An innovative placemaking project

Neighbourhood Postcards walks are about wellbeing with large dollops of curiosity, familiarity and comfort, and engaging today's residents as active players in their ‘hood’s unfolding history. We mine the archives for stories of past residents - their pre-occupations and how they lived, worked, played and shaped today's neighbourhoods, and we talk to locals about what their places have meant over the years.

 
 

Why?

The legacies left by former residents - their buildings, infrastructure, vistas, streets and house names; their concerns, cultures, curiosities, politics and interests - these were the day-to-day stuff of those peoples’ lives.

Their legacies remain as the stuff of our neighbourhood's memories, and knowing the stories behind them provides a generous, multi-layered perspective on our own lives in these places.

This stuff is fun to explore and know. Neighbourhood Postcard walks are for everyone from ramblers to pedestrians with a purpose. They are for all ages and can even be read and enjoyed without leaving your home. Despite their fine-tuned locality even the closest of walks are different because every neighbourhood has its own history. While some places give up more than others, every place has its stories – if you know where to find them.

Neighbourhood Postcards is grounded in two decades of working with community history and heritage. Its inspiration is everything that's happened to us in the ‘year of Covid', and the pressing need for better health, positive experiences, engaged communities, and for the places we live and work in to be meaningful as well as liveable.

 

How?

Historical integrity

Experienced historians research and write the walks delving deep into the archives but also using oral history when possible.

Engaging and accessible

Stories that pique curiosity in the everyday past of our neighbourhoods and tap into the interests of all ages and mindsets.

Covid safe!

Walks can be enjoyed solo and in small company, or even enjoyed by reading the stories at home while in lockdown. We have Covid19 safe protocols for engaging local researchers and for consultation.

Recognising traditional custodians

Every walk identifies the custodians; stories featuring Indigenous people are included where possible and the custodians invited to review the content if there is uncertainty.

Local contributions

Launched in the ‘year of Covid’ this is about new beginnings. We look to give locals training or employment when we research their area. We hope readers use the references to explore their neighbourhood’s history further, and we hope to incorporate user requests and input in the future.

Postcards

Our walks and curated collection of postcards below have recently morphed into individual postcards of places we’ve come across, already knew of, or that have become part of our wider project work. If there is a place you’d like us to investigate please contact us with the location and any details you already know about it.

In the meantime, the places are gathering in number and you can click on the images below for their stories or follow @historyatwork on social media to read them.

This is an ongoing project to bring local history, memory and placemaking together and to help make welcoming, familiar, interesting neighbourhoods across Victoria.

 
Featured
Spencer Street Bridge
Spencer Street Bridge

Before this Bridge was constructed in 1930 ships sailed as far as Queen Street. Sailing and steamships were part of the CBD’s everyday life. [Image 2 & 3] They turned a fledgling village into a flourishing city in just a few decades. The Melbourne Harbour Trust had been transforming the Birrarung/Yarra for years – widening, deepening, removing debris & snags – and bringing ships into the heart of the city. But by the 1920s the port’s growth and evolutions in ship construction meant the Birrarung/Yarra was no longer able to support contemporary shipping. The new Spencer Street Bridge offered better access to Melbourne’s south bank and suburbs but cut the CBD off from the world of shipping for the very first time. Not everyone was happy. In ‘Yarra Bygone Days’ [The Age, 1929] the author was convinced "The closing of the River Yarra from Queens bridge to Spencer Street to all shipping … entirely changes one of the most historical places in the Commonwealth."

In a feat of nature, Spencer Street Bridge construction workers reached 20 metres below sea level searching for bedrock when they discovered a stump of red gum so big it took three weeks to remove. [Image 1] It was later carbon-dated at about 8,800 years old and had lived for over 400 years.

In 1975 the new Charles Grimes Bridge completely ended access to the old north wharfs, and today the heritage listed Goods Shed #5 is the only north wharf shed remaining.

This story is part of a project commissioned by the Melbourne Maritime Heritage Network to explore the maritime history of Melbourne on foot.

📙

Cupper, White & Neilson, Quarternary: ice ages - environments of change, chapter, January 2003, p.353

‘Yarra Bygone Days’, The Age, 27 April 1929, p.7

Thomas Pockett's 'mums': Malvern Gardens
Thomas Pockett's 'mums': Malvern Gardens

On April 22 just past, the Chrysanthemum Society of Victoria had its annual (members’) show and exhibition in Burwood Uniting Church Hall. But as long ago as March 1860, members of the Victorian Gardeners’ Mutual Improvement Society first entertained the idea of a Chrysanthemum and Dahlia show in Melbourne.

English gardener Thomas Pockett was already a prize-winning chrysanthemum grower when he migrated to Australia in the late 1870s, aged 21. Settling in Malvern in the 1880s he began growing chrysanthemums on the vacant blocks around his house. He landscaped Malvern’s first public park, Malvern Gardens, and ‘mums became a feature there.

For 30 years Pockett was Curator of Parks and Gardens in Malvern, also designing Central Park, corner Wattletree and Burke Roads, and planting many miles of street trees.

Pockett’s passion was the cultivation and growing of chrysanthemums and on retiring from Malvern in 1918 he set up a nursery in Healesville. His chrysanthemums have been grown and acclaimed all over the world. For his services to horticulture Thomas Pockett was in 1945 awarded an O.B.E.

If you’re in the area and see any chrysanthemums in the parks and gardens they may be part of Tom Pockett’s legacy

Glenard Estate: Lower Heidelberg Rd, Eaglemont
Glenard Estate: Lower Heidelberg Rd, Eaglemont

‘Give the town a bit of the country and the country a bit of the town, secure better housing, protect existing parks, safeguard native animals and plants, and erect memorials to explorers’ – these were the aims of the Victorian Town Planning and Parks Association (VTPPA) in 1914. Peter Keam, local cattle farmer, agriculturalist, and town planning enthusiast was a founding member. In 1916 he commissioned ‘Landscape Architect’ Walter Burley Griffin to design Glenard to this vision. Laudable goals (except the last one), they can still be seen at Glenard today.

The 1916 auction of 120 lots was a near sell-out success but building was slow with WW1 followed by a shortage of building supplies, the Depression and WW2. This ‘bit of country in the town’ lasted until well into the 1950s attracting ‘unusual men and women’ as residents - artists, designers, architects, including the Griffins for a couple of years. Cattle had the run of the Yarra River flats; the Boulevard and internal streets (only 2) remained unmade; houses were slow to be constructed; and years later, when a developer wanted to subdivide a block a group of residents took him to VCAT and ‘knocked him off. We called ourselves The Gang of Five. That was an absolute triumph!’

In the end Glenard did include a memorial, although not to an explorer, it was to ‘Walter Burley Griffin [who] lived in Glenard Drive. He planted this subdivision in 1916. For this we are grateful’.

Mrs Aeneas Gunn Library: Monbulk RSL, 48 Main Rd, Monbulk
Mrs Aeneas Gunn Library: Monbulk RSL, 48 Main Rd, Monbulk

Damned in 1935 as ‘wretched little institutes which have long since become cemeteries of old and forgotten books’, Melbourne’s mechanics institutes and circulating libraries were crying out for a sophisticated approach to reading.

The status quo was upended in Monbulk in 1946 by Jeannie Gunn (Mrs Aeneas Gunn), author of The Little Black Princess and We of the Never-Never, which had been chronicled in newspapers, adapted for schools, translated into German, and put her into 3rd place amongst early 19th century Australian novelists after Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood,

Horrified to hear a returned soldier she cared for (she was a patriot first and foremost) had travelled all the way to the State Library for an atlas to show his son where he’d been in the war, she harnessed her experience as a teacher, her extensive contacts in the book world, and her skills in persuading bookshop owners and authors around the world to donate to her cause. She established a library of over 700 volumes by the mid 1950s that included only ‘the essential’. Today her library is a time capsule of sophisticated, pleasurable, and educational reading in the post-WW2 era that would have enlightened the Monbulk community on subjects as diverse as poetry, fiction, travel, biography, Antarctic exploration, the Olympic Games, religion, entomology, art interpretation, etc. This library was a book-lovers community project driven by one woman in one place but stretching as far as London and New York, and today can be appreciated at the Monbulk RSL hall.

Fairlea Women’s Prison: once at Yarra Bend Road, Fairfield. Now it’s netball courts in the making.
Fairlea Women’s Prison: once at Yarra Bend Road, Fairfield. Now it’s netball courts in the making.

When the female prisoners at Pentridge moved into the old refurbished Fairhaven Venereal Diseases hospital on 9 March 1956 they were mostly excited and felt safer being away from Pentridge. ‘Lifestyle crimes’ like drunkenness, gambling, aborting, prostitution, and having ‘no visible means of support’ had put most behind bars. Lack of education and employment kept them dependent on institutional supports for income and housing. Dysfunctional families and communities made it hard to keep out of trouble, and out of prison. In subsequent decades drugs made everything worse. But Fairlea accommodated everyone – ‘the four Ms – maximum, medium, minimum and mad’, as well as the ‘Fairlea Five’ S.O.S. (Save Our Sons) anti-Vietnam War protestors, the genesis of Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company, the fire of 1982, the deaths of six women, and the lives of 18,000 women.

'Horti Hall', 31 Victoria Street, Melbourne
'Horti Hall', 31 Victoria Street, Melbourne

31 Victoria Street, Melbourne

The walls of Horti Hall share surprising and enlightening tales of 19th and 20th century Melbourne: the comings and goings of gardeners and flower growers, dancing clubs and dance schools, trade unions, choirs, weddings, prayer groups and the Australian Secular Society; the Italian anti-fascist Matteoti Club, Bureau of Meteorology, Star Trek Appreciation Society, Dr Who Fan Club, Melbourne Lyceum Club, Southern Ladies Pipe Band, Handweavers and Spinners Guild – and aeronaut Mr Henri l’Estrange, who in 1879 stored and repaired his hot air balloon there.

Horti Hall (1873) is the bricks and mortar evidence of the enduring legacy of the Victorian Gardeners’ Mutual Improvement Society (1859), later the Victorian Horticultural Society.

Early members were gardeners of public and private gardens, orchards and farms who used the hall for monthly meetings, presenting essays on cultivation, species and pests, and exhibited and celebrated fruit, vegetables and flowers they had grown. They built up a members’ library and held seasonal horticultural shows open to the public.

Today Horti Hall is managed by Working Heritage Inc. and tenanted by Victorian Opera.

The basketball courts on the Flemington Kensington Housing Estates
The basketball courts on the Flemington Kensington Housing Estates

Debney Park, Flemington

The court area is a great example of how one place can have many meanings. Public places within the estate are also the residents' private places, easier than a small apartment high in the sky when you're with friends, or have family & community events. For youth on the estate the court area has its own importance for groups of friends (friends, not gangs).

In the ‘80s the court was the re-meeting point for kids after police arrived to disperse the ‘gangs’ and they ran and hid amongst the surrounding trees.

In the ‘90s teens and young adults on the estate ‘were some of the most politically engaged young people … we were first-generation refugees so all the stories of back home, the conflicts occurring across the world, these were in our parents’ minds [and so in our homes].’ Known to them as the ‘bench of power’ or the ‘parliament’ this area ‘was a really important space to not only find our place in the world but also to grasp with all the world issues, because we couldn’t escape them.’ [Daniel – see the FKCLC Storytelling Project in our bio link and our next post]

Former ETA Peanut Butter factory
Former ETA Peanut Butter factory

254 Ballarat Road, Braybrook

With vegemite in the news recently (thanks to the great work by @nationaltrustvic to promote #intangibleculturalheritage ) we thought ‘What about peanut butter?’ So this postcard from Braybrook is for the ETA factory, complete with childhood memories of being lit up every Christmas. You can see the full Braybrook NP set under ‘Walks’ below.

Former Braybrook Radio Station
Former Braybrook Radio Station

Ashley Street, Braybrook

It's World Radio Day! Declared by UNESCO In 2011 for Feb 13 because radio 'is a powerful medium for celebrating humanity ... and constitutes a platform for democratic discourse'.

In Braybrook in Melbourne's west a new radio transmitting site in Ashley Street was leased by Radio Station 3LO [today ABC Melbourne]. The official opening broadcast on 13 October 1924 was a concert for the Limbless Soldiers' Fund by Dame Nellie Melba at His Majesty's Theatre in Collins Street. Prime Minister Stanley Bruce gave a delighted speech at which he anticipated '...this innovation means a great deal to the widely separated settlers of this country... We do not intend to stop here... Who can measure the effect of such an achievement, not only in the British Empire, but in the whole of human relations?'

The Argus newspaper explained that dozens of land lines at the recording studio are switched on a control panel to Braybrook, where the performance and the PM's speech would be broadcast. Every word was clear and listeners in Tasmania and New Zealand wrote to The Argus telling of their joy in being able to hear Dame Nellie and the PM.

Programming in Braybrook finished in 1938 but for many years the Braybrook Broadcasting Station was one of the most powerful in the world, covering 4 acres with two 200 ft high masts.

 

Walks

Neighbourhood Postcards is part of the placemaking landscape that is reimagining our communities and our lives.

We ran a pilot project in 2020 and received some really encouraging interest. Many thanks to all of you who took part by requesting particular walks or points of interest, commenting and providing feedback on the initial pilot walks, and for generally supporting the concept.

Since that initial project we have been acting on your feedback, talking to interested groups on developing the project further, and have further walks in the making for Box Hill, Croydon, Fairfield, Little River and South Yarra.

We also changed the name from Know Your ‘Hood to Neighbourhood Postcards, which are easier to scroll through on your phone and still enable us to bring you the curious and the everyday [hi]stories of local people & places in all your neighbourhoods.

Take a look at our pilot walks and developing series of Neighbourhood Postcards below - each includes a link to their own comprehensive www.walkingmaps.com.au page and a downloadable document or set of postcards for your walk.

 
Walks
Welcome to the Westgarth Strip
Welcome to the Westgarth Strip

Once, from what later became known as Ruckers Hill, you could peer south all the way to the Bay, but by 1900 your focus would be drawn to the Merri Creek bridge, and soon after to the increasing bustle on the short strip 500m closer in. ‘Welcome to the Westgarth Strip’ is a collection of illustrated stories about some of Westgarth shopping strip’s people, places and events over the years.

Welcome to the Westgarth Strip Neighbourhood Postcards

Walkingmaps.com

Welcome to Braybrook
Welcome to Braybrook

From ancient volcanoes to the RAAF; peanut butter and the AFL; from one of Victoria’s first radio transmission towers to its housing estates - Braybrook is a place of many surprises.

This walk is courtesy of a former client who wanted something that was ‘healthy, socially responsible, local … and able to be shared online for broader benefit’. She wanted a present for a couple who were newish residents in Braybrook. What a lovely idea! And her requirements encapsulate perfectly what our Neighbourhood Postcards are all about.

So please download this inaugural set of Postcards and explore the unique western Melbourne suburb of Braybrook. If you enjoy the walk, or the read, you can let us know through our contact page and we’ll pass on your appreciation to our client.

Walking Maps page

Welcome to Braybrook Neighbourhood Postcards

Albert Street, Brunswick & Westbourne Grove, Northcote
Albert Street, Brunswick & Westbourne Grove, Northcote

This walk begins at the Western end of Albert Street and heads east, crossing one of the northern suburbs much love to features, the Merri Creek, before continuing eastwards up Westbourne Grove to Ruckers Hill and High Street, Northcote. You'll meet butchers, steeplechasers, potters, Rechabites, the ‘Salvos’ and the Sumners, the Cain politicians, nuns and a photographer as well as a number of regular folk and see how the physical landscape along this single stretch of neighbourhood in the inner north has changed in extraordinary ways.

Walking Maps page

Download full document (PDF 5MB)

Darebin Creek - Plenty Road to the Yarra River
Darebin Creek - Plenty Road to the Yarra River

The walk meanders along the Creek from its intersection with Plenty Road to the Yarra River Trail and includes stories belonging to children, the dispossessed, bike riders, migrants, quarries, shoppers, golf players and others. There have been enormous changes along the Darebin Creek over the last 180 years in its landscape, its flora and fauna, and the way residents think, use and play with it.

Walking Maps page

Download full document (PDF 3.4MB)

Golden Point, Ballarat
Golden Point, Ballarat

This walk takes you through the heart of Golden Point in Ballarat starting near the junction with Victoria Street and heading in a straight line down Barkly Street with a couple of short diversions along the way. But, in that short 1.5 km space you’ll see a major transformation has taken place from the 19th century to today: be introduced to former neighbours who were WW1 home front volunteers, much loved ’hood characters, ‘everyday’ people doing special things and sensational events such as ravaging floods and the disappearance of a kitchen garden to collapsing mine shafts.

Walking Maps page

Download full document (PDF 3.7MB)