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

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

‘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’.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.