let’s go to Knox for something different’ mall. It’s further away and the selection of stores is different and it had JB Hi-Fi well before they became a mall staple.

The first time we went, the place was under renovation and we had to walk down a long, boarded up corridor to get through Myer to the main mall. I couldn’t tell you exactly what was being refurbished there because I was quite young and it was in that period where we’d not long moved house and my memories of the era are a little jumbled up still. We went there maybe two or three times ever as a family.

It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I started going to Knox regularly, mostly because it was the closest decent cinema and JB Hi-Fi to where I lived. I bought a lot of CDs from that original JB, including the first Garbage album. I had to decide between that and the first Foo Fighters album that came out around the same time, and my limited teenager budget only afforded one. I decided that Vow was a better song than This Is A Call and made my choice.

The cinema was where I saw a lot of movies for the first time. I remember seeing Forrest Gump there with my youth group. I hated it, but our organiser had tears down her t-shirt from it so it must have been good. It’s also where I saw Die Hard With A Vengeance and Clueless. My most enduring memory is going to see The Usual Suspects there during the school holidays on my own and walking out of the cinema in absolute shock, long before the film’s famous twist was common knowledge.

The other reason I would make the long trek to Knox in this era was for Video Games Heaven. At the time, they were a small chain of stores in Melbourne, but their original store was at Knox. I never went to Knox enough to be a regular customer, but I did buy my Dreamcast from them, as well as 12 games and the arcade stick and keyboard accessories. Total cost? About $300 right around the time the system was discontinued. If it wasn’t for that purchase, I probably would have just left video gaming behind as I went into adulthood.

Knox itself was refurbished heavily in the early 2000s. The main mall was extended eastward, past the old bus shelter, and a new outdoor area branded as O-Zone was added. This was kind of a cool space at first. You could go there for a restaurant meal before seeing a film, and in the summer there would be walking entertainment and a pretty cool overall vibe. At the time, the mall, including all its outparcels, was the second-largest mall in Australia behind the mighty Chadstone.

Sadly, that didn’t last long. The centre was sold to Westfield (now Scentre Group) about a decade ago and it started to really stagnate. The place looked old and outdated and even the new extension from a decade before seemed old.

The past few years saw Knox reach dying mall levels of shop occupancy. Empty storefronts were everwhere, and when Myer closed down things seemed pretty bad. The most recent redevelopment added a Woolworths, Aldi and fresh food area to that end, as well as bringing JB Hi-Fi into the centre for the first time. Today Knox is a weird mix of the new extension and a mall that has barely changed since the early 2000s. The old food court is sadly gone, replaced by a much worse one in what used to be the fresh food market. O-Zone has quite a few empty spaces now, and much of that end of the main mall feels dead. In fact, the entire upper floor is currently closed off for refurbishment.

Even today, Knox is very much a ‘special occasions’ mall for me. Somewhere to go when Eastland or Doncaster or Chadstone seems like too much effort to get to. It continues to mostly look dated, and its layout— a single long mall— makes it even more of a slog to walk around than Chadstone is. It’s mostly nostalgia for when it was out of the ordinary that keeps me coming back all these years later. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to work there.