Once a place where the poorest endured toxic run-off from Melbourne’s wealthy, Collingwood is reaching for an affluent, sustainable future. It’s not all smooth going.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Greg Scott moved to the gritty Melbourne suburb of Collingwood 15 years ago to discover his next-door neighbour was the notorious criminal Mark “Chopper” Read, who claimed to have used blowtorches on his victims and bolt cutters on their toes.He had recently graduated from the University of Canberra, where he’d studied industrial design. The young man who’d grown up in genteel Canberra had never met anyone quite like Read.
Recently, Bodriggy became Victoria’s first brewery to be certified carbon neutral. It uses recycled materials and solar, purchases carbon credits and has farmers collect the operation’s spent grain for their pigs, among other innovations. The current plan is to push further into the green by reducing emissions by another 30 per cent by 2030.Advertisement
There was so much heroin openly circulating there in the 1980s and 1990s that the popular name for the area was “Smack Street”.It had the same benefits for drug dealers and users that were much prized by the 19th-century gangsters, sly groggers and illegal betting outfits: a long line of sight down a straight street to observe approaching police, laneways for disappearing and good public transport to bring customers from afar.
Aged 17, David attends high school, works in a fast-food restaurant and worries about where his mother might find a home in an unspecified future. Last week, taking coffee in one of Collingwood’s numerous excellent cafes – the vegan Smith and Deli – I fell into conversation with a young couple, Tessa Carroll and Ben Heenan.Simon Schluter
“For every two masks we could sell, we donated one to a local public housing tower, where people were locked up and afraid,” Carroll says. “It just seemed the right thing to do.”, wanted to know about this Common Good Company and its products. Virginia Dods remembers that when she moved to the area 30 years ago, her grandmother – whose family was prominent in Kew, the suburb sitting high on the eastern bank of the Yarra, peering down on Collingwood – was horrified.
Collingwood is such a tiny place. Squeezed into its 145 hectares, smaller than a small farm, are more than 9000 permanent inhabitants. Tensions are inevitable.When the City of Yarra spent $2 million recently to transform a tiny children’s playground in Cambridge Street into a shared pocket lawn and playground, a very Collingwood argument ensued. Parents were furious their children were left with one swing and a couple of metal climbing bars.
It was “yalla–birr–ang”, according to notes made by anthropologist Alfred Howitt, meaning, he scribbled, “the wooden point of a reed spear”. Newtown offered no music to the ear of Charles La Trobe, the first superintendent of the Port Phillip District. He instructed his surveyor Robert Hoddle to rename it Collingwood.
The footy club, which also invested Collingwood with rare dignity by winning an extraordinary four grand finals as the Great Depression sank its claws into the community in the 1920s and 30s, now has more members than any other – 106,470 of them at last count, from all around Australia.Search for the Collingwood railway station, or Victoria Park, and you will find yourself in the neighbouring suburb of Abbotsford. The extravagant old Collingwood Town Hall is in Abbotsford, too.
It left many of the celebrated old Collingwood institutions beyond the boundaries of what now was no more than a small suburb, bounded by Smith Street to the west, Hoddle Street to the east, Alexandra Parade to the north and Victoria Parade to the south.That little place is much mythologised. Collingwood is the fictionalised “Carringbush” of one of Australia’s most sensational novels of the 20th century, Frank Hardy’sIts central character was the legendary John Wren .
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