Originally Posted by
Okihara
I might be ill-informed but it seems to me that the airport was there first. Dwellings came next.
The airport is a postwar development, apparently opening in 1948.
As it happens there is a website with aerial photography of Melbourne taken in 1945; I've been meaning to have a look at the area to the south of the airport and you've successfully prodded me into action.
There doesn't seem to be a way to link to a particular view, but
the site is here so you can have a look around yourself. There looks to have been very little development in Mordialloc beyond a well built up wedge defined by White Street and Chute Street, which matches my own observations on the ground while house hunting in the area.
BTW, as a non-flying home owner who regularly hears Oxford training flights passing directly overhead in the evenings, I have little sympathy for residents complaining about low aircraft, with the possible exception of one resident quoted in the news, who is a public housing tenant who commented that she has very little choice but to take what is offered. I previously lived next to a railway line; if you're going to live in a city you're going to have noisy infrastructure nearby. You choose if you're prepared to tolerate what's nearby before buying/renting, and in my case I take a bit of interest in what is going past, rather than complain about it.