Maribyrnong Heritage Review

Volume 2
Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

Jill Barnard Graeme Butler Francine Gilfedder & Gary Vines, 2000
 Maribyrnong Heritage Review
Volume 2
Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

Jill Barnard Graeme Butler Francine Gilfedder & Gary Vines, 2000: Volume 2: i
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY FOR THE CITY OF MARIBYRNONG ............................ 1

INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................................1
BACKGROUND TO MARIBYRNONG HERITAGE REVIEW PROJECT ........................................................1
STUDY TEAM ...............................................................................................................................................2

CITY OF MARIBYRNONG HERITAGE REVIEW ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY ..... 3

INTRODUCTION TO CITY OF MARIBYRNONG ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY .........................................3

1.ABORIGINAL ACTIVITY IN THE CITY OF MARIBYRNONG ..................................................................3
2 EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND SURVEYING OF THE AREA................................................................4
3 SETTLING ON THE LAND .........................................................................................................................5
3.1 SQUATTERS ............................................................................................................................................5
4 PRIMARY PRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................6
4.1 PASTORALISM ........................................................................................................................................6
4.3 HORSE STUDS ........................................................................................................................................8
5 EXPLOITING NATURAL RESOURCES ......................................................................................................9
5.1 BASALT QUARRYING ............................................................................................................................9
6 ESTABLISHING LINES AND NETWORKS OF COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPORTATION OF GOODS
AND PEOPLE (INCLUDING EARLY HOTELS)............................................................................................11
7 AN INDUSTRIAL CENTRE .......................................................................................................................16
8 DEFENDING AUSTRALIA .......................................................................................................................22
9.0 PLANNING AND DEVELOPING URBAN SETTLEMENTS ....................................................................26
10 MIGRATION ...........................................................................................................................................36
11 EDUCATION ...........................................................................................................................................38
12 CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT .................................................................................................................40
13 DEVELOPING LOCAL GOVERNMENT ..................................................................................................48
14 SICKNESS AND HEALTH.......................................................................................................................49

APPENDIX 1 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................

PUBLISHED SOURCES..................................................................................................................................1
UNPUBLISHED SOURCES ............................................................................................................................2

APPENDIX 2 PRINCIPAL AUSTRALIAN HISTORICAL THEMES...................................

APPENDIX 3 STUDY AREA .......................................................................................................

Jill Barnard Graeme Butler Francine Gilfedder & Gary Vines, 2000: Volume 2: ii
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY FOR THE CITY OF MARIBYRNONG ............................ 1

INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................................1
BACKGROUND TO MARIBYRNONG HERITAGE REVIEW PROJECT ........................................................1
STUDY TEAM ...............................................................................................................................................2

CITY OF MARIBYRNONG HERITAGE REVIEW ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY ..... 3

INTRODUCTION TO CITY OF MARIBYRNONG ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY .........................................3

1.ABORIGINAL ACTIVITY IN THE CITY OF MARIBYRNONG ..................................................................3
2 EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND SURVEYING OF THE AREA................................................................4
3 SETTLING ON THE LAND .........................................................................................................................5
4 PRIMARY PRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................6
4.3 HORSE STUDS ........................................................................................................................................8
5 EXPLOITING NATURAL RESOURCES ......................................................................................................9
6 ESTABLISHING LINES AND NETWORKS OF COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPORTATION OF GOODS
AND PEOPLE (INCLUDING EARLY HOTELS)............................................................................................11
7 AN INDUSTRIAL CENTRE .......................................................................................................................16
8 DEFENDING AUSTRALIA .......................................................................................................................22
9.0 PLANNING AND DEVELOPING URBAN SETTLEMENTS ....................................................................26
10 MIGRATION ...........................................................................................................................................36
11 EDUCATION ...........................................................................................................................................38
12 CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT .................................................................................................................40
13 DEVELOPING LOCAL GOVERNMENT ..................................................................................................48
14 SICKNESS AND HEALTH.......................................................................................................................49

APPENDIX 1 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................

PUBLISHED SOURCES..................................................................................................................................1
UNPUBLISHED SOURCES ............................................................................................................................2

APPENDIX 2 PRINCIPAL AUSTRALIAN HISTORICAL THEMES...................................

APPENDIX 3 STUDY AREA .......................................................................................................

Jill Barnard Graeme Butler Francine Gilfedder & Gary Vines, 2000: Volume 2: ii
Jill Barnard Graeme Butler Francine Gilfedder & Gary Vines, 2000: Volume 2: iii
 Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

Environmental History for the City of Maribyrnong

Introduction
The following volume deals with the historical context of development within the City of
Maribyrnong. The project 1 brief required a thematic environmental history to be prepared for the
project area to assist with the identification and assessment of significance of historic places. The
thematic history for project 1 was to be of around 3000 words, with the key themes identified and
briefly described. The project area was that part of the city outside of the former City of
Footscray (which was the subject of a heritage study in 1989). This task has been expanded by
the consultant team to cover the entire City of Maribyrnong, rather than the project area, to
provide a balanced context for historical development. This thematic framework has drawn on
the environmental history in the Footscray Conservation Study (G. Butler, 1989) the 1986
regional studies (Lack & Ford 1986) and Johnston et al (1986), and other local sources. It has
also demonstrated the relationship between the Principal Australian Historic Themes (AHC) and
the local themes developed during the study.

Project Area
The City of Maribyrnong. Refer to Appendix 4 for a map of the study area.

Background to Maribyrnong Heritage Review project

The City of Maribyrnong has resolved to undertake the identification and preservation of sites of
natural and cultural heritage. This Heritage Review aims to identify, evaluate and provide
conservation recommendations for:

q places of cultural significance (non-Aboriginal places),

q places of natural significance, &
q places of pre and post contact Aboriginal significance.

To facilitate this process Council has appointed Context Pty Ltd as lead consultant to project
manage the overall Heritage Review. The lead consultant and Council Officers comprise the
Project Management Group, which is guided by the Heritage Review Steering
Committee.Projects making up the Heritage Review include:

Project 1: Maribyrnong, Maidstone, Braybrook and Tottenham Heritage Study (former City
of Sunshine area)
Project 2: Footscray Review: Urban Conservation Areas & Individual Places
Project 3: Significant Trees
Project 4: Industrial Places Review Study
Project 5: Historical Archaeological Zoning Plan

This volume (Volume 2) is the Environmental History for all of the above specialist projects
undertaken during the Heritage Review. The project team of Jill Barnard, Graeme Butler,

Jill Barnard Graeme Butler Francine Gilfedder & Gary Vines, 2000: Volume 2: 1
 Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

Francine Gilfedder & Gary Vines have carried out projects 1-4, with specialist researchers Olwen
Ford, John Lack, Damian Veltri, Beatrice Magalotti and Lesley Alves.

Other volumes for projects 1-4 include:

q Volume 1: Projects methods and final results.
q Volume 2: Environmental History City of Maribyrnong
q Volume 3: Historic Places - Industrial Places City of Maribyrnong
q Volume 4: Historic Places - Non-industrial places in former City of Sunshine (Maribyrnong,
Maidstone, Braybrook and Tottenham)
q Volume 5: Historic Places - Urban Conservation Areas & Individual Places in the former
City of Footscray
q Volume 6: Significant Trees City of Maribyrnong
The Heritage Review brief did not require the preparation of an environmental history for the
City of Maribyrnong. However the consultant team proposed to include a history as a necessary
step to undertaking a review of heritage places in the City of Maribyrnong. The history provided
in the City of Footscray Conservation Study 1989 had dealt only with the former City of
Footscray and was also limited in scope by the small budget.

Study team
Jill Barnard, historian, prepared this history aided by members of the City of Maribyrnong
Heritage Review project study team, with specialist researchers Lesley Alves, Olwen Ford, John
Lack, Beatrice Magalotti and Damian Veltri.

Jill Barnard Graeme Butler Francine Gilfedder & Gary Vines, 2000: Volume 2: 2
 Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

City of Maribyrnong Heritage Review

Environmental History
Introduction to City of Maribyrnong environmental history
This is an Environmental History of the City of Maribyrnong. It surveys how human activity has
affected the physical environment of the area since first contact between indigenous and non-
indigenous people. An environmental history cannot tell the story of political or social life in the
study area. It is intended only to be a brief explanation of its physical history.

In preparing this brief history, the author has relied heavily on John Lack’s History of Footscray
and on material prepared by Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West. Readers wishing to
explore the history of the City of Maribyrnong in more depth are directed to these sources.

1.Aboriginal Activity in the City of Maribyrnong

The scope of this environmental history does not include pre-contact Aboriginal activity within
what is now called the City of Maribyrnong, as this activity is documented in the Maribyrnong
Aboriginal Heritage Study. However, it should be reiterated that the people of the Woi-wurrung
language group had occupied the area for at least 17,000 years and possibly 40,000 years before
European people came here and were still in occupation when the first white people came to
what is now the City of Maribyrnong. Ironically, the site most easily identifiable with the first
white people to enter the area, the ford across the Maribyrnong found by Grimes and his party on
the Maribyrnong in 1803, is said to be a fish trap and ford created by Woi-wurrung people1.

Aboriginal people in the vicinity of Melbourne were pushed onto reserves such as Corranderck at
Healesville fairly soon after non-Aboriginal people began to populate the area. But there were
instances of white and Woi-wurrung people interacting in the early years of contact in the City of
Maribyrnong. For instance, an early historian of Braybrook recorded that Joseph Solomon, who
settled on the Maribyrnong in 1836, 'had many dealings with the blacks'2. While Woi-wurrung
people may have appeared to have disappeared from Melbourne's West during the nineteenth
century, the region became a significant place of employment for Koorie people in the twentieth
century and, connected with this, a home for many people connected with the Aboriginal rights
movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Work opportunities offered in places like the
City of Maribyrnong in the hard years of the 1920s and 1930s led to many Aboriginal people
drifting away from missions, such as Cummeragunga on the Murray River, to seek work in the
city. As Aboriginal people had been gathered and moved from mission to mission at various
times during the nineteenth century, some of these travellers to the city may have been Woi-
wurrung people. Oral histories have shown that many of these people found work in the
meatworks, munitions and other factories in Melbourne's West3. The Maribyrnong Aboriginal
Heritage Study, working with Larry Walsh of Melbourne's Living Museum of the West, has
identified a number of sites within the City of Maribyrnong that are associated with personalities
active in the Aboriginal Rights movement in the twentieth century. These include houses and

1 City of Moonee Valley and V.C.C.C.M. The Wurundjeri Willam The Original Inhabitants of Moonee Valley, nd:
14
2 Quoted in David Rhodes, Taryn Debney and Mark Grist, 'Draft Maribyrnong Aboriginal Heritage Study', 1999: 77
3 David Rhodes, Taryn Debney and Mark Grist, 'Draft Maribyrnong Aboriginal Heritage Study', 1999: 88

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 Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

boarding houses belonging to William Cooper, Marge Tucker, Molly Dyer and Sally Russell
Cooper4. Approximately 1300 Aboriginal people were listed as living in Melbourne's West in the
1991 census. One site connected to contemporary Aboriginal activity within the Study Area is
Melbourne's Living Museum of the West and Pipemakers Park.

2 European exploration and surveying of the area

2.1 Early exploration

The earliest official white exploration of the area now included in the City of Maribyrnong was
by the crew of the schooner Cumberland, sent to explore Port Phillip to determine its suitability
for settlement. Aboard the schooner, along with Lieutenant Charles Robbins, were Acting-
Surveyor General Charles Grimes and others, including James Flemming, a gardener who kept a
record of the journey. The schooner entered Port Phillip Bay on 20 January 1803 and exploratory
parties left the boat for days at a time to explore the country from the Mornington to the Bellarine
Peninsulas. By February 3, they had come to the mouth of the Yarra/Maribyrnong Rivers at
Newport and Robbins, Grimes and Flemming were rowed up it, taking the fork to the left, thus
following the Maribyrnong as it separated from the Yarra. The party rowed as far as some rocks
that later became known as Solomon's Ford and were situated on the Maribyrnong just south of
the western end of what is today called Canning Street, at the boundary of the Cities of
Maribyrnong, Brimbank and Moonee Valley. Unable to get the boat across the rocks, they left it
and moved further up the river until they found that the salt water gave way to fresh. That night
they camped at the rocks, or natural ford that they had found. The party seems to have been
unimpressed with the landscape through which they passed on their journey up the Maribyrnong.
They noted 'stony soil' and 'no trees for many miles'5. The ford that they had discovered,
however, was to become the first crossing place over the Maribyrnong for the earliest white
settlers in the Port Phillip region.

Three decades later, John Batman also explored the area on foot, leaving his boat near Stony
Creek and walking across the plains to meet the Maribyrnong River again near Essendon. His
impressions of the country here were more favourable, noting the 'The land [is] of the best
description, equal to any in the world'6. In the 1930s a local Footscray historical enthusiast,
Claude Smith, initiated a campaign to recognise the junction of the Yarra and Maribyrnong
Rivers as the spot where John Batman had stood to decide that the Yarra, being fresh, was the
site for a village. In 1941 a ‘pioneers’ monument’, in the form of an obelisk commemorating
Batman, John Murray, Edward Grimes and John Pascoe Fawkner was erected with private funds
on land at Footscray owned by the Harbor Trust7. It is doubtful that Batman did make his historic
pronouncement while standing in what is now the City of Maribyrnong, but he did travel through
the area before deciding that the Yarra offered better opportunities.

Batman's enthusiastic assessment of the pastoral country at Port Phillip led to John Helder
Wedge following him to Port Phillip to survey the country with a view to dividing it amongst the
members of Batman's Tasmanian-based Port Phillip Association. He was less impressed than
Batman with the land between Williamstown and what is now Avondale Heights and failed to

4 These sites are listed in Rhodes, Debney and Grist 'Draft Maribyrnong Aboriginal Heritage Study'
5John Lack, A History of Footscray, North Melbourne, 1991: 4, also Valantyne J. Jones, Solomon's Ford, 1983: 2,3
6Batman, quoted in Lack, A History of Footscray, 1991: 7
7 Lack, 1991: 302

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 Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

allot it to any of the members of the Association when he divided the Port Phillip Association's
land to the west and north of what is now Melbourne into 17 allotments.

The members of the Port Phillip Association who followed Batman to Victoria with their flocks
of sheep were but a few of the hopeful squatters who crossed over from Van Diemen's Land to
the mainland in search of pastures and fortunes in the years after 1835. By September 1836 the
Governor of New South Wales had despatched Captain William Lonsdale to act as
superintendent of the Port Phillip District and the task of determining the best site for a
government town had begun. The next year Governor Bourke himself visited the district and
confirmed that the Yarra was the best site for a town, but that Williamstown was a more suitable
landing place for vessels entering the district. Williamstown and Melbourne were thus officially
sanctioned as settlements.

2.2 Surveying the Land

One of the first tasks for officialdom in the Port Phillip District was to survey the land, dividing
it into parishes and reserving sites for villages or townships at regular intervals. These sites were
usually located on creeks or rivers. The area now covered by the City of Maribyrnong (and much
of the City of Hobson's Bay) was surveyed by 1840 and named the Parish of Cut-Paw-Paw. It
stretched from the Maribyrnong River (known as the Saltwater River until 1913) at Braybrook,
along Kororoit Creek to the sea, along the coast at Williamstown in the south and along the
Maribyrnong River down to Hobsons Bay to the east. The survey was signed by Robert Hoddle.
Hoddle's map shows a thick belt of she-oak following the west side of the river bank from Point
Gellibrand at Williamstown up to what is now Footscray, where it widened even further. To the
west of the she-oak were open plains with 'iron stone' noted in several locations. Village reserves
were marked in at Braybrook, (straddling the Maribyrnong River) Brooklyn (on the Kororoit
Creek) and Footscray (around the junction of the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers) although they
were not named at this time. Nor was the land within these reserves subdivided and sold until
much later.

3 Settling on the land

3.1 Squatters
By the time Hoddle made his map of Cut-Paw-Paw, he could mark the location of one squatter's
station in the parish of Cut-Paw-Paw. This was 'Mr Solomon's Station', on the south side of the
Maribyrnong River where the Medway Golf Club is now located. Another station belonging to
Mr Solomon is on the same map, but outside of Cut-Paw-Paw parish, on the north side of the
river in what is now East Keilor8. Squatters did not own their land. At first they held their
acreage under pastoral licenses. After 1847 they were able to lease land from the Crown for 14
years at a time, with the option of purchasing part of it when the lease had expired. Joseph
Solomon was the licensee of a run in Cut-Paw-Paw, which he held from 1836 to 1849. Michael
Solomon is said to have also been the licensee of a run at Solomon's Ford, 'Keilor' between 1835
and 18419. Eventually Judah Solomon purchased the land on which the golf course now stands10.
It is said that the first clubhouse used by the Medway Golf Club was a relic of the 1850s,

8 See map Sydney C10, Parish of Cut-Paw-Paw, Hoddle, 1840

9 R.V. Billis and A.S.Kenyon, Pastoral Pioneers of Port Phillip, 1974: 142
10 Jones, 1983: 54

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belonging either to Judah Solomon or William Alison Blair who purchased the property from
Solomon in 185811.

Most of what now comprises the City of Maribyrnong was ignored by squatters as a place to
establish large stations. However, it was at the edge of some of the biggest land holdings in the
colony. W.J.T. Clarke established his empire at Sunbury, but by the 1840s the area over which he
exercised grazing rights extended down to Werribee and across almost to the Footscray
Township12.

4 Primary production

4.1 Pastoralism
The lack of squatters' stations within the study area can be partly explained by the fact that
Crown Land here was offered for sale as early as 1843, so that many of the earliest white settlers
here purchased their land rather than occupying it under lease or license. While many of these
early landowners did use their property for pastoral purposes, others used it for agriculture or
mixed farming. Others leased it to small farmers and others hoped to subdivide it into suburban
lots and sell it. Some tracts of land within the study area were owned by pastoralists and used for
resting or holding stock on its way to the saleyards or abattoirs, rather than as the nuclei of
pastoral stations. One example of this kind of property was Solomon's original purchase on the
Maribyrnong (now Medway Golf Course) which was purchased from its second owner, William
Blair, in 1901 by Thomas Williamson, a north-eastern Victorian grazier, who intended using the
property to fatten cattle13. Areas of land within the municipality were used by meat preserving or
slaughtering companies as holding or grazing areas for stock, for example Wembley Park, which
was once a holding area for William Angliss stock14. The link between the Study Area and the
pastoral industry, however, was probably most strongly expressed in the establishment of such
industries as meat processing and related trades and by the siting of wool stores strategically
close to railways from the Western District. Woolstores were spread across Brooklyn, West
Footscray and Tottenham in the twentieth century. A most striking example was the Australian
Estate Company's store built in Sunshine Road in the 1930s.

4.2 Farming
Crown Land in the Parish of Cut-Paw-Paw was offered for sale from 1843. A number of small
blocks along the west of the Maribyrnong River from Solomon's land at Braybrook down to the
Footscray Village Reserve had been sold, many of them to owners such as Joseph Raleigh and
James Johnston who purchased multiple smaller blocks. Thomas Hobbs had purchased a section
just to the west of the Footscray Village Reserve and much of the land at Spotswood and
Newport had been sold. Thorpe, Morris and Irish had acquired 640 acres in the area roughly
covered by North Sunshine today and a few other smaller properties were scattered near Kororoit

11 Gilbert Lyle Williams, The History of the Medway Golf Club, From Mia Mias to Manicured Meadow 1935-1990,
1992
12 Lack, 1991:.43
13 Gilbert Lyle Williams, The History of the Medway Golf Club, From Mia Mias to Manicured Meadow 1935-1990,
1992: 15
14 Lack, 1991:.249

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and Stony Creeks, but generally by 1851 much of the land, though it was subdivided, had not yet
been sold15.

Though Joseph Raleigh's name is most often associated with early industry in the region (see
below), he did use the land he purchased at Maribyrnong for pastoral and agricultural purposes as
well. Ruins of the house he built in the 1850s at Maribyrnong are still thought to be located on
the Explosives Factory Site here16. Other privately-owned land was sometimes leased by farmers,
as was Blair's farm, leased from its owner, W. Fletcher, which was located roughly where
Maribyrnong Secondary College and the former Ammunition factory site is located today. This
farm was about 198 acres in size and was farmed by the Blair family from the 1860s to the mid-
1880s. Other farmers at Maribyrnong in the 1870s were the Wests and Emmersons17.

Many farmers appear to have held small holdings. The electoral roll of 1856 for the Parish of
Cut-Paw-Paw listed 123 male householders, 34 of them farmers (this included the Spotswood-
Newport area). However, the census of 1861 showed that at Maidstone only four people were
engaged in agricultural and pastoral pursuits (three of them as labourers) while 56 were engaged
in these occupations in the combined centres of Albion and Braybrook18. Much of the land that
had been bought from the Crown was held by speculators who did not live on it or farm it and
some of this land was subdivided and offered in small residential lots in the 1850s. One such area
was that called Maidstone between Ballarat Road, Ashley Street, Suffolk Street and O'Connell
(now Summerhill) Roads. The plan of this subdivision, which was advertised in 1858, showed
four farms, Nelson's Merton's, Warringa's and Stanlake's grouped in a bunch on the south side of
Suffolk Street, between Rochelle and Studley Streets19. Another subdivisional plan from the
same era shows a 'market garden reserve' between Mitchell Street and Hampstead Road at
Maidstone20.

In 1857, at the north west corner of Essex Street and Summerhill Road, stood Dove's Residence
and farm of 40 acres, just outside another subdivision of 540 acres21. At the same time Colman's
Farm was located near the corner of Ashley Street and Ballarat Road22. While Braybrook was
described as very much an agricultural district in 1865, at Maidstone 'little agriculture [was]
being carried on, but there [were] several dairy farms in the neighbourhood...'23. A traveller
passing through Maidstone by rail in 1860 noted that

'Maidstone is a much smaller place [than Footscray] with some half-dozen wooden houses
standing in gardens surrounded with stonewalls for hedges, the inhabitants seemed to have made

15 See Map of the 'Suburban Lands of the City of Melbourne', 1851

16 Allom Lovell and Associates, 'Maribyrnong Heritage and Open Space, An Assessment of the Defence Site
Cordite Avenue Maribyrnong, (report) 1998:.22
17 Information re the Blairs, Wests and Emmersons from Olwen Ford and Pamela Lewis, Maribyrnong: Action in
Tranquility, Melbourne's Living Museum of the West and Sunshine City Council, 1989: 21
18 Quoted in Edith Popp, Glimpses of Early Sunshine Dawn of a District from Aboriginal Times to 1901, 1979: 54
19 See 'Plan of Maidstone', 821.08 1858
20 See book EF 912.945 S14: 48-49 'Plan of 1120 allotments near the municipality of Footscray; (nd) (SLV Map
collection)
21 See book EF 912.945 S14 Suburban and Country Plans 1853-1860 (SLV Map collection)
22 See book EF 912.945 S14 Suburban and Country Plans 1853-1860 (SLV Map collection): 141
23 Victorian Gazetteer, 1865, quoted in Popp, 1979: 51-53

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some attempt at farming, for I observed several stacks of oats. I saw nothing green but here and
there a patch of thistles which seemed to be struggling to exist' 24.

Farming continued in some parts of the Study Area until fairly recent times. There were still
some small farmers at Braybrook in the early years of the twentieth century and at Maribyrnong
in the 1950s, for instance, there were a number of poultry farms, market gardens and dairies.

4.3 Horse studs

In the late nineteenth century one of Australia's most famous horse studs was located at
Maribyrnong, on land that Joseph Raleigh had first purchased from the Crown in the 1840s. It
was on the site that later became the Maribyrnong Explosives Factory, between Cordite Avenue
and the Maribyrnong River.

Raleigh's property here was sold in 1862 to Hurtle Fisher, a South Australian pastoralist. Hurtle
Fisher began to establish a stud farm for racehorses on the site, but sold it in 1864 to his brother,
Charles Brown Fisher, who continued with this plan. Hurtle Fisher had, by that time, imported
the thoroughbred stallion, Fisherman, along with several mares. Fisherman, who won many
races himself, sired many other successful racehorses25.

In 1868 Charles Brown Fisher sold the Maribyrnong Stud to George Petty who continued to
develop the property's name as a successful thoroughbred stud. Petty established the
Maribyrnong Plate, which was, in its time, the richest prize for horse-racing in Australia26.

When Petty sold the property in 1875, Charles Brown Fisher repurchased it, adding the land to
the west that had originally been purchased from the Crown by Joseph Johnston. In 1888-89
Fisher built large red-brick stables which are still located on the site (within the Explosives
Factory complex). Four years later he sold the original Johnston portion of the stud to the three
Cox brothers, Archibald, William (of Cox Plate fame) and Albert, who established the
Maribyrnong Racecourse, which operated until 1900-1901, but was used as a training track until
1908. Some of the outline of the course can still be seen on the Explosives Factory site 27. In the
mid-1890s Fisher sold the eastern side of his stud farm to Sir William John Clarke, the largest
landowner in Victoria, founder of the Rupertswood Battery of Horse Artillery and a breeder of
thoroughbreds, but it is not known whether Clarke used the land in the same way. The use of part
of this land for training horses continued. In 1912 the Commonwealth Government purchased
part of Clarke's land (known as Remount Hill) for use as a Royal Australian Field Artillery
Remount depot, where horses were broken in and trained. On thirty acres which included the
stables built by Fisher, the Government built more stables and an exercise yard. The site was
used as an Army Remount Depot until the end of the Second World War28.

24 Phillip Rayson, quoted in Lack, 1991: 48

25 Ford and Lewis, Maribyrnong: Action in Tranquility, Melbourne's Living Museum of the West and Sunshine City
Council, 1989: 12
26 Australian Heritage Commission, Register of the National Estate, file no: 2/12/051/0005 Explosives Factory
Maribyrnong
27 Australian Heritage Commission, Register of the National Estate, file no: 2/12/051/0005 Explosives Factory
Maribyrnong
28 Australian Heritage Commission, Register of the National Estate, file no: 2/12/051/0005 Explosives Factory
Maribyrnong

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5 Exploiting natural resources

5.1 Basalt quarrying

The western area of Melbourne forms part of a vast basalt plain that stretches from the Yarra
River across almost to South Australia. It was created by volcanic activity millions of years ago
which resulted in vast outpourings of lava, which, when cooled, became basalt. A very hard
stone, basalt was recognised as a useful building and paving stone in the nineteenth century and
many early public buildings, churches, some houses, and road and railway bridges were
constructed of basalt. It was also used for paving roads and forming kerbs and gutters. One of the
very earliest uses of western suburbs basalt was as ballast for ships returning to England after
depositing cargoes of both imports and immigrants. Much of this ballast was quarried at
Williamstown, Newport, Spotswood and Yarraville.

Eventually bluestone quarries were dotted right across the current City of Maribyrnong, but in the
early years they were located near the Maribyrnong and Yarra Rivers and Stony Creek, partly
because these locations offered handy transport routes close to the quarries. Early quarries were
often small, opened up for a single private building. For instance, Joseph Raleigh used bluestone
to build his boiling down establishment and bluestone 'castle' or accommodation for his single
workers at Maribyrnong in the late 1840s-1850s. A map of the locality drawn in 1857-8 shows
two quarries, as well as stone buildings, located near the Maribyrnong where Pipe Makers Park is
now situated29.

Quarrying and carting bluestone became such an important occupation in Footscray in the 1850s
to 1870s that Melbourne Punch coined the alternative name of 'Stoneopolis' for the area. A
quarry reserve was noted by Selwyn in 1859 at Yarraville, just north of the Stony Creek
Backwash30.

According to John Lack, by the 1870s quarries in the Braybrook Shire specialised in stones for
use as road metal and railway line ballast, while Footscray offered blocks for buildings, roads and
bridges31. Many smaller quarries were operating at Yarraville and Upper Footscray by then. An
1877 map shows that Footscray Council had its own Borough Quarry, roughly where Michael
McCoy Reserve is now located in Ballarat Road, while another large quarry was located at West
Footscray about where Hansen Reserve is now located32. By the 1920s an enormous quarry was
located near the old Borough Quarry, roughly on the site of the sports grounds below the VUT
Ballarat Road Campus. While the Council still maintained its quarry and a stone-crushing plant
here, a private quarry was also being operated by Morans. Many quarrying firms or families
operated over several decades. James Govan opened a quarry in 1870 behind his bluestone house
on the corner of Essex Street and Summerhill Road. The family continued to open new quarry
holes in the same area into the twentieth century. In 1917 their main quarry 'covered the block
between Summerhill Rd, Essex, Market and Graham Streets'33.

29''Plan of Subdivision of Portion 10, Section 20 and Portions 4,5,6,& 7, Section 21, in the Parish of Cut Paw Paw
Being Part of the Maribyrnong Estate on the Saltwater River', reproduced in Ford and Lewis, 1989: 10
30 See map MD1C 1859, Selwyn
31 Lack, 1991: 80
32 See Map Melbourne RL 41, 'Plan of the Borough of Footscray by Gustav Tulk, 1877
33 Gary Vines, Quarry and Stone, Melbourne's Living Museum of the West, 1993: 27

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In the 1880s, when Melbourne experienced a building boom, Footscray quarries flourished as
they provided building material for such projects as Princes Bridge. Stone cutting works reflected
the demand for building stone. Footscray and Malmsbury Stone Cutting Works was established
in Moreland Street Footscray in 1887 and J. Taylor and Sons, Australasian Pioneer Granite
Polishing and Monumental Works transferred from Bendigo to Nicholson Street Footscray
around 188434. A guide to Victoria published in the 1880s noted that 'large quarries, the
bluestone being of excellent quality' existed at Braybrook, and smaller basalt quarries at
Maidstone35.

By the 1890s the Standard Quarrying Co. already owned a number of large blocks on either side
of Geelong Road at Brooklyn 36. Around 1910-1915 Standard Quarries also took over a quarry
opened by Eldridge between Ballarat Road and the Maribyrnong River. This was the last large
quarry within the former City of Footscray and was still operating in the late 1940s. The quarry
hole was later used as a tip. It was located near present-day Footscray City Secondary College37.
In the early twentieth century a number of quarries were still located near Stony Creek at
Yarraville. The present Cruikshank Park was the location of eleven quarries38. A 1910 map also
showed a number of large quarries where the Yarraville Terminal Station is now located,
between Francis Street and the Creek. A road leading from Francis Street was called Quarry
Road39.

By the 1930s there were still a number of large quarries located at Brooklyn, Tottenham, West
Footscray, Maribyrnong and Maidstone40. At Maribyrnong the Essendon Council opened a
corporation quarry in 1910 on what later became High Point Shopping Centre. Footscray Council
opened a new quarry at Tottenham in 1921, moving to North Altona in 1957. Council quarries
reflected the use of crushed bluestone in road-making.

The larger surviving quarries of the western suburbs are located outside of the Study Area now.
As quarries were worked out and as residential development spread further west, the quarries
themselves were pushed further out. However, for a significant period of time quarrying provided
employment for a number of residents in what is now the City of Maribyrnong, initially attracting
workers to settle in the area and providing ongoing work for local residents, particularly in the
nineteenth century. While examples of the use of local bluestone can be seen in several buildings
in the City of Maribyrnong, many of the sites of former quarries have now been transformed into
parks and reserves, having often served as tips or toxic waste dumps before then. Sometimes a
single small reserve located in a residential or industrial landscape is a hint that a small quarry
once existed on the site, as at Bassett Reserve in West Footscray. A quarry site that had tragic
consequences for later residents was located on Williamstown Road, on the corner of Anderson
St, in Yarraville. Several units built on this site subsequently cracked and collapsed before being
demolished. The site became known for a while as ‘Yarraville sinking village’. Other former
quarry sites have become much larger reserves, while the former Essendon Council Quarry has
become the multi-storey Highpoint West and its carpark.

34 Gary Vines, Quarry and Stone, Melbourne's Living Museum of the West, 1993: 20
35 Alexander Sutherland, Victoria and its Metropolis: Past and Present, 1888, Vol. 2: 418
36 See map 'Parish of Cut Paw Paw 1892', County of Bourke Atlas
37 Gary Vines, Quarry and Stone, 1993: 28
38 Meyer Eidelsohn, Stony Creek, The Journey of a Waterway and its People, Friends of Stony Creek, 1997: 19
39 See Port of Melbourne General Plan, 1920 from Melbourne Harbor Trust (located at Living Museum of the West)
40 See 1936 Army Survey Plans [located at Living Museum of the West]

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6 Establishing lines and networks of communication and

transportation of goods and people (including early hotels)
Transporting both people and goods has been vital in an area that has long been a centre of
industry. Industry has to be located in places convenient for the supply of raw materials and with
access to transportation, both to domestic and export markets, for their finished products. The
City of Maribyrnong lies on the route between Melbourne and other major Victorian cities, such
as Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo and thus main roads to these centres traversed the city from the
mid-nineteenth century. Some of Victoria's earliest railway lines also passed through the Study
Area. The Maribyrnong River also afforded a very important early transport route for industry.
Paradoxically, it also posed early transportation difficulties for those wishing to pass between
Melbourne and the west.

6.1 River crossings: fords, punts, hotels and bridges

Even as Melbourne on the Yarra had been established as the administrative centre of the Port
Phillip District, the land to the west of the Saltwater River was isolated from it. Although
geographically the current City of Maribyrnong was not far from Melbourne, the river had to be
crossed and the West Melbourne Swamp had to be negotiated by travellers wishing to go
between Melbourne and Williamstown or Melbourne and Geelong. The earliest European route
across the Maribyrnong was established at the stepping stones or ford that Charles Grimes' party
had found at Braybrook in 1803. This was hardly a very convenient route as it meant going north
from Melbourne towards Essendon, crossing the ford, which came to be known as Solomon's
Ford, and then travelling in a south-westerly route towards Geelong. The earliest map of the
Parish of Cut Paw Paw shows this faint and dotted track, indicating that the route to Melbourne
was via Solomon's Ford and then through what is now Avondale Heights, East Keilor, Essendon,
Moonee Ponds and Flemington.

By 1839 Captain Lonsdale, the Superintendent of the Port Phillip District, took steps to improve
communication via the Saltwater River by placing a punt on the river at the village reserve for
Footscray, just north of the junction of the Saltwater and Yarra Rivers41. Hoddle's 1840 map
shows a punt and one track forking out towards Geelong and Williamstown, the forerunners of
today's Geelong and Williamstown (or Melbourne) Roads. The historian Dr. John Lack points
out that heavy traffic, such as drays, would have continued to use Solomon's Ford rather than this
small punt. Lonsdale's punt was soon replaced by privately-licensed punts, first operated by
Thomas Watts, briefly and then, from 1840, by Benjamin Levien, who also established an inn on
the Footscray side of the river, roughly where Shepherd Bridge crosses it today. Inns or hotels
were integral components of the transport system in nineteenth century Victoria as they
functioned primarily to provide travellers and their horses with rest and sustenance. Levien's
Hotel was known as the Victoria Hotel42. Although Levien held onto the punt, he gave up the
hotel in 1843 and it passed through the hands of three licensees and a couple of name changes
before it burned down in 1848. By this time Michael Lynch had bought the punt and he moved
both hotel and punt upriver, about a mile north of the township reserve of Footscray and near to
the racecourse43.

Another punt, operated by John O'Farrell, was located on the Maribyrnong River by 1855. By
this time four more hotels had been located in the old Footscray Township: the Stanley Arms at

41 Lack, 1991: 24
42 Lack, 1991:.28
43 Lack, 1991: 39

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Maribyrnong Street, the Junction Inn at the corner of Bunbury and Whitehall Streets, the Railway
Hotel in Nicholson Street and the Footscray Punt Hotel (later known as the Bridge Hotel) on the
corner of Maribyrnong and Wingfield Streets44.

Further up the river, at Maribyrnong, Joseph Raleigh had established a punt near the location of
the present bridge by 1852 when Mrs Ellen Clacy crossed the river on her way to the goldfields45.
The punt was replaced by a pontoon bridge in 1858 and a hotel, known as Raleigh's Punt Hotel, a
two-storey bluestone building, was located nearby, on the corner of what is now Raleigh Road
and Burton Crescent, by 1866. Another Hotel, the Anglers, was located on the present site of the
Anglers Hotel by 187046. The pontoon bridge at Maribyrnong was replaced about 1870 by a
timber bridge, funds for which were contributed by the Melbourne Meat Preserving Works and
local landowner, George Petty47. This timber bridge was replaced by a reinforced Monier
Concrete bridge in 1911. The present bridge was built by the Country Roads Board in 196748.

Lower down the river, at Footscray, the first bridge linking the Melbourne and Footscray sides
was opened at the end of a road across the West Melbourne Swamp. Initially called the Saltwater
River Bridge, it was located at Dynon Road and was opened by the Governor in February 186349.
The new road across the swamp, which Footscrayites had agitated for since the 1850s, was made
a toll road (travellers were charged for the use of it) and was managed jointly by Footscray and
Braybrook Council interests. In 1903 the 1863 bridge was replaced by the Hopetoun Bridge,
named after Australia’s first Governor-General. This, in turn, was replaced by a four lane bridge
in 1969.

The next bridge across the river was a drawbridge, erected by Michael Lynch to replace his punt
by 1866. Footscray Council was leasing this bridge by 1870. In 1871, after it was repaired, it was
actually sold to the Footscray Council.50 The wooden drawbridge was demolished and replaced
with a concrete bridge in 193551. In the 1990s this bridge has been made safer by duplication.

In 1895 the Melbourne Harbor Trust opened Footscray Road across the swamp from Flinders
Street and a swing bridge was built across the river to connect the new road to Napier Street52.
Erecting a swing bridge meant that it could be opened to allow river traffic to negotiate the river
to deliver raw materials to the industry located further upstream. This was replaced by Shepherd
Bridge (named after Ernie Shepherd) in 1958.

Crossing the river at the back of Flemington Racecourse between Ascot Vale and Footscray was
the Monash Bridge, which was in existence by 192353, but was not present on a 1920 map of the
area (nor was Farnsworth Avenue). This bridge was replaced with a new bridge called the
Farnsworth Avenue Bridge in 198054. Canning Street, between Maribyrnong and Avondale

44 Lack, 1991: 45
45 Ellen Clacy quoted in Ford and Lewis, 1989: 6
46 See Lack, 1991: 74 and Ford and Lewis, 1989: 22
47 Alan Gross, 'Maribyrnong', in Victorian Historical Magazine, Vol.XXII, no.2, September 1947: 58
48 Keith Ashton, personal communication
49 Lack, 1991:.68
50 Lack, 1991:74
51 City of Footscray, Footscray, A Pictorial Record of the Municipality from 1859 to 1988, 1989: 148
52Alan Mayne, Andrew May, John Lack, Heritage Study City Link Development Site, July 1989: 70
53 See Map Roll 126 'Melbourne and Suburbs', Hilde, 1923 (Land and Survey Information Centre)
54 City of Footscray, Footscray, A Pictorial Record of the Municipality from 1859 to 1988, 1989: 146

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Heights was bridged by a wooden military bridge in 192155. It was replaced in the 1970s by the
current bridge.

Not all bridges over the Maribyrnong were intended for general road traffic. A railway bridge
was one of the first structures to span the river and will be dealt with under railway
transportation. Similarly, a tramway bridge crossed the river at Maribyrnong Road earlier in this
century. A stock bridge was constructed over the river between the former City abattoirs and
William Angliss's meat works .

6.2 River transport

The Maribyrnong River, while marking the eastern boundary of the City of Maribyrnong, was
also an important catalyst for the establishment of industry in the region, as it enabled easy
transport of raw materials and finished products to and from industries located along its banks.
Boats and lighters which worked along the river had to be fairly small, however, as there was a
bar at the junction of the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers, which was originally located at about
where Lyons Street, Footscray, reached Maribyrnong Street. The junction was moved with the
creation of the Coode Canal and Coode Island in the 1880s. By this time the Melbourne Harbor
Trust had begun providing wharfs on the river below Hopkins Street and by 1920 the wharves
extended down from the Hopkins Street Bridge to Lyons Street56. At Yarraville wharves were
built to service the industrial complexes that began to locate there in the 1870s and 1880s.

Along with cargo handling, boat repairs and building were carried out at Footscray from quite
early times. Charlie Lovett recalled that two floating docks were located on the Melbourne side
of the river near Footscray in the 1860s and they attracted most of the shipping coming up to
Melbourne that needed to be repaired57. In the 1880s two shipbuilding yards were operating on
the Maribyrnong at Footscray, one of them on the Melbourne side, Campbell, Sloss and McCann,
employing 300 men. Foreman and Co. operated on the Footscray side58.

During World War Two the Footscray Wharves were used by the Commonwealth Allied Works
Council for assembling and fitting out small craft59.

6.3 Railways
The railway came early to Footscray simply because it was on the Melbourne-Williamstown line
which was first mooted by a private railway company, the Melbourne, Mount Alexander and
Murray River Railway in 1853. When the company ran short of funds, however, in 1856, it was
taken over by the Victorian Government, thus creating the Victorian Railways Department. The
Melbourne-Williamstown line was the first line completed by the Victorian Railways. The line
across the Maribyrnong, via Footscray to Williamstown, was opened in early 1859, along with
the first stage of the Melbourne -Bendigo line as far as Sunbury. On opening day, January 13,
1859 a ceremonial train set out from Spencer Street station, passed through Footscray and on to
Williamstown and then back to Footscray to follow the Bendigo line through Sunshine as far as
Sunbury. Bridges over the Maribyrnong River and Stony Creek at Yarraville had been included
in the design of the Williamstown line and another, on the Bendigo line crossed Stony Creek

55 Hugh Anderson, Saltwater River History Trails, Sunbury to the Sea, Red Rooster Press, 1984: 55
56 Lack, 1991: 89 and see map 'Port Of Melbourne General Plan', 1920, Melbourne Harbor Trust
57 John Lack, (ed), Charlie Lovett's Footscray, City of Footscray Historical Society, 1993: 6
58 Hugh Anderson, Saltwater River History Trails, Sunbury to the Sea, Red Rooster Press, 1984: 68
59 Lack, 1991: 316-17

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between Tottenham and Sunshine. The bridge over the Maribyrnong was described as a
'handsome and in every way satisfactory structure of iron girders and stone piers'60. It was
modified in 1905 and 1910 and duplicated in 187461. Footscray Station was the only station on
the line, apart from Williamstown and Williamstown Pier, that was opened for traffic in 1859.
Middle Footscray Station served as the Footscray stop on the Bendigo line. The main Footscray
Station was originally located in a different position from its current one. Maps of the 1850s
show it as being located between Napier Street and Bunbury Street. It was moved and rebuilt in
1899 so that both Williamstown and Bendigo lines could be joined at the one junction station62.
In 1928 a railway tunnel and bridge across the river were constructed in line with Bunbury Street
so that goods trains could travel between West Footscray and South Kensington and the West
Melbourne Goods Yard without having to go via Footscray Station63.

Early developers of land at Maidstone and Footscray used the availability of the railway lines as
part of their sales campaigns. Indeed, in the 1860s there was said to be a station at Maidstone on
the Bendigo line, though trains did not stop there64. Yarraville's station opened in 1872, though it
was reconstructed in 189365. Seddon and West Footscray Stations were opened in 1906, although
originally the West Footscray station was on the other side of Geelong Road from its present
location66. By 1895 West Footscray and Tottenham Stations were featured on a map of the
Parish. White City was also featured by 1923. It was in the early half of the twentieth century that
the Victorian Railways further altered the local environment by constructing an overpass over
railway lines at West Footscray, known since then as ‘Mount Mistake’ and reconstructed in
recent decades, and underpasses at Middle Footscray and Tottenham67.

Footscray station became especially significant as a transportation point during the Second World
War, when the current City of Maribyrnong was a nationally important centre for defence
manufacturing. It was noted during the war that it was the busiest suburban railway station in
Australia68. At the very least it was Melbourne's busiest suburban station, handling 40,000
passengers daily in 1943, when Flinders Street Station handled 60,000 during the evening rush69..

6.4 Main roads

As mentioned above, early tracks into and through the City of Maribyrnong were pivoted around
river crossing places and connected Melbourne with Geelong and the pastoral empires of the
western part of Victoria. The route which crossed Solomons Ford and led to Geelong via
Braybrook was possibly a precursor to Ballarat Road, although the direction it takes after leaving
what is now North Sunshine is difficult to discern on the old maps. Maps of the same vintage
(circa 1841) also clearly show tracks leading from the punt on the Maribyrnong at Footscray and

60 The Age, quoted in Marc Fiddian, Trains, Tracks and Travellers, A History of the Victorian Railways, 1977: 13
61 Gary Vines, Western Region Industrial Heritage Study, Melbourne's Western Region Heritage Study, Living
Museum of the West, no page numbers
62 Gary Vines, Western Region Industrial Heritage Study, Melbourne's Western Region Heritage Study, Living
Museum of the West, no page numbers
63 Gary Vines, Western Region Industrial Heritage Study, Melbourne's Western Region Heritage Study, Living
Museum of the West, no page numbers
64 Victorian Gazetteer, 1865, quoted in Popp, 1979: .51
65 Graeme Butler, 'Footscray Conservation Study', 1989: 4-28
66 John Lack, personal communication
67 John Lack, personal communication and see also Lack, 1991: 266
68 The author came across this remark in Department of Manpower files during research conducted in the 1970s.
69 Lack, 1991: 320

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forking out towards Williamstown and Geelong. The Geelong Road followed much the same
route as the present Geelong Road, even though, for some time in the 1840s, it was proposed that
the main road to Geelong should cross the river below Footscray at Spotswood and head via
Williamstown and Altona towards Geelong.

It appears to have been the already established route that became the main Geelong Road. This
was not, however, declared a main road until the 1850s. When the Geelong Railway line was
taken over by the Government (in the mid-1850s), the road's main road status was repealed, and
it was left to Local Roads Boards, such as Wyndham, Footscray and Braybrook to try and
maintain this road and its bridges. Roads Boards were the precursors to municipal councils. They
constructed and maintained main roads within their areas and charged travellers a toll for the use
of the road. Wyndham (later Werribee Shire) and Braybrook took much of the responsibility for
the Geelong Road. As with crossing places, hotels were often established at stopping places
along main roads. An 1859 map shows the Rising Sun Hotel at the junction of the Geelong Road
and what is now Williamstown Road. The Guiding Star Hotel was located on the same road at
Kororoit Creek and the Green Man Hotel stood on the corner of (the current) Williamstown Road
and Francis Street70.

Although an 1851 map of the area gives no indication of a track along the route of the present
day Ballarat Road, an 1852 map includes a road crossing Lynch's Punt (now Lynch's bridge) and
forking to the north-west (as Ballarat Road does now) as well as south-westerly towards Geelong.
It has been said that Ballarat Road was not initially used very much as a route to the rich
goldfields of central Victoria, which were discovered in 1851. However, enough traffic was
passing by 1854 for the Braybrook Hotel to open. Land was reserved by the Government for a
'road or highway' from the Saltwater River to Ballarat via Exford in 185771. By the next year
hopeful subdividers were calling it the 'main road to the diggings' on their plans of allotments for
sale in Maidstone and Upper Footscray.

Although the most popular route to the diggings was said to be via Moonee Ponds and Keilor, it
appears that some travellers used Raleigh's Punt at Maribyrnong to cross the river and follow
Raleigh Road and what is now Hampstead Road to meet up with Ballarat Road at Braybrook.
Some sources suggest that teamsters carrying supplies to the goldfields on bullock drays favoured
a 'grove of trees' on Hampstead Road as a camping place72.

6.5 Tramways
While several other inner Melbourne municipalities were connected to the centre of the city by
cable tramways as early as the 1880s, the City of Maribyrnong could not boast its own tramway
system until the second decade of the twentieth century. Tramway systems were usually
established by local Tramways Trusts and the Footscray Tramway Trust was created in 1916.
Although trams in other parts of Melbourne generally provided a route into the city, Footscray's
was different in that it was intended to bring passengers into Footscray from 'outlying areas' such
as Kingsville, Essendon, West Footscray and Seddon73. Initially the Tramways Trust envisaged a
system that ran from Essendon to Williamstown, via Footscray, but this ambitious plan did not

70 See map MDIC 'Geological Survey, 1859' Selwyn (Land and Survey Information Centre)
71 Victorian Government Gazette, 1857: 732
72 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 6
73 Lack, 1991

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eventuate. The Footscray Tramways system opened on 06 September 1921, with three routes
leading out from a Leeds St terminus and with a tram depot at Buckley Street. The routes
terminated at the corner of Somerville and Williamstown Road, Yarraville, Barkly Street/Russell
Street, West Footscray and Rosamond Road/Summerhill Road, Maidstone.

Maribyrnong's eastern boundary had tram connections with the city from 1906 when the
Essendon tram was extended from Flemington down to the Moonee Ponds side of the
Maribyrnong Bridge. Wartime production at the Explosives and Ordnance Factories meant that
the tramline was extended, via a special trestle tramways bridge, across the river, down Cordite
Avenue and along Wests Road to the corner of Williamsons Rd in 1940-41. The bridge (
demolished in 1967) was on the downstream side of the existing bridge74. The demands of
transporting wartime workers also led to the addition of another spur tramline from Footscray,
along Gordon Street to the Ammunition factory75. Eventually Footscray did get its tram route to
Essendon when the routes through Footscray and Maribyrnong were joined sometime after the
war. By the 1960s the tram routes to Yarraville and West Footscray had been replaced by
tramways buses.

7 An industrial centre
The City of Maribyrnong's identity as a centre for industry in Victoria stretches back to the 1840s
when the first industrial establishment was opened on the Maribyrnong River. As industry grew
during the nineteenth century, it was at first drawn to the banks of the Maribyrnong, especially at
Footscray and Yarraville, but also at Maribyrnong and Braybrook. It was not really until the
twentieth century that industry began to stray away from a belt along the river, jumping
established residential areas to spread out along Geelong Road at Footscray West and Ballarat
Road at Footscray and Maidstone. From the 1920s industry spread along Sunshine Road at West
Footscray and Tottenham and from the 1940s it moved into the Hampstead Road district at
Maribyrnong, along Ballarat Road at Braybrook, and filled up wide open spaces around
Paramount Road, Sunshine Road and Somerville Road at Tottenham and Brooklyn. Meat
preserving and meat by-products, such as tanning, tallow and soap -making and fertilisers were
heavily represented amongst the earliest industries. Chemical and fertiliser manufacturing were
also a strong force. Textiles were another major industry from the late nineteenth century, while
metals, farm implements and heavy engineering became more predominant around the turn of the
century. Food stuffs and rubber related industries became more commonplace in the mid-
twentieth century. A major strand in the industrial history of the City of Maribyrnong from the
nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century was that of explosives
and munitions, especially at Maribyrnong and Maidstone/Footscray.

7.1 By the river: early industry 1840s-1870s

It is ironic that an area on the edge of vast pastoral plains had its first industry started because of
a slump in the pastoral industry. Not very long after squatters had moved into the Port Phillip
District with their flocks of sheep, an economic depression hit the district, causing prices of meat
and wool to slump dramatically. For a time the most profitable method of using sheep was not to
sell them for meat or fleece, but to boil down the meat of the sheep to make tallow, which was
then used in candle and soap making. Joseph Raleigh, a pastoralist and entrepreneur, established
a salting and melting down operation on the then Yarra River at Yarraville (south of Somerville
Road in Pivot Fertiliser site) in 1845. He purchased land from the Crown at Maribyrnong in

74 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 50

75 Lack, 1991: 320

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1847 and, along with establishing pastoral and agricultural activities, established another boiling-
down operation, probably in 1848-976. The boiling down works were located on the site now
occupied by Pipemakers Park and an 1858 map of the area shows stone buildings and bluestone
quarries (probably used to build the buildings). As well as the boiling down factory, Raleigh
erected a bluestone 'castle' at about the site of Highpoint West, which apparently served as
accommodation for his workers. The castle remained as a landmark (though in ruins) until
around the time of World War One77. Raleigh also made use of 'bounty' immigrants, migrants
whose passages to the colonies were paid, but who were bound to work for a particular employer
for a certain period of time. It is thought that the gold rushes put an end to Raleigh's boiling down
operation, when a rising population increased the local demand for fresh meat. By August 1854
the engineering firm of Robertson, Martin and Smith were said to be occupying the site of a
boiling-down establishment on the Saltwater and evidence suggests that, at least between 1854
and 1855, the firm was using Raleigh's buildings as an adjunct to their city operation78.
Robertson, Martin and Smith were responsible for building the first steam locomotive in
Victoria, to be used on the Melbourne-Port Melbourne railway line, the first railway line opened
in Australia.

As well as the production of tallow, and, of course, meat, sheep and cattle carcasses could be put
to many uses. Hides were tanned for leather, and other parts of the animal could be used in the
production of gelatine, glue, margarine, fertilisers and chemicals. When the Melbourne City
Council saleyards were located at Kensington in 1854 and the City Abattoirs moved to
Flemington in 1860, associated industries were encouraged to locate nearby for ready access to
raw materials. The river was an ideal location for these industries, not only because water could
be used in some processes, but, more importantly, waste from the factories could be poured
directly into the river, which served as a giant open drain. River transport could also be used for
moving finished products. Many of these noxious industries had at first been established on the
Yarra River but, when pushed out of inner Melbourne, settled on the Maribyrnong at Footscray,
Yarraville and Maribyrnong.

Although Raleigh's boiling down works did not survive the 1850s, another slump in the wool
market in the late 1860s, together with new discoveries about ways of canning meat, meant that a
number of meat preserving works were established in the area. Four were located at Footscray
and Yarraville , but the best known was the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company which took
over Raleigh's old site at Maribyrnong (now Pipemakers Park).

Canning fresh meat meant that it could be exported to markets overseas, such as Britain. Seven
meat canning companies were founded: four of them at Footscray and one at Maribyrnong. The
Melbourne Meat Preserving Company was the most successful. Formed by Samuel Ritchie, the
Melbourne Meat Preserving Company leased the boiling down works' site in 1868. While some
of Raleigh's structures appear to have been used by the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company,
new buildings were also erected. Stock were penned nearby, vegetables were grown, tins were
made on the premises and employees were accommodated either in the 'castle', which was briefly
a hotel, or in a number of cottages built by the company for employees. Wharves lay alongside
the company's site on the Maribyrnong. A fire in 1873 damaged some areas of the complex,

76 Ford and Vines, Pipemakers Park Conservation Analysis, 1996: 30

77 John Lack suggests that the remaining stones of the castle were actually crushed sometime between the beginning
of the twentieth century and the First World War in 1914-1918.
78 Ford and Vines, Pipemakers Park Conservation Analysis, 1996: 30

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necessitating some rebuilding, but, in the early 1870s the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company
was leading Australia in the export of tinned meats79. By 1882 the site was being shared with the
Australian Frozen Meat Export Company, which was utilising the new technologies of
refrigeration to export meat, but this company moved to Newport in 1882.

The Melbourne Meat Preserving Co. was beginning to fail by this time and wound up its business
in April 1886. Buildings dating from the establishment of the company (1868) and from
Raleigh's prior occupation of the site, can still be found at Pipemakers' Park80.

Further down the river, at Footscray and Yarraville, other meat-related industries were
established at around the same time as the Melbourne Meat Preserving Co. Henderson's Piggery
opened in 1872 as a bacon-curing works. Later it became a boiling-down and margarine factory
for Swallow and Ariel. The remaining substantial bluestone building on the banks of the river is
now the Footscray Community Arts Centre81 .

Just north of Hopkins Street Footscray, Isaac Hallenstein established a tannery in 1864. After his
nephew Moritz Michaelis joined the business, the company expanded, buying additional land and
establishing branches in London, Sydney and New Zealand82. By 1901 200 men worked at this
leather factory. The Michaelis-Hallenstein building was demolished in 1987. The Victorian Bone
Mills, first operated by Macmeikan and Reid, ground bones into dust or meal for use as fertiliser.
The firm had operated in Flemington for 25 years before they erected a new bluestone building
and chimney on eleven acres at Yarraville, on what is now the site of Pivot Fertilisers. This firm
attracted Robert Smith and Co.'s acid works to relocate from South Melbourne and lease part of
Macmeikan and Co.'s land, supplying the latter with essential acid via a pipeline83. By 1872
Smith's works had been purchased by Charles Campbell and James Cuming to form Cuming
Smith and Co. By 1875 Cuming Smith, which had rebuilt a larger factory after the first was
destroyed by fire, was leasing Macmeikan's bone mills. Cuming Smith not only became a large,
benevolent and long-lived employer of local men in Yarraville, but it also attracted other
chemical and superphosphate firms to locate alongside it, so that reciprocal arrangements could
be made. Wischer and Co. came to Yarraville in 1895, followed by the Mount Lyell Mining and
Railway Co. in 1907, consolidating a chemical and fertiliser industry that continues on the
Yarraville site today. The three companies, along with the Australian Explosives Co. combined
to form Commonwealth Fertilisers and Chemicals Ltd in 1929. In 1936 I.C.I. took over
Commonwealth Fertilisers and Chemicals plant84.

Woollen mills were another industry connected to the pastoral world. The Melbourne Woollen
Mills on Stony Creek at Yarraville opened in 1872 in premises that had been built two years
earlier by the Australasian Woollen Company. The new company added some buildings,
including a manager's residence, to those already on the site. Operations from wool washing and

79 Ford and Vines, Pipemakers Park Conservation Analysis, 1996: 44

80 Information re: the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company has all been drawn from Ford and Vines' Pipemakers'
Park Conservation Analysis. This is a very detailed document and therefore only an outline has been included in the
present document.
81 Vines, Meat and Meat Byproducts, Melbourne's Living Museum of the West, 1993: 6
82 Alan Mayne, Andrew May, John Lack, Heritage Study City Link Development Site, July 1989: 76
83 Lack, 1991: 93
84 Lack, 1991: 358

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scouring to weaving took place at the mills85 .When the company collapsed in 1884, the
Yarraville Woollen Mills took over the site, but by 1891 it had become a pottery and later, in the
twentieth century, Morlynn Ceramics, which still manufactures insulators86. Remnants of an
1880s bluestone wall are said to still exist within the complex at Banool Avenue87.

The industrial landscape along the river at Yarraville in the 1870s was virtually completed in
1873 when Joshua Brothers built a sugar refinery. Two years later this was taken over by the
Victoria Sugar Co. which, on twelve acres, built a villa for the resident manager and a row of
brick houses for employees, as well as making massive alterations to the refinery itself88. After
experiencing financial difficulties in 1886-7, during which time it shut down, the site was
absorbed by the Colonial Sugar Refining Co., which it remains today.

The beginnings of the City of Maribyrnong's very significant contribution to Australia's

explosives and ammunition industry were laid when the Colony of Victoria's powder magazine
was moved to Footscray, on the river at the foot of Lyons Street in the 1860s. Volatile explosives
naturally had to be stored in isolated places. A location near water helped in safe transportation
of explosives into and out of the magazine. By the mid-1870s the Footscray site was no longer
isolated and between 1875 and 1878 a new powder magazine was constructed upstream of
Footscray, on the river at what is now called Maidstone. Known as both the Saltwater River
Powder Magazine and also as Jack's Magazine, it included two main bluestone magazines and
other buildings, surrounded by 10 metre high earth blast mounds and a 3 metre high bluestone
wall. Tramways connected the buildings, via tunnels to a wharf on the river and the loading shed
was connected to the river by a 400 metre canal89. Jack's Magazine, which can still be seen on the
west bank of the Maribyrnong, was, in turn, replaced by the Truganina Explosives Reserve at
Altona in 1901, but by then other foundations for the manufacture of arms and ammunition in the
Footscray-Maribyrnong area had been laid by the establishment of the Colonial Ammunition Co.
ammunition factory just to the north of the magazine near the river in 1889. A private company,
the CAC was established with a view to making Victoria less dependent on imported arms and
ammunition.At the beginning of the twentieth century CAC expanded its plant so that it could
produce cartridge cases and bullets and, during the First World War, as work expanded it added
more buildings. When the company experienced financial difficulties in 1919 it leased the factory
to the Commonwealth Government for seven years until 1928, when the Commonwealth bought
it outright90. The ammunition factory was another addition to the vast area of land devoted to
defence purposes in Maribyrnong-Footscray and will be explored more thoroughly under the
theme heading of Defence.

85 Neale and Co., 'Local Industries in Williamstown, Footscray and Yarraville. A Complete and Authentic
Description of Each of the Principal Manufacturies in the Above Districts', 1882
86 Gary Vines, Western Region Industrial Heritage Study, Melbourne's Western Region Heritage Study, Living
Museum of the West, no page numbers
87 Gary Vines, Western Region Industrial Heritage Study, Melbourne's Western Region Heritage Study, Living
Museum of the West, no page numbers
88 Neale and Co., 'Local Industries in Williamstown, Footscray and Yarraville. A Complete and Authentic
Description of Each of the Principal Manufacturies in the Above Districts', 1882: 17
89Allom Lovell and Associates, 'Maribyrnong Heritage and Open Space, An Assessment of the Defence Site Cordite
Avenue Maribyrnong, (report), 1998
90 Australian Heritage Commission, Register of the National Estate Database, file no. 2/12/051007, ADI Footscray
(Indicative Place)

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7.2 Consolidation and diversification: 1880s-1920s

The 1880s were a time of expansion for Melbourne, both economically and in terms of
population and the spread of settlement. It was also a time when the west of Melbourne
consolidated its industrial role and began to emerge as a centre of engineering, metal trades and
agricultural machinery as massive engineering works opened in Spotswood and Newport and
companies such as the Braybrook Implement Works were established just outside of the current
City of Maribyrnong. The 1880s saw the beginning of several engineering and metal works in the
City of Maribyrnong, located near to the railway lines, as at Yarraville, where Claus Ebeling
started his engineering business as a blacksmith in 1885 and Laughtons Engineering located in
Footscray.

After the gloomy years of the 1890s depression, a number of newer industries made their start in
or moved to the study area. Some reused old industrial sites by the river, as did Barnet Glass,
rubber manufacturers, and Maize Products. Others began to take up large areas of vacant land
needed to expand operations that had begun elsewhere. Kinnears Ropes was an example of such
an industry, relocating from Essendon to the site it still occupies in Ballarat Road in 1899.
Mephan Ferguson, engineering works, had also been operating in the 1890s in North Melbourne
and Carlton, but relocated to Gordon Street Footscray in 189391. In 1929 this site was purchased
by Metters, renowned for 'one of the biggest foundries in Australia'92 but has recently been
redeveloped as medium density housing.

The theme of meatworks was carried on by William Angliss, who established the Imperial
Slaughtering and Freezing Works across the river from the Flemington Abattoirs in 190593.
Angliss expanded his operation to include not only slaughtering and freezing, but boiling down,
canning, meat-preserving and skin-drying, on a huge site, adjacent to which he constructed
workers' housing. The Angliss Meatworks continued to provide employment for local and
seasonal workers until the 1970s, when they closed, and were later demolished for housing
development. In 1927 Smorgons initiated a meat-preserving plant at Somerville Road Brooklyn.
After the war the plant was modernised and Smorgon Consolidated Industries was to go on to
expand over much of Brooklyn between Somerville and Geelong Roads.

At Braybrook, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the beginnings were made of another
enclave of meat by-products industries. W. Blair was noted on an 1885 subdivisional plan as
having 'works' in the area north of Raleigh Street that he had long held as farm land. By 1894 he
was listed in the Melbourne Directory as having a bone mill here in Raleigh Street (now
Cranwell Street). In the same street were the Ewers Brothers, slaughtermen and H. Hyam, a
slaughterman. By the turn of the century there were two piggeries in nearby Burke and Butler
Streets, both operated by Chinese (Hap Shoon and Shing Lee) as well as Dagg and Co., makers
of sausage skins and whip gut in Burke Street and Charles Thompson's boiling down works in
Raleigh Street94. W. Pridham Pty Ltd were making sausage casings, meat meal for poultry, tallow
and fertilisers in the same area just south of the river from the 1890s95. Pridhams went on to
occupy the same site (in Evans Street) until the 1990s. George Pennell was making bone dust and

91 Lack, 1991: 164

92 Lack and Ford, Melbourne’s Western Region: An Introductory History, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West,
Melbourne Western Region Cultural Heritage Study, 1986:86
93 Lack, 1991: 166
94 Sands and Mc Dougall, Victorian Directories, 1894, 1903
95 See Footscray and Braybrook Publicity Committee, Forging Ahead, 1947 ,which says that Pridhams had been
operating for more than half a century

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refining tallow in the second decade of the twentieth century in Burke Street. In the 1930s the
company began making Tuckerbox Pet Food, until a shortage of tinplate during the Second
World War made the company switch to wartime production of glycerine for munitions and
tallow for soap. It reverted to making pet food under the Tuckerbox brand after the war.

In 1911 Raleigh's old site on the river at Maribyrnong was recycled once again as Humes
Pipeworks, manufacturers of reinforced concrete pipes. Humes, which had several factories
throughout Australia, pioneered techniques in the development of reinforced concrete. In the 68
years that Humes occupied the Maribyrnong site, the buildings and plant were extended and
expanded. The plant was closed to move to Laverton in 197996.

Textile industries enjoyed a resurgence in the Study Area in the 1920s when Dickies Towels
began operating in Yarraville and Bradford Cotton Mills in Footscray. Bradford later took over
the Barnet Glass Rubber Co. building in Footscray.

John Lack has said that by 1911 the Williamstown-Footscray and Braybrook area had become the
most highly industrialised part of Melbourne97. New industries of the 1900-1920 period not only
pushed urban development out away from the river by occupying large spaces, but also attracted
a population looking for work, who built, bought or rented houses in the area. It was not only
industry within the current City of Maribyrnong that accounted for population growth in these
decades, but also other major employers, such as H.V.McKay, who relocated his harvester works
to Braybrook Junction (Sunshine) in 1905.

7.3 Pushing outwards: 1930s-1960s

Despite the depression of the 1930s, many industries continued to relocate or establish
themselves on new sites in the study area. The Bendigo Railway line and Geelong Road at West
Footscray attracted the new premises of Boon Spa (which had opened in 1886 in Footscray as
Footscray Enterprise Dandelion Wine and Aerated Water Manufactory), Hopkins Odlum, which
later became Apex Belting, and the Southern Can Company. Bramall and Co. (later called
Bramac) was established in 1928 and Frank Beaurepaire established Olympic Tyre and Rubber
Co. in Cross Street, West Footscray in 1933.

At Maribyrnong and Maidstone Commonwealth munitions and ordnance complexes were

expanded during the 1930s as the Government sought to prepare Australia for possible war.
Government policy in the 1920s and 1930s encouraged the private development of iron, steel,
metal, glass making and chemicals98 and this may have been an impetus for the location in the
Hampstead Road area of complexes such as Brass Co. of Australia, Extruded Metals, Ralph
McKay, who relocated from Ascot Vale to Maidstone in 1935, and Pilkington Glass nearby in
Ballarat Road (1935), establishing another industrial precinct in the area around the Hampstead
Road, Mitchell Street, Williamsons Road axis.

At Braybrook, the theme of meat-byproducts industry was continued in the 1930s. Clearly a
number of the early establishments at Braybrook changed hands, but remained on the same site
from the 1890s through into the middle and late twentieth century. By the early 1930s Kreglinger

96 Ford and Vines, 1996: 84

97 Lack and Ford, Melbourne’s Western Region: An Introductory History, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West,
Melbourne Western Region Cultural Heritage Study, 1986: 74
98 AHC RNE Database, File no. 2/12/051/0009

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and Fernau's were listed as having sheepskin and glue works in Raleigh Street. Also established
during the 1930s was Klipspringer Proprietary Limited, making tennis strings, carrying on the
earlier work of Dagg and Co.

The Second World War meant that many existing factories in the City of Maribyrnong increased
or altered production for wartime purposes, producing materials for use in armaments and
munitions industries, as well as food and textile items for the armed services. In 1947 the Cities
of Footscray and Braybrook combined to produce a booklet outlining their attractions. Greatest
prominence in the publication was given to the 245 factories in Footscray and 83 in Braybrook99.
By 1960, the City of Sunshine had grown to include 260100. Many of these were locating along
Ballarat Road at Braybrook. The striking ETA factory, for example, now used by another
business, was built in Ballarat Road in 1961.

Some industries which relocated in Tottenham had had to wait until the war was over to carry out
planned expansions. Textiles British Australian Carpet Manufacturing Co., for instance, had been
making carpet in Dynon Road Footscray before the war and rebuilt a new factory at Tottenham in
1947. Olympic Cables began as a wartime initiative to develop electrical cables at Olympic Tyre
and Rubber Co. and moved into its own new premises in Sunshine Road, Tottenham, in the late
1940s.

7.4 1970s-1990s
In the 1970s and 1980s the old pattern of new industries seeking open space occurred again and
Footscray, Braybrook, Maidstone and Tottenham were passed by as new industrial precincts
opened up further west at Laverton, Altona and West Brooklyn. While many of the nineteenth
and twentieth century industrial precincts remained in place, there were changes in ownership
and function of many of these premises as economic and political forces closed many industries,
particularly in the manufacturing sector, with resulting loss of employment as well. Some of the
older established firms in the region relocated further west, as Humes Pipes did, to Laverton. The
very oldest of the industrial precincts, at Footscray, was abandoned and largely destroyed for
development purposes, although the old Yarraville river-front industrial precinct is still
performing much the same functions as it did 100 years ago.

Some large-scale enterprises such as Angliss, Metters and much of the Maribyrnong EDI have
been redeveloped as medium-density housing and ADI will soon also be developed in this way.
Yet many of the City of Maribyrnong's industrial sites are still used for much the same purpose
that they were built for originally. Kinnears is an obvious example of this, but so too are many of
the establishments at Maidstone/Maribyrnong and at West Footscray and Tottenham.

8 Defending Australia
The City of Maribyrnong's most significant contribution to the defence of the Commonwealth is
probably its long-running role as a centre of explosives, ordnance and ammunition development
and manufacture, which goes back to the establishment of the Colonial Ammunition Company in
Footscray in 1899. The availability of river transport down to the port, large areas of open space,
the proximity of a growing chemical industry and the presence nearby of a reliable workforce

99Forging Ahead
100
Lack and Ford, Melbourne’s Western Region: An Introductory History, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the
West, Melbourne Western Region Cultural Heritage Study, 1986: 110

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 Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

were some of the reasons why explosives and ammunition complexes were sited at Footscray and
Maribyrnong late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth.

8.1Ammunition factory (ADI) Footscray

As mentioned above, Colonial Ammunitions Company's (CAC) factory was adjacent to
Victoria's explosives magazine, Jack's Magazine. CAC's factory was located close to the river on
the site of what later became known as Australian Defence Industries, Footscray, or the Footscray
Ammunition Factory. Although privately operated, CAC was established as an attempt to
decrease Australia's dependence on imported ammunition. It was Australia's first ammunition
factory and was, by 1890, making ammunition for the Victorian Government. By 1901 the
company had expanded its area to produce .303 cartridge cases and bullets101 .

Increased demand for ammunition during World War One meant that more buildings were added
to the Gordon Street part of the site at this time. After the war, when the company was
experiencing difficulties, the Commonwealth Government leased it for seven years before
purchasing it in 1928. During the period of the lease the Government added a Gun Ammunition
Factory to the site. The early years of World War Two again saw massive expansion, with many
new buildings added (some of them on the oldest part of the site). Safety issues in the
manufacture of ammunition meant that many processes had to be carried out in separate, small
areas. Buildings needed to be isolated from each other and were often specifically designed for
individual purposes. Thus the Ammunition Factory site, like other sites where explosives and
volatile substances are handled, resembled something like a small town rather than simply a huge
industrial complex. By 1942 9,323 people, almost half of them women, were employed at the
Gordon Street Ammunition factory102. Although it remained the largest and most important
ammunition factory in Australia throughout the war, production was scaled down after 1942
when supply far outstripped demand. By 1944, there were only 2,507 employees. After the war
the lower part of the site, near the river flat, was leased to Myer Limited for storage space (until
1993) but the remainder of the site was still used to manufacture ammunition until the 1980s,
although the workforce was gradually scaled down over this time.

Much of the ADI Footscray site was demolished in the 1990s for future housing development,
leaving only one or two precincts of significant buildings from the World War One and Two
eras, as well as Jack's Magazine lower down towards the river bank.

8. 2 Maribyrnong explosives factory

The complex that became the Maribyrnong Explosives Factory, between the Horseshoe Bend of
the Maribyrnong River and Cordite Avenue, began as a proposed Cordite Factory when the
Commonwealth purchased land formerly occupied by the Maribyrnong Racecourse and Fisher
Horse Stud in 1908. Cordite had been developed as an alternative to gunpowder as a propellant
for firing weapons in the 1890s. Soon after this military commandants from all Australian
colonies agreed that Australia should have its own cordite factory. The Maribyrnong Cordite
factory was not built until 1909-1912, however. Originally the factory included about 30
buildings producing nitric acid, gun cotton, nitro-glycerine and cordite, but like the Footscray
Ammunition Factory, it was further developed during World War One and again during the
1920s and 1930s, when the factory manufactured explosives for commercial and civil use, but

101 AHC, R N E Database, file number:2/12/05/0007

102 AHC, R N E Database, file number:2/12/05/0007

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also a range of other chemical products, such as acids, lead-free paints, lacquers, cements,
solvents, etc. It is said that in the early 1930s the Maribyrnong factory complex, by then known
as the Explosives and Factory Filling Group, was 'the centre of the chemical engineering industry
in Australia'103. From 1922 the Munitions Supply Laboratories (later known as Materials
Research Laboratories) was located at the Maribyrnong site. It became the 'biggest industrial
research establishment in Australia'104 during the 1920s when it worked to help secondary
industries develop new technologies which could help them produce materials for wartime use by
government factories.

As the Government worked towards war readiness after 1933 a significant building program was
carried out at Maribyrnong and the factory expanded its manufacture of explosives, including
solventless cordite for use in Navy guns. Previously this had to be imported from Britain. Many
of these buildings were added to provide space for the expected influx of workers, including
women, during an increasingly likely war.

During World War Two, the Maribyrnong Explosives Factory not only employed large numbers
of people (8,000 in 1942), but also played the part of training school for staff from explosives
factories all over Australia. The complex of buildings expanded even further during the war.

After World War Two, the Maribyrnong Factory continued to make explosives for the Armed
Forces until the 1960s when it turned to producing rocket motors and explosive devices for
rockets. The factory closed in 1994.

8.3 Maribyrnong ordnance factory (ADI Maribyrnong)

The Maribyrnong Ordnance factory was located on part of the site acquired by the
Commonwealth for a Cordite Factory in 1908 and part of its area was used, at first, by the Royal
Australian Field Artillery (see below). The Ordnance Factory was located south of Cordite
Avenue, between the Maribyrnong River on the west, Williamsons Road on the south and Wests
Road in the east.

It was not until 1922 that the buildings erected for the RAFA were turned over to the Department
of Munitions to be used as an Ordnance Factory. While the RAFA buildings (some still standing)
were converted for factory use, many others had also to be erected on the site. In the 1920s,
however, the ordnance factory worked at such things as forging car components for private
industry105. As with the other local defence factories, a significant building program was carried
out in the 1930s to prepare for wartime production. By 1943, 6.262 people, more than half of
whom were women, were employed at the Ordnance Factory. Although the factory continued
making munitions up to the 1970s, by 1989 it was decided that it would be gradually closed.
Much of the site has now been cleared and built upon with medium density housing, but a
number of the original RAFA buildings are still located at the south-east corner of the site.

8.4 Legacy of defence industries

For over 100 years a significant area along the Maribyrnong River was devoted to defence
industries. The peak of production occurred, of course, during World War Two when thousands

103AHC, RNE Database, file no: 2/12/051/0005 Defence Explosive Factory Maribyrnong
104AHC RNE Database, file no. 2/12/05/0009
105AHC RNE Database, file no. 2/12/05/0009

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of people worked here on round the clock shifts, doing for the most part, very dangerous work.
Among the several hundred buildings which comprised the munitions and explosives sites there
were also for many years after the war, innumerable concrete or brick air raid shelters to remind
observers of the dangers of this war work. Like many of the other defence buildings at
Maribyrnong, these shelters have now disappeared.

8.5 Armed forces

8.5.1 Royal Australian Field Artillery

As mentioned above, the earliest defence use of the Maribyrnong Ordnance Factory site was as a
Royal Australian Field Artillery Remount Depot. Another site associated with the Remount
Depot was located near the cordite factory on Remount Hill. Between 1912 and 1914 a number
of buildings, comprising administrative offices, living quarters, a gymnasium and mess room
were built along Wests Road and Williamsons Road for the RAFA106. In addition, thirty acres of
the old Fisher Estate, to the east of the Cordite Factory, north of Cordite Avenue were acquired
for use as paddocks, exercising yards and stables for the remount horses. Fisher's stable was on
part of this land and was retained as a remount stable. This area later became known as Remount
Hill. Although the RAFA buildings (along Wests Road and Williamsons Road) were transferred
over to the Department of Munitions for use as part of the Ordnance factory in 1922, Remount
Hill retained its use as a remount depot and army veterinary hospital until 1945107, by which time
the area had become subsumed as part of the Explosives factory complex. One figure associated
with remount hill was a horse called Sandy, said to have been the only remount horse to return to
Australia of the 180,000 shipped overseas during World War Two. Sandy was retired to
Maribyrnong, where he spent the last six years of his life. According to some sources, he was
buried here.

8.5.2 RAAF base

World War Two, which intensified the defence role played by the City of Maribyrnong, also saw
the establishment of a RAAF storage depot at Tottenham, bounded by Ashley St, South Road and
the railway line. The RAAF Depot remained here until the early 1990s.

8.6 Civilian military effortsrior to the First World War, Victorian boys were required to
undertake citizen's military training or drill. The Footscray Drill Hall, at West Footscray, was
built in 1911 after a local citizens' committee raised funds for the purpose. The hall was built on
a Council Reserve, which had formerly been used as a pound. Drill halls had been constructed in
many Victorian localities before Federation, but according to John Lack, Footscray's corrugated
iron drill hall was 'possibly the Commonwealth's first military drill hall'108.

106 AHC RNE Database, file no. 2/12/05/0009

107 AHC, RNE Database, file no. 2/12/05/005
108 Lack, 1991: 211

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9.0 Planning and developing urban settlements

9.1 Village and township reserves

As mentioned in section one, some village reserves were set aside in the Parish of Cut Paw Paw
when it was surveyed in 1840. These included Braybrook and Footscray. Footscray Village was
not actually named until 1848. The following year Assistant Surveyor Clarke surveyed the
township, creating four main blocks that were formed by Maribyrnong, Whitehall, Cowper,
Wingfield and Bunbury Streets109. Two years later land in these blocks was offered for sale.
While some of these blocks were purchased by speculators, hoping to resell at a quick profit, by
1854 there were 100 residents in Footscray, and by 1861, 1070110.

Braybrook Village Reserve straddled the Maribyrnong River and in fact, most of the village
reserve was located in the Parish of Doutta Galla (in the area now known as Avondale Heights).
The area now bounded by Duke Street, the river, Ashley Street and Ballarat Road formed the
southern portion of the village reserve, but land here does not seem to have been surveyed and
offered for sale until the 1850s.

9.2 Private subdivisions and villages in the nineteenth century

Transport routes that were opened up during the 1850s seem to have been an incentive for private
developers to market estates or private villages. The (soon to be built) Williamstown railway line
was a selling point at Yarraville as was the Ballarat Road at Braybrook and Maidstone. Often
developers carved land up into tiny allotments, very few of which were probably actually built
upon during the 1850s or soon after. Some remnants of these old street configurations can still be
made out at Braybrook and Maidstone, while the township of Yarraville still retains the streets
that were laid out in the 1850s.

The township of South Braybrook, just south of Ballarat Road from the Government Village
Reserve of Braybrook, was a square grid of north-south and east-west streets bounded by Ballarat
Road, Darnley Street, Ashley Street and Hampden Street, which, on a plan of the subdivision,
extended from Ashley Street to Darnley Street, but now only extends a short distance from
Ashley Street. This township, advertised as being only three miles from Melbourne, was
marketed during the 1850s111. It is unknown how much of this estate was purchased or built-upon
and, like the early subdivision at Maidstone, it was earmarked for re-subdivision by the
Metropolitan Town Planning Commission in 1929 and then significantly altered by the Housing
Commission of Victoria in the 1940s and 1950s, when the tiny allotments allowed by the 1850s
subdividers were replaced by larger house blocks and the square grid of streets transformed into
crescents and courts.

James Long advertised that his 540 quarter acre allotments were near to the Township of
Footscray when he offered them for sale in June 1857. In fact the subdivision was the beginning
of that part of Footscray West bounded by Ashley Street, Summerhill Road, Essex and Barkly
Street (called Long Street on Long's map). The original 1850s street layout, with Alma,
Stanhope, Palmerston, Elphinston, Argyle, Blandford and Market Streets, appears still to be the

109 Lack, 1991: 38

110 Lack, 1991:.49
111 See S L V Map Collection, EF 912.945 S14 1853-1860, Plan of Township of South Braybrook

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same, though other smaller streets have been added to the grid112. A month later Long claimed
that all of the 540 allotments were sold, when he advertised another sale of allotments to the
north of Essex Street113 , part of the area that was offered for sale as Maidstone by J.W. Thomson
in 1858. Perhaps Thomson purchased Long's land for subdivision himself (see below). At about
the same time 1120 allotments, which must have been somewhat smaller than Long's quarter acre
blocks, were offered for 'free selection with deferred payments'114 in the area now bounded by
Ballarat Road, Mitchell Street and Rosamond Roads. Within the estate only Omar, Cambridge,
Alma and Cathcart Streets were outlined and named, and they were, of course, much longer than
they are on the redrawn maps of today.

Maidstone began as a private subdivision by J.W. Thomson, who carved up a triangular section
of land bounded by Ballarat Road, Ashley Street, Suffolk Street and O'Connell Street (now
Summerhill Road) into 3,500 minute allotments which he offered for sale in 1858. Thomson
argued that he was motivated by the desire to provide the poor 'with fresh air and fresh water'115,
but as each of the allotments was only 26 feet wide and 68 feet deep, he did not seem to be
concerned to provide them with very much room. Seven months after the first sod had been
turned on the estate, Thomson reported that a school and chapel had been opened and some of
the streets on the estate were being formed. Advertising ploys included the main road to
Footscray (the Ballarat Road) and the soon-to-be opened Bendigo railway116.

By studying census returns, Dr. Olwen Ford has found that by 1861 there were 47 houses at
Maidstone, most of them timber, and seven tents117. although a traveller passing through on the
train in 1860 noticed only 'some half-dozen wooden houses standing in gardens surrounded with
stone walls for hedges'118/ Evidence from rate books suggested that many of the residents worked
in manufacturing, rented their homes and often had difficulty paying the rates119.

It is unlikely that a great proportion of the 3,500 allotments at Maidstone were built upon in the
nineteenth century. It has been suggested that many of the blocks were purchased by miners in
central Victoria who never actually saw them. Certainly, when the Victorian Housing
Commission came to redevelop the area in the 1950s, it found that 'many titles were obscure,
since they had been originally been sold in unusual and sometimes shady circumstances'120.

Even in the 1880s, there were renewed attempts to market parts of this estate. The eastern corner,
bounded by present-day Summerhill Road, Thomson Street, Ballarat Road and Norfolk Streets,
was re-advertised in the 1880s as the Leinster Estate, situated in Maidstone "the future
manufacturing centre of Victoria". A plan of this estate, which included three small reserves,
showed that several large blocks, suitable for industry or further subdivision had already been

112 See SLV Map Collection , EF 912.945 S14 (Suburban and Country Plans)
113 See SLV Map Collection , EF 912.945 S14 (Suburban and Country Plans)
114 See SLV Map Collection , EF 912.945 S14 (Suburban and Country Plans)
115 Lack, 1991:.57
116 L ack, 1991:.57
117 Olwen Ford, 'Voices from Below: Family, School and Community on the Braybrook Plains 1854-1892' M.Ed
thesis, University of Melbourne, 1993: 59
118 Phillip Rayson, quoted in Lack, 1991: 48
119 Ford, 'Voices from Below', 1993: 60
120 Housing Commission of Victoria, Housing Commission of Victoria, First Twenty-Five Years, (pamphlet)

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sold, particularly along Ballarat Road, but that most of the small allotments were still available
for purchase121.

One family who lived at Maidstone for some time during the terrible depression of the 1890s was
the Facey family, who had come from the goldmining district of central Victoria in 1890. Joseph
Facey got work at a local quarry until unemployment forced him to set off, like thousands of
other Victorians, to the goldfields of Western Australia. The Facey's rented house in Maidstone,
the third they'd occupied since coming to Melbourne, was, like many others at that time, moved
away by the building society that repossessed it when its owner was unable to maintain his
mortgage payments122. A plaque now stands near where Albert Facey, author of A Fortunate Life,
spent some of his early years in Maidstone. At the end of the 1920s the Maidstone estate was part
of a huge area that the Metropolitan Town Planning Commission intended to re-subdivide to an
intricate and impressive plan. Some elements of this plan were featured in the 1940s-1950s
redevelopment of the area by the Housing Commission. Nevertheless, a small portion of the
original 1858 street subdivision still exists at the eastern end of the township (although with
much larger house blocks than were originally intended).A triangular area between Thomson
Street, Suffolk Street, Summerhill Road and Ballarat Road, which includes Wallace, Norfolk,
Howard, Madden, Baird, Carlisle and Studley Streets, still presents much the same configuration
as it did when it was the eastern tip of a triangular grid in which the east-west streets stretched
from Summerhill Road to Ashley Street.

Allotments in the Township of Yarraville were first offered for sale at a grand fete, picnic and
land sale in April 1859. The township was centred around the Williamstown railway line (mostly
to the west of it), although Yarraville station was not opened until 1872. A bluestone obelisk at
the corner of Blackwood and Ballarat Streets123commemorated the sale of land in streets that
were named after Victorian goldfields, possibly to attract goldminers as buyers. The township
was a rectangular grid of streets between Somerville Road and Newcastle Street and Fehon and
Ballarat Streets and presumably some sales of allotments were made at the first sale for soon
another advertising bill was showing a plan of 'remaining allotments for sale at the township of
Yarraville'124. By 1879 there were 200 houses at Yarraville. The opening of the railway station in
1872 and the siting of a number of industries further east along the river in the 1870s and 1880s
probably helped to attract workers to the township and commercial development occurred in
Anderson and Ballarat Streets in the 1880s125.

By the mid-1850s a small number of people had been living at Maribyrnong, first as employees
of Joseph Raleigh, and then as employees of the short-lived Victorian Iron Works. When Ellen
Clacy passed through in 1852 she described a 'little hamlet', although she mistook Raleigh's
Castle for a church126. While some Maribyrnong workers were accommodated in the 'castle', a
map which has been dated as 1857-8, shows some cottages located close to what is now the
corner of Raleigh and Rosamond Roads, as well as Raleigh's house on the hill to the north of
Cordite Avenue and another house and garden close to the industrial buildings on the present
Pipemakers' Park site. There were enough children living locally for a school to also be shown on

121 See State SLV Map Collection:820bhf Vol. 5: 10

122 J.B. Hirst, The World Of Albert Facey, 1992: 2-13.
123 Butler, 1989: 3-27
124 SLV Map Collection Book EF 912.945 S14: 44 and 47
125 Butler , 1989: 3-31
126 Ellen Clacy quoted in Ford and Lewis, 1989: 6

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the map127. The same map was produced with a view to selling land still owned by the Raleigh
family in the 1850s and the proposed subdivision included larger farming lots of 10-20 acres by
the river and small 2 or 3 acre lots between what are now Wests and Rosamond Roads. There
seems little evidence, however, that the sale of these proposed allotments ever took place128.

When the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company took over the old boiling down works at
Maribyrnong in 1868, it used several measures to accommodate workers. Single men could still
use the castle as accommodation, as well as the nearby Raleigh's Punt Hotel, which the Company
also purchased. By 1870 the Company had built 12 stone cottages, 'six of four rooms and six of
three rooms', which it 'intended as the foundation of a village for its employees'129. The cottages
were located in what is now called Warrs Road and were not demolished until after the Second
World War130. While the cottages represented an early example of employer-provided housing in
the Study Area, another form of housing offered by the Meat Preserving Company was the
subdivision of a small housing estate in the area between Wests and Rosamond Road (where the
Maribyrnong Estate had been divided into 2-3 acre blocks). The company sold some of the
allotments on this estate, apparently known as Hampstead, to its workers. Some of the buyers
erected houses on their blocks. White and Sloane Streets were main streets in this subdivision 131.

Away from the Meat Preserving Company's Land, much of Maribyrnong was offered as either
the Maribyrnong or Maribyrnong Park Estates in the 1880s. This was a decade of rampant land
subdivision and sales right across Melbourne, as speculators invested in huge parcels of land and
attempted to sell it on, often wildly exaggerating the land's proximity to amenities such as
transport, water supply, etc. Charles Brown Fisher, who had owned the horse stud at
Maribyrnong, brought in partners, such as Thomas Bent and Benjamin Fink to subdivide land on
both the Maribyrnong side of the river (in the horseshoe bend to the north of Raleigh Road) and
across the river at Ascot Vale West. When Charles Fisher first sought investors in the proposed
estate it comprised 2016 acres132. There were several attempts to sell blocks on the estate, which
boasted Yan Yean water, river frontages and business frontages. The first sale, on October 6,
1888 resulted in 160 lots being sold. Another sale was held two weeks later133. A plan of the
Maribyrnong Park Estate showed that it ran from Dunlop Street to Navigator Street, and
Maribyrnong Road to the Esplanade and included Middle, Plantation, Hortense and Newstead
Streets. It also boasted two 'proposed bridges' across the river to Essendon, as well as a large
recreation reserve between Navigator Street and the Anglers Hotel134. Despite the sale of quite a
number of blocks, like so many of the estates marketed in Melbourne in the 1880s, few houses
were actually built there. With the depression of the 1890s came financial collapse for building
societies and speculators. An 1893 description of Maribyrnong said 'it rests in solitude, a lovely
undulating piece of country, the natural beauty of which could hardly be exaggerated'135..

127 See 'Plan of Subdivision of Portion 10 Section 20 and Portions 4.5.6.&7 in the Parish of Cut PawPaw, being part
of Maribyrnong Estate on the Saltwater River,' reproduced in Ford and Lewis, 1989: 10
128 Ford and Vines, 1996: 36.
129 The Argus, 26/2/1870 quoted in Ford, 'Voices From Below', 1993: 8
130 Ford and Lewis, 1989:.57
131 See Ford, "Voices from Below '1993: 36 also Ford and Lewis, 1989:.20
132 R.J. Archer, Euchred, Melbourne, 1888
133 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 27
134 SLV Map Collection, 820.bhf Vol. 5: 34 'Maribyrnong Park Estate c. 1880s
135 Footscray Advertiser, 16/9/1893, quoted in Ford and Lewis, 1989: 28

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Maribyrnong was not the only part of the Study Area to be marketed during the excessive 1880s.
The Leinster Estate at Maidstone has already been mentioned. In 1885 the Braybrook Park Estate
was advertised as being at the 'centre of a rising suburb'136. Fifty-four blocks between Errol St,
Ballarat Road, Annesley Street and Raleigh St (now possibly Cranwell Street), with the state
school and teacher's residence not far away, were offered for sale in what was originally the
township reserve at Braybrook. The small estate was intersected by streets that do not now exist.

While some of the speculative estates of the 1880s might have failed to attract large numbers of
residents, there was a great increase in population and housing within Footscray itself in the
1870s and 1880s. Footscray's population was 2,473 in 1871; it was 19,149 in 1891137. Housing
now spilled over from the original township reserve into parts of Upper Footscray and the edges
of West Footscray. An 1877 survey of Footscray showed dense pockets of suburban streets
extending to the north along Nicholson Street to Newell Street, to the south along Gamon Street
to Mackay Street, beginning to fill in the gap between Nicholson Street and Geelong Road and
extending to the west between the Bendigo Railway line and Ballarat Road as far as Ashley
Street. While John Lack has pointed out that several thousand blocks were filled with 'detached
weatherboard workers' cottages at this time138, not all of the new streets were filled so quickly.
The 1880s subdivision at West Footscray that was bounded by Suffolk, Church. Essex and
Dongola Roads, was yet another example of an estate that was carved up, but hardly built upon
until the twentieth century139.

9.3 Employer-provided housing

A tradition of large employers providing convenient housing to attract a stable workforce began
in the study area when Joseph Raleigh built his 'castle' for single employees approximately on the
current site of Highpoint West in the 1840s. There followed several other instances of companies
providing housing for their workers. The Melbourne Meat Preserving Co.'s Maribyrnong cottages
have been mentioned above. The Victoria Sugar Co. at Yarraville, for instance, built a row of
cottages and a villa for the manager, John Campbell, in the 1870s140. Later, around 1917, the
sugar works, by the then Colonial Sugar Refinery, subdivided land around the corner of Hyde,
Somerville Road and Stephen Street for housing for its employees, replacing the earlier
cottages141.

One of the best-known (and preserved) areas of employer-provided housing was that provided by
William Angliss for workers in his meat works. Between 1912 and 1932 Angliss erected 36
houses and purchased four others near his meatworks in Newell, Cowper and Donald Streets and
in Ballarat Road and Railway Place, Footscray. Some of these houses survive today and are
registered on the National Estate as an example of a large pre-war industrial estate142. Pennell's,
which produced Tuckerbox Pet Food in Braybrook from the late 1930s, also provided housing

136 SLV Map Collection, EF 912.945B32 Vol. 48: 219

137 Lack, 1991: 116
138 Lack, 1991: 118
139 Butler, 1989: 3-15
140 Lack, 1991: 117
141 Butler, 1989: 4-127
142AHC RNE Database, file no: 2/12/022/0008

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for its workers143. During the housing shortage after World War Two, I.C.I.A.N.Z. built fifty
weatherboard homes for workers at Yarraville144.

Many of the really large twentieth century workers' housing estates were just outside the City Of
Maribyrnong, at , for instance, Sunshine and Deer Park. It was also just outside the Study Area
that large numbers of houses were built for railway workers, most of them prefabricated in
England and often used to house migrant railway workers in the 1950s.

9.4 Employers' housing

In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, many of Footscray's industrial
and retail employers or managers lived within the community, often building quite substantial
villas for their families. In the early years, these houses tended to be placed relatively near to
work sites, thus the location of some old substantial houses near the river at Footscray and
Yarraville. Later a trend developed of erecting such homes on major roads, such as Somerville
Road, Geelong Road and Ballarat Road, especially at the eastern end of the latter two.

9.5 Twentieth century residential development

Despite the frantic subdivision of land in the late nineteenth century, most of the residential
development of the City of Maribyrnong has occurred in the twentieth century. In the first two
decades of the century housing spread out through Seddon, between Geelong Road and
Somerville Road and at West Footscray. In this period and the 1920s, much of the residential
development was carried out by developers, such as Hansen, who built homes on both sides of
Geelong Road at West Footscray, Rayner, who built an estate around Eleanor, Gordon Street,
Alma and Rayner Streets 145 and even Sir William Angliss, who began to subdivide land to the
south of Somerville Road at Yarraville and Kingsville in the 1930s. At Maidstone war-service
homes contributed to the filling streetscapes between Mephan and Mitchell Streets.

The Cordite and Ordnance Factories at Maribyrnong attracted a small but growing population to
settle there, but by the end of the 1920s, there were still only 160 households146. Indeed a map of
Melbourne's West produced in 1936 shows that while Footscray, West Footscray and Yarraville
were closely subdivided, houses were still very sparse and scattered at Maidstone and Braybrook,
West Yarraville and Kingsville. There were few houses in the streets running either way off
Gordon Street north of Mitchell Street, a smattering in the subdivision north of Geelong and
Somerville Road and south of the railway line and barely any houses or streets at what is now
Kingsville. Braybrook and Braybrook South were barely touched by housing. Much of the infill
of these areas was to come after the Second World War when both public agencies, such as the
Housing Commission of Victoria, and private builders and owner builders filled in the gaps.

143Lack and Ford, Melbourne’s Western Region: An Introductory History, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West,
Melbourne Western Region Cultural Heritage Study, 1986: 117
144Lack, 1991: 341
145 Lack, 1991: 246
146 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 43

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9.6 Government -provided housing

9.6.1 Workmen's home settlement

During the twentieth century government departments became major providers of housing within
the City of Maribyrnong. A very early forerunner of government attempts to provide housing for
working people was the Workmen's Home Settlement established in the first decade of the
twentieth century at Upper Footscray. Various government schemes had been initiated in the
1890s to settle working people on small blocks of land at low cost. Most of these attempts had
been located in rural areas where applicants were given a few acres of land on which to grow
vegetables and keep a cow, chickens, etc, but there were some settlements within Melbourne.
Under the terms of the Rural Closer Settlement Act, 1898, local people petitioned the
government for quarter acre blocks and 100 allotments were made available at £ 3 10 s. a year for
thirty years, with loans of up to £ 50 for houses. Footscray residents were given preference in the
allocation of blocks. The blocks were located between Kinnears and the Ammunition Factory, by
the Maribyrnong River in Kinnear, Empire, Eldridge and Owen Streets. By 1907 there were 250
people living in eighty houses on the estate and they formed a powerful Settler's Progress
Association 147.

The Association requested the donation of a central block on the settlement for the construction
of a community hall and it is possible that this block is what is now called Heatley Reserve and
the adjacent Maternal and Child Health Centre in Empire Street. The quarter acre blocks of the
Settlement have proved to be a useful size for the construction of flats and medium density
housing and there are now possibly only one or two houses remaining from the early twentieth
century on the estate.
9.6.2 Commonwealth housing
The concentration of war-related industries in the Footscray-Maribyrnong-Sunshine area during
the Second World War led to a pressing need for suitable local housing. In 1941 the Minister for
Labour and National Service, Harold Holt, acknowledged the problems experienced by many
munitions workers who had to travel long distances to their work and recommended that the
Government purchase land in the area to build 'up to 1,000 low-cost houses' to rent to munitions
workers148. The Federal Government initiated a Munition Workers' Housing Scheme and
compulsorily acquired land in the Sunshine-Braybrook area. A total of 235 houses were
constructed. While some of these houses are now located within the City of Brimbank, a large
proportion are in the City of Maribyrnong, bounded by Duke, Lily, Darnley and Myalla Streets.
Some houses were detached and others were built in maisonette style. There was a mixture of
brick and concrete housing on the estate. The houses were rented to munitions workers during
the war, but were made available for purchase sometime after the war had ended149. There is
some evidence, also, that at least four brick houses in Cordite Avenue Maribyrnong were built at
the time of the establishment of the Cordite Factory for use by employees150.

147 Lack, 1991: 192

148 National Archives file MP180/2/0 CM/4, quoted in Ford and Vines, City of Brimbank Heritage Study Draft,
Heritage Area C Citation (loaned to author)
149 National Archives file MP180/2/0 CM/4, quoted in Ford and Vines, City of Brimbank Heritage Study Draft,
Heritage Area C Citation (loaned to author)
150Walker, Johnston, Boyce, Melbourne Western Region Heritage Study, Evidence of History, 1986: 266

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9.6.3 Defence housing

When the Royal Australian Field Artillery Remount Depot was established at Maribyrnong
between 1912-1914, the buildings constructed included living quarters and a gymnasium. At the
same time a number of houses and quarters for the Commanding Officer and single officers were
built outside of the boundary of the site along Williamson Road151.
9.6.4 Housing Commission of Victoria
The Housing Commission of Victoria (HCV) was initially formed in 1938 to provide low cost
housing and to replace metropolitan areas that were regarded as 'slums' with more acceptable
accommodation. For a decade after the Second World War, when Victorians experienced acute
housing shortages, the Housing Commission devoted its efforts to building large estates of rental
housing on 'broad acres' in preference to slum reclamation. Shortages of building materials meant
that the Commission experimented with a range of building materials, including not only bricks
and timber, but concrete, conite and asbestos. Many of the timber houses were 'pre-fabricated',
either overseas or locally, as were the concrete houses. The Commission began experimenting
with concrete prefabrication in 1951, setting up a prefabrication plant at Holmesglen. Concrete
walls were manufactured here and then made up into houses, often with concrete tiled roofs, on
site.

A very large area (625 acres) of Maidstone-Braybrook, and a smaller area at adjacent West
Footscray were acquired by the Housing Commission in the 1940s. Much of this land included
the old 1850s subdivisions referred to above. The unsuitability of the old subdivisions, with
narrow blocks and 'bad street patterns' meant that the Commission placed a blanket order on the
land and re-subdivided it to create room for 2460 houses, with space also for recreation areas,
schools, parks, shopping centres and churches152. The axis of the estate was Churchill Avenue.

By June 1954 1,663 Commission houses had been completed at Braybrook-Maidstone. Of these,
1,292 were concrete houses and 663 were timber, mostly prefabricated both here and overseas153.
During the next year brick veneer houses were built as well. By the end of 1957 2,280 dwellings
had been erected at Braybrook-Maidstone. Most of these homes were concrete (1559), 685 were
timber and 36 were brick. Eighty-four flats were also constructed in the area. Nearby at West
Footscray, 121 houses, most of them prefabricated timber, but some of them concrete or brick,
were constructed at the same time. There were also six flats for the elderly constructed at West
Footscray at this time. Braybrook-Maidstone was one of the largest Housing Commission estates
erected in Melbourne in the 1950s, coming second to Heidelberg, where 3,357 dwellings were
built (exclusive of the Olympic Village). The Housing Commission would go on to build high-
rise flats in Footscray, but the Braybrook-Maidstone estate completely altered the physical
environment of a large area of land in a very short space of time.

9.7 Establishing services

The provision of water and power to residents and local industry is taken for granted in the late
twentieth century, but these services were sometimes a long time coming for early residents in
the City of Maribyrnong. Piped water from Melbourne's first reservoir, Yan Yean, did not reach

151 AHC, RNE database, File Number: 2/12/051/0009

152 Housing Commission of Victoria, Twenty Five Years
153 Housing Commission of Victoria, 'Sixteenth Annual Report', in Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1955 Volume
2: 781

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Footscray residents until 1865, despite the fact that the Yan Yean system was first connected to
Melbourne in 1857. Even in 1865 one standpipe at the corner of Napier and Hyde Streets, served
all Footscray for some years until the main streets were reticulated154. New subdivisions,
especially those carved up by speculators, were often without provision for water mains in the
early years. But Maribyrnong was fortunate that the Melbourne Meat Preserving Works, which
took over Raleigh's old site in 1868, needed water for their operations and paid for pipes to be
laid to the factory from Flemington, going underneath the river155. This made it relatively easy
for later subdividers of land in the area to extend pipes to their property. Maidstone was listed as
having Yan Yean water by 1899 in the Municipal Directory.

Melbourne's gas in the nineteenth century, was generally supplied by local companies, often
formed by local businessmen who built gasometers and laid mains to their customers. The
Footscray Gas and Coke Company was formed in 1877 and was supplying gas a year later. The
gasworks was located in Moreland Street, at the corner of Lyons Street. In 1913 the Colonial Gas
Association took over the Footscray Works, combining them in 1925 with the Williamstown Gas
Company. The Colonial Gas Association went on to produce gas for an ever expanding
Footscray, Sunshine, Williamstown and Deer Park into the second half of the twentieth century
from the Moreland Street site. It was not until 1950 that the Gas and Fuel Corporation was
formed to subsume other providers, such as the Colonial Gas Association.

Footscray became the first municipality outside Melbourne with its own lighting system after it
agreed with the Melbourne City Council to bulk purchase electricity from them in 1911156. It
remained one of the few municipalities in Melbourne with its own electricity supply department
and supplied electricity as far as Braybrook, Maidstone and Brooklyn in the post World War Two
era.

9.8 Providing shops and retail facilities

While isolated single general stores often served early communities and sometimes developed
into limited retail precincts, as at Ballarat Road Maidstone, Barkly Street West Footscray, or
Somerville Road Kingsville, the City of Maribyrnong also developed two early extensive retail
precincts, at Footscray and Yarraville. In the retail world the City is notable for some milestones.
It was within the City of Maribyrnong that the half-holiday movement for shop assistants was
pioneered, that Australia's first shopping mall was established in Nicholson Street in 1971 and
that Highpoint West, planned as Melbourne's largest shopping centre opened in the mid-1970s.

9.8.1 Footscray and Yarraville shopping centres

The heart of Footscray's retail district is a product of the population expansion of the 1870s and
1880s. Charlie Lovett recalled that, until well into the 1870s, all business in Footscray was
carried out 'between the railway line and the Saltwater river'157, with Moreland, Napier, Hopkins
and Hyde Streets boasting many businesses. In the 1870s and 1880s Nicholson Street and Barkly
Street began to fill with shops, among them Hooper's Drapery, which gradually spread from one
store in 1885, to an expansive emporium in Barkly Street in the first decade of the twentieth

154 Lack, 1991: 64

155 Ford and Vines, Pipemakers Park Conservation Analysis, 1996: 41
156 Lack, 1991: 197
157 Lack, 1993: 5

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century158. Retail establishments spread into Paisley and Leeds streets in the early decades of the
twentieth century159. By the mid-twentieth century Footscray shopping centre was the largest
suburban shopping centre in metropolitan Melbourne. The creation of the Nicholson Street mall
in the 1970s was an attempt to forestall competition from Highpoint West. While the shopping
centre has survived competition such as this, its nature has altered significantly in recent decades,
with the opening of the Footscray market in the 1980s, the creation of the ring road (which
necessitated the demolition of several historic buildings including part of Hooper's store), the
creation of a pedestrian mall between the old and new sections of Forges and the impact of the
influx of Asian migrants and their distinctive shops and restaurants, particularly in Hopkins and
Leeds Streets.

Yarraville shopping centre also began to develop within the township of Yarraville in the 1870s
and 1880s, with Stephen and Anderson Streets being the major shopping precincts. However,
much of the retail heart of Yarraville was built around the second and third decades of the
twentieth century. It was at Yarraville that pioneering moves were made to reduce the working
hours of shop assistants in 1884 when shopkeepers decided to close their stores at 7 p.m. on
weeknights. The year before, Mary Punshon, a Footscray shop owner, had introduced a weekly
half-holiday for her staff160. This was at a time when Victoria's shop workers were expected to
work twelve hours on weekdays and fifteen on Saturdays. In 1893 Yarraville traders began giving
their employees a Wednesday half holiday and two years later a Labor MLA, John Hancock and
Bible Christian Minister, Rev. D. Daley joined with a small group of Footscray businessmen in a
committee to work towards achieving a half-day holiday per week for shop assistants. Charlie
Lovett, who was on the committee, recalled that eventually they got the majority of shopkeepers
within the municipality to agree to the half-holiday. The half-holiday, changed from Wednesday
to Saturday, was achieved by agreement in Footscray in 1895, but it was not adopted across the
metropolitan area until 1909161.
9.8.2 Early shops at Braybrook and Maidstone and Maribyrnong
By 1870 the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company provided a restaurant for workers within its
works and seems to have sold goods there, so perhaps it served as an early shop. In the twentieth
century a small shopping centre, the nucleus of the town, stretched along Raleigh's Road between
the river and Warrs Road. The shops were not all grouped together, but, by the 1950s, there were
the usual butchers, confectioners, grocers, as well as a Maribyrnong Post Office near the south
west corner of Warrs Road and Raleigh St. Another little group of shops was found on the west
side of Rosamond Road, between Emu and Verdun Streets162. Interestingly, Maribyrnong still
had two blacksmiths listed in the directory for 1950.

It is more difficult to discover what shops were available to early residents at Braybrook. It
appears that Thomas Derham opened a butcher shop here in 1858, and in 1867 took over the
Braybrook Hotel163. Dickson's General Store had also opened in Braybrook by 1867164, as well as
a nursery garden and blacksmith, but as the population here was essentially a rural one, it does
not seem to have developed rapidly into a shopping precinct. By the beginning of the twentieth

158 Lack, 1991: 160

159 Butler, 1989: 3-23
160 Lack, 1991: 126
161 Lack, 1991: 163
162 See Sands and McDougall, Victorian Directories, 1950
163 Alexander Sutherland, Victoria and its Metropolis, quoted in Popp, 1979: 35
164 Popp, 1979: 55

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century there were a few shops spaced along Ballarat Road. George Cranwell ran a general store,
post office and butcher (all in one) on the corner of Butler Street and Ballarat Road and there was
another general store, a bootmaker and a blacksmith dotted along the road as it headed towards
Albion165.

At Maidstone William Pullar operated a post office and shop as well as being an electoral
registrar from about 1861. Charlie Lovett records that Mr Pullar lived with his family on Ballarat
Road about half way between Footscray and Braybrook166 and a subdivisional plan for the
Leinster Estate at Maidstone, produced in the 1880s, shows the Maidstone Post Office on the
south side of Ballarat Road between what is now Summerhill Road and Studley Street167. Single
and clustered shops still line Ballarat Road in the vicinity of Maidstone. When the Housing
Commission re-subdivided land in the area in the 1940s, allowance was made for small
neighbourhood shopping centres.

Tottenham also had its small cluster of local shops in Sunshine Road, between Aliwhal and
Dempster Streets by 1950. Often such rows of shops were built by housing estate developers as
an adjunct to the residential estates they developed. Sir William Angliss provided such a row on
Williamstown Road at Yarraville and Anders Hansen did so on the edge of his estate, at the
corner of Geelong and Robbs Road in the 1920s. Despite the importance of centres such as the
Footscray shopping centre for clothing, shoes, furniture, etc, it was local corner shops and, in the
twentieth century, small strip shopping centres that provided most people with their daily
supplies. Even in the 1950s most households purchased their food supplies on a daily or semi-
weekly basis at local shops. Many households still did not own motor cars, making frequent local
shopping trips on foot a necessity. Even such items as clothing and haberdashery supplies were
often still purchased at ‘local’ shops in the 1950s. Barkly Street, in West Footscray, for example,
still boasted a number of these sorts of shops in the mid-1950s. As large supermarkets and car
ownership became more commonplace in the 1960s and 1970s, shopping habits began to change.
Some newly-built local shopping strips tried to adapt to the motor car by providing strips of off-
street parking, as at Churchill Avenue in Braybrook. Gradually some of the City of
Maribyrnong’s strip shopping centres changed character, converting to specialty stores, take-
away food outlets, or closing completely.
9.8.3 Highpoint
In the 1970s shopping within the City of Maribyrnong was radically changed with the building of
the first stage of Highpoint Shopping Centre on the former Essendon Municipal Quarry at
Maribyrnong. The centre and its carparks have expanded several times since it opened. In the
1990s the site of the old Sunset Drive-In, across Rosamond Road from Highpoint, was turned
into the Highpoint Homemaker Centre.

10 Migration
Migration has been a constant theme in the City of Maribyrnong since the first European
squatters arrived in the Port Phillip District with their flocks of sheep. Early examples of 'assisted
migrants' were among Joseph Raleigh's workforce at Maribyrnong in the 1840s, and few of the
early settlers in the region in the first twenty years of non-Aboriginal occupation had been born in

165 See Sands and McDougall Victorian Directories, 1903

166 Lack, 1993: 43
167 See SLV Map Collection 820.bhf Vol. 5: 10

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Victoria. A large proportion of the earliest industrialists in the city were migrants, particularly
from Scotland. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the City of Maribyrnong was
populated by many former gold seekers, whose families had arrived in the colony in the 1850s.
As gold mining became less profitable in central Victoria in the 1880s and 1890s, many of these
families moved to Melbourne's West and sought work.168 Some large employers in the area also
imported skilled workers from England and Scotland at this time169. It has been argued that
Footscray’s growth between 1880 and 1914 was largely influenced by British-born migrants170.
Perhaps the most obvious physical evidence these migrants left on the landscape were the
cultural institutions they introduced, particularly churches and chapels, such as Wesleyan
churches which were also popular on Victoria's goldfields.

The twentieth century, particularly its second half, saw many more migrants settling in the City
of Maribyrnong. Before World War Two these migrants still tended to be predominantly British,
although, in the 1920s, a growing number of Maltese, many of them employed at the Albion
Quarries, were living in Braybrook Shire. In 1926 there were 200 Maltese men working at the
quarries, and, while many of them lived in inner Melbourne, a number were purchasing their own
blocks of land in Braybrook171. After the War migrants began arriving from a far greater diversity
of cultures than the previous century. While in 1933 10.9% of Footscray's population and 16.3 %
of Braybrook's (Sunshine's) population were overseas-born, (the vast majority of them from the
United Kingdom and Ireland), by 1981 these percentages were 38.9 and 39.8 respectively.
Initially, along with British-born migrants, Maltese, Yugoslavs, Poles and Ukrainians were the
predominant ethnic groups, followed later by southern European communities in the 1960s and
1970s. Refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia in the late 1970s and 1980s brought another
cultural wave.

Overseas migration to the City of Maribyrnong received a boost in the post-World War Two era
when Commonwealth Government policy aimed at first to help displaced persons settle in a new
country and also to build up Australia's population and workforce through assisted migration.
The large number of migrants entering the country in the late 1940s to 1960s necessitated the
establishment of migrant hostels in many places throughout Australia. Three of these were
located in Melbourne's West, at Brooklyn, Williamstown and Maribyrnong. The Maribyrnong
Hostel actually began in the old pyrotechnics section of the Explosives factory and was initially
used to house 400 single men who were working for the Postmaster General's Department, the
MMBW and brickworks in Footscray. It was not uncommon in the early post-war days for
migrant men to be accommodated separately from their wives and children, who were often
located miles away at 'holding centres' such as Bonegilla. In November 1949 400 women and
children joined their husbands at Maribyrnong, the first of 2,000 migrants expected to be housed
here172. While many migrant hostels were set up in former army barracks (as at Williamstown
racecourse), the Federal Government did intend importing Nissen or malthoid huts in which to
accommodate migrants eventually. By 1954 about 1000 people were housed at the hostel, which
by then had become a collection of 'steel and brick huts', some of them Nissen huts173. British and
non-British migrants were housed here and the site was also the headquarters of Commonwealth

168 Lack, 1991: 117

169 Lack, 1991: 117
170 James Jupp, (ed) The Australian People An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins, 1988
171 Barry York, ‘‘A Splendid Country’? The Maltese in Melbourne 1838-1938’, Victorian Historical Journal, Vol.
60, September 1989: 10-11
172 Herald, 24/11/1949: 2
173 Herald 13/9.1954:.3

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Hostels Ltd. In 1968, as part of a Commonwealth hostel rebuilding program, 13 new brick double
storey buildings, capable of accommodating 500 people, replaced some of the Nissen huts on the
site.

Midway Migrant Hostel, as it became known, outlived many other migrant hostels in Melbourne,
offering a refuge to waves of migrants, such as South East Asian refugees in the 1970s and
central Americans in the 1980s. Its location at Maribyrnong influenced classes at nearby schools
and attendance at nearby churches and many of the migrants who passed through Midway settled
in the local area. In 1989 Midway was turned into a student village, accommodating tertiary
students seeking housing in Melbourne. A Detention Centre for deportees pending deportation
from Australia is still located on the site.

Another migrant hostel of a slightly different kind was operated by the Victorian Railways at
Rupert Street Tottenham in the 1950s. Experiencing shortages of labour, the Victorian Railways
actively recruited overseas for workers, as well as making use of the labour of assisted migrants
required to 'work as directed' for two years after arrival in the country. From 1949 the Railways
imported many prefabricated timber houses to accommodate British workers and their families
and a large number of these houses were located in Braybrook. At Tottenham in 1952 the
Railways opened a hostel for migrant workers, on Railways' land174. The hostel clearly did not
operate for very long because in 1954 it was leased to the Parish of Christ the King Braybrook
which used it as a church, school, presbytery and convent until 1958175.

The impact of waves of multicultural migration on the City of Maribyrnong can be seen in a
variety of sites, such as social and sporting clubs, churches, temples and mosques of various
denominations, and in the variety of shops, cafes and restaurants that are operated by people from
various ethnic backgrounds. Hopkins, Barkly and Leeds Streets in Footscray are particular
examples of such sites, but they are also scattered in various other parts of the municipality.

11 Education

11.1 Primary schools

Early schools are often an indication of the growth of population in an area. When a sufficient
number of children are resident in an area the local population generally seek to establish a
school or have it opened by religious or state authorities. Many early schools in Victoria closed
or moved as the local population waxed and waned. At Footscray both the Catholic and Church
of England congregations erected schools in the mid-1850s and at least three private schools
operated in Footscray in the 1860s. In 1860 a National School, the precursor of Geelong Road
State School, began on the corner of Barkly Streets and Geelong Road, although the site for the
school that was eventually built here was not properly reserved until 1862 and buildings not
completed until 1870176. Further buildings were erected in the 1880s. By that time the first
buildings at Hyde Street School were opened (1877), Yarraville's first school, the Yarraville and
Stony Creek Common School had opened in 1866, but a reserved site for a state school was not
made available until 1872 and the beginnings of Yarraville State School were opened in Francis

174 Report of the Victorian Railways Commissioners for the Year Ended 1952, Victorian Parliamentary Papers
1952/53: 1477
175 Margaret McKay, The Phoenix Parish, Twenty Five Years at Christ the King, Braybrook, 1977: 5
176 Lack, 1991: 82

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Street in 1875. The school was substantially rebuilt and added to in 1889177. Another Yarraville
State School joined it in Powell Street in 1887, although it closed, to be amalgamated with the
first Yarraville School in 1892, only reopening again in its own right in 1926. Yarraville
Catholics had been using their timber Church as a school by 1895. They built the first part of
their school in 1905178. Later opening state and Catholic schools reflected the residential growth
of areas.

A little school at Maidstone was built, along with a Wesleyan Chapel, by late 1858, according to
the developer of the Maidstone Estate, William Thompson. By 1865 the Victorian Gazetteer
mentioned two schools at Maidstone, though quite possibly this included the school at
Maribyrnong. The Maidstone School, a non-vested National School, was a wooden building
twenty feet by ten feet in dimension, though exactly where it was located in Maidstone is
unclear179. The school operated with government subsidies until 1872 when Government support
was withdrawn. Ironically, this was when the Education Bill, providing for 'free, secular and
compulsory schooling' was introduced and Education Department authorities decided that
Maidstone children could attend school at a new state school opening in Braybrook.
Subsequently two little private schools operated in Maidstone. Miss Webb began her school in
her home near Madden Street from about 1877 to 1909. A Mrs Douglas also ran a private school
in Maidstone from 1886-7 to 1888, before moving it to Footscray180.

Braybrook's school, No.1102, opened in 1873 in a bluestone building on the site that is still
occupied by the Braybrook State School. This building was replaced by a brick building in
1925.A wooden building was added in the 1940s, but after it burned down, it had to be replaced
in the 1950s.

Maribyrnong's first school was in use for about a year in the 1850s, when the engineering firm,
Robertson, Martin and Smith occupied the old Raleigh site and there were clearly enough
children in the district to support a school. Known as the Raleigh's Punt Church of England
School, it operated in 1855-56. A map made circa 1857 showed the school building located near
industrial buildings and quarries on the site of what is now Pipemakers' Park. From about 1880 to
1886 a private school operated at Maribyrnong, probably under the auspices of the Melbourne
Meat Preserving Company and when the Company closed its operations, the school closed
also181. Maribyrnong had to wait for another surge of population, in the second decade of the
twentieth century for a state school to open, at first in the new Methodist Church in Raleigh Road
in 1911. By 1916 a proper school building was erected on the corner of Wests Road and Raleigh
Street. However, this was on Commonwealth land and was resumed during World War Two for
extensions to the munitions factory. For a couple of years in the 1940s the Maribyrnong School
was conducted in the Maribyrnong Hall until in 1942 the new Maribyrnong State School opened
in Warrs Road. Maribyrnong achieved a Catholic school in 1957.

Other primary schools reflected the growth of particular areas. Footscray West Primary school
opened in 1915 as Tottenham Primary School, but its name was changed when another
Tottenham Primary School opened in Sunshine Road in 1953, catering for growth in that area. A

177 Butler, 1989: 4-47

178 Jill Barnard, 'Expressions of faith: Twentieth Century Catholic Churches in Melbourne's Western Suburbs', M.A.
thesis , Monash University, 1990: 63
179 Ford, 'Voices from Below', 1993: 63
180 Ford, 'Voices from Below', 1993: 85-86
181 Ford, 'Voices from Below', 1993: 51-55

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site had been reserved in South Road Tottenham for a school in 1929, but it was not until 1953
that Tottenham North Primary school began. Footscray West had to be substantially expanded in
the post -World War Two years to cater for growth in the area. A Catholic School at West
Footscray, St Johns, opened soon after the State School in 1922. Kingsville State School was
opened in 1919, but had to be extended in 1931. The Catholic school at Kingsville, now Corpus
Christi, did not open until 1943.

Footscray North Primary School opened amid rapid population growth in 1924 and Maidstone
Primary School in 1951, followed three years later by a Catholic Primary School at Braybrook.
Tottenham North Primary School opened in 1953, while Wembley Primary school was not
opened until 1958.

11.2 Technical and secondary education

Secondary education in the City of Maribyrnong was, for many years in the twentieth century,
confined to technical education. Footscray Technical School opened in Nicholson Street in 1916
and was extended in 1938. In 1940 it extended again, this time to a new site in Ballarat Road,
that was given by Footscray Council. It was allowed the name Footscray Technical College in the
1950s and the senior part of the institution became Footscray Institute of Technology in 1968. In
the 1980s the secondary section of the school moved onto a new site in Kinnear Street, while the
TAFE section occupied the Nicholson Street and Ballarat Road sites. These became
amalgamated into the new Victoria University of Technology in 1990. Tottenham Technical
School began as an offshoot of Footscray Technical School to cater for the rapidly growing
population at Tottenham-Braybrook in 1957. It moved onto its own site in 1958.

Girls at Footscray were catered for in the Footscray Girls School (now Gilmore College) founded
in Barkly Street in 1925. Prior to this a private girls’ education had been offered from 1915 by
the Misses Watkins who operated Claremont College, at first in the Baptist School Hall in
Paisley St and then, after 1921, in new buildings in Pickett St. Boys were able to attend
kindergarten and preparatory school at this Ladies Establishment182. But general high school
education did not reach the study area until 1954 when Footscray High School opened. It was
followed by Maribyrnong High School in 1958 and Braybrook High School in 1960. Both of the
latter held classes in the Ordnance Factory at Maribyrnong before their permanent buildings were
ready. Catholic secondary education was offered to boys from 1941 at Yarraville and to girls
there from 1920. The boys school at Yarraville closed in the 1970s and the girls' school in the
1990s. Boys and girls' Catholic regional secondary schools were established in Braybrook in the
1960s, under the auspices of the Parish of Christ the King, Braybrook.

Many of the secondary schools established in the post World War Two period have undergone
changes in the 1990s. Tottenham Technical School and Footscray High School sites have been
closed and students at these schools amalgamated into other local secondary colleges.

12 Cultural development

12.1 Mechanics institute and libraries

Mechanics Institutes were nineteenth century versions of both libraries and self-education
colleges. They provided working people with opportunities to pursue education, mainly by using
reading rooms and attending lectures, talks, etc. Footscray's first Mechanics Institute was built in

182 Lack, 1991: 252

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1855 in Pilgrim Street, but then moved to Austin Street and later Nicholson Street. The
Mechanics Institute was used for a time as Council chambers, a church and, for a time, as a
School of Design183. The old Mechanics Institute was rather small and land was acquired for a
new building on the corner of Napier, Nicholson and Buckley Streets in 1886, but the new
Mechanics Institute and Library was not commenced until 1913. In 1928 Footscray Council
established a Children’s Library in a converted shop in Victoria Street184. It was enormously
popular with local children and must have been one of the earliest municipal libraries for children
in Melbourne. After the Second World War it was moved to a recycled ARP building in Buckley
Street. It was flanked by the adult library by 1955. Maribyrnong had its own branch library, in the
Maribyrnong Hall, by 1956185. In the 1970s the City of Footscray established more branch
libraries, a children’s one at Kingsville, a children’s and adult’s library at West Footscray in the
West Footscray Progress Association Hall and a Yarraville branch in a converted shop. The
Yarraville branch, reflecting the changing cultural composition of the area, specialised in
stocking books in a number of European languages186

12.2 Recreation

12.2. 1 Reserves and parks

The variety of reserves within the City of Maribyrnong derive from a number of sources. Some
early recreational reserves were granted by government, such as the current Whitten Oval, which
was originally a botanical reserve at Footscray, but was used as a quarry for some time before
becoming a sports ground for cricket and football , especially after the Footscray Football Club
was formed in 1883. Yarraville Gardens was also reserved early, in 1859, although it, too was
used as a quarry and later as a nightsoil dump and not developed as gardens until the early
twentieth century. At Braybrook, what is now part of Pennell Reserve was gazetted as a cricket
and recreation reserve in 1876, although the eastern half of the reserve appears not to have been
officially added until 1921187.

Other reserves were achieved by citizen or council action. Footscray Park was created when the
VRC planned to sell land on the Footscray side of the Maribyrnong River for subdivision in 1908
and local citizens urged the Footscray Council to buy the land. The Sate Government and
Footscray Council combined to purchase the land from the VRC, which sold it at a reasonable
price. A citizens' committee and then, for many decades the curator, David Matthews, worked to
create the wonderful public gardens that are there today. At Maribyrnong in the early twentieth
century local residents, perhaps inspired by the Essendon River League across the bridge, worked
to create a recreation reserve at the Maribyrnong Bridge and a boulevard on a very small part of
the land that had been set aside as a recreation reserve in the Maribyrnong Park Estate of the
1880s. Maribyrnong's recreation reserve in Raleigh Road was achieved during the 1920s. Local
residents built a hall at the reserve in 1927188. After World War Two a grandstand at the reserve
served both the local cricket club and the youth club and was also used by the Speedway, which
constructed a race track on the reserve.

183 Butler, 1989: 4-113

184 Lack, 1991: 265
185 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 60
186 Lack, 1991: 382. Also John Lack, personal communication
187 See map Township of Braybrook, 1879, SLV Map Collection
188 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 42

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Many parks and reserves within the municipality are former quarry sites, unsuitable for other
development. Some are quite small. Others, like Cruikshank Park, Kingsville, lay as large
neglected areas for decades before they were turned into parks and recreational areas. Hansen
Reserve, also on a former quarry, was developed to include the cycling track in the 1930s.

When the Housing Commission of Victoria redesigned Braybrook and Maidstone in the 1940s
and 1950s, it made allowances for a number of reserves as open space and sports fields within
the area.
12.2.2.Sports
Within the City of Maribyrnong a huge range of sports are now played on recreation reserves and
sports grounds. Sports clubs, even in their most informal mode, are often amongst the earliest
associations formed by young communities and some of the City's Associations such as the
Footscray Cricket Club can trace their history back to the nineteenth century. As population grew
within particular areas, and as people had the leisure time to pursue sports, clubs and facilities
were born. The range of sporting facilities available now in the City of Maribyrnong reflects not
only changes in the popularity of various sports, but also changes in the composition of the
population. Waves of migrants extending back into the nineteenth century have popularised
different sports and the variety of activities now available within the City of Maribyrnong
demonstrates this. One significant game that is said to have been invented during lunch hours at
the Newport Railway Workshops in the 1920s was Trugo. It is said that railway workers who
lived at Yarraville continued playing the game after work at Yarraville Gardens and Footscray
Football Ground and by the 1940s a number of teams were playing in the western and northern
suburbs of Melbourne189.

Football and cricket were informally played by a number of teams from the 1870s in Footscray.
Although an early municipal reserve near the river was used, this was later exchanged for a
reserve at what is now called the Whitten Oval. For a while, in the late 1870s, the local football
team, the Footscray Football Club, played on vacant land in Cowper St, then on a market reserve
between Barkly St and Geelong Road before, they were finally allowed to join the Footscray
Cricket Club on the Botanical Reserve at Upper Footscray (now known as the Whitten Oval) in
1884. It was the Footscray Cricket Club, established in 1882-83, but disbanded for a while before
reforming in 1894, which built the first pavilion at this reserve190. The Footscray Football Club
entered the Victorian Football Association competition in 1886, but did not join the Victorian
Football League (now Australian Football League) until 1925. Now known as the Western
Bulldogs and playing its home games at Colonial Stadium, the Footscray Football Club and the
Whitten Oval, have been enduring symbols for western suburbs residents. Other local football
clubs, including the now defunct Braybrook and Yarraville clubs have also harnessed local
support, as well as providing many players for the local League team. The Yarraville Football
Club entered the Victorian Football Association in 1928, having played in the Victorian Junior
Football League since 1903. The team was based at the Yarraville Oval until its demise in the
1980s.

Many of the city’s sporting facilities were provided or improved by works carried out to provide
employment for local men during the depression of the 1930s. For instance, a grandstand was

189Susan Priestley, The Victorians, Making Their Mark, 1984: 330

190John Lack, Chris McConville, Michael Small , Damien Wright, A History of the Footscray Football Club
Unleashed, 1996: 15

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built at Yarraville Oval during this period, drainage of areas at the edge of Footscray Park
provided playing fields, courts were laid out at Hanmer Reserve (adjacent to the Yarraville
Gardens) and the cycling track laid down for the enthusiastic local Footscray District Cycling
Club191.

One large sporting facility within the municipality began as a private venture when the
Williamson family, who owned land that had originally been Solomon's purchase on the
Maribyrnong River, formed a private company to turn the land into a public golf course. The
company was formed in 1934 and the 18 hole golf course constructed by July 1936. What is
thought to have been Solomon's house, but is just as likely to have been William Blair's, was
used as the first clubhouse. The Williamsons built a new home for themselves in Omar Street. In
1946, when the company intended to sell the golf course land, the Medway Golf Club took over
the course. A new clubhouse was built in 1958.

12.2.3 Youth clubs

During the twentieth century a number of activities, excluding those exclusively aimed at sport,
have been launched to keep youth usefully occupied in the City of Maribyrnong. The Footscray-
Yarraville Mouth Organ Band, though now fairly well populated by older people, was formed as
the Yarraville Mouth Organ Band in the bleak depression days of 1933192. During World War
Two, when so many parents were on overseas service or working, the Yarraville Boys' Club was
established. Just after the war the Social and Educational Club established a sports program for
boys and girls at Trimble's Hall. In the 1950s the YMCA established a Youth Centre at
Kingsville and another at Essex Street West Footscray two years later193. Maribyrnong's Youth
Club began just after World War Two when a clubhouse was built at the Maribyrnong Recreation
Reserve194.
12.2.4 Racing and coursing
From 1892 to about 1901 Maribyrnong had its own race course on the western side of the
property that later became a remount depot and part of the Explosives Factory at Maribyrnong.
The racecourse, called Maribyrnong Racecourse, was operated by well-known racing family, the
Cox's, after one of whom the W.S.Cox Plate is named. They had purchased the property from
C.B. Fischer and it included the stables built by him. Although the racecourse was forced to close
in 1901, it continued to be used as a training track until about 1908. It was also used, in 1904, as
the venue for Victoria's first motor sports meeting for cars and motor bikes195. The motor racing
theme at Maribyrnong was continued from 1946 to the 1960s when Tracey's Speedway occupied
the Maribyrnong Recreation Reserve, operating motor bike races on Saturday nights196.
Greyhound racing had earlier taken place at the Victory Running Ground which was located on
what is now parkland between the river and Burton Crescent at Maribyrnong beside the
Maribyrnong Hotel. Although the hotel was delicensed in 1925, it operated as a boarding house
until the 1940s. The Coursing Club continued to operate until the 1950s197.

191 Lack, 1991: 296

192 Lack, 1991:.298
193i Lack, 1991: 343
194 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 61
195Allom Lovell and Associates, 'Maribyrnong Heritage and Open Space, An Assessment of the Defence Site
Cordite Avenue Maribyrnong, (report), 1998: 22
196 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 60, 66
197 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 57

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Another greyhound track in the City of Maribyrnong was the White City Greyhound Track at
Tottenham, built on the other side of Sunshine Road from White City Railway Station about
1927198. Nearby, but closer to Stony Creek, was the Melbourne Gun Club.

12.2.5 River activities

Despite the pollution of the Maribyrnong River by noxious industries in the nineteenth century,
local citizens still used it for recreational activity, especially around the turn of the century. The
Essendon Rowing Club, for example, which is now based across the river, began as the
Maribyrnong Rowing Club, with its base at the Maribyrnong Bridge (originally Raleigh's Punt)
Hotel, where boats were stored. It became the Essendon Rowing Club in 1888 and built a
clubhouse across the river in 1920. The Footscray Rowing Club had been formed as early as
1873199 By the end of that decade the Maribyrnong River at Footscray had become the venue for
the Clarke Cup Challenge, a rowing race over two miles, open to any rowing club in Victoria.
Pastoralist W.J. Clarke, MLC donated the silver cup, which had to be won by a club
consecutively for three years before it could keep it200 The course of the race was from the mouth
of the Yarra for two miles to Maribyrnong Street near the current Shepherd Bridge. Although the
Corio club won the first race, in 1879, Footscray Rowing Club won for the next three years and
claimed the Cup. The Rowing Club existed on and off until the mid 1890s, when it folded, but
was resurrected as the City of Footscray Rowing Club in 1894201.

Boating for pleasure, especially for excursionists became especially popular after the tram was
extended to Maribyrnong Bridge in 1906. Charles Snelson was a boat builder who offered boats
for hire just up river from the Anglers Hotel from about 1895202. His boat shed was later taken
over by Alfred Fitzsimmons. The Maribyrnong Motor Boat Company also had a jetty and ticket
office adjacent to the Anglers Hotel from about 1907. The service was later taken over by Daniel
Hicks, who ran excursion boats up the river from the Anglers Hotel to his tea gardens at
Avondale Heights from 1909 to 1947. The Riverlea Tea House was also located adjacent to the
Anglers Hotel.

In the 1920s Maribyrnong had its own Swimming and Lifesaving Club on the river at the end of
Chicago Street203. Here a picket fence outlined an area for younger children and diving boards
were constructed for older members. The club's facilities were demolished during World War
Two204. Footscray had its own swimming club also based on the Maribyrnong and formed in
1909. By 1922 it was the second largest club in the Victorian Amateur Swimming Association205.
When Footscray went on to open its own municipal pool in 1930, it was one of the first in
suburban Melbourne.

198 Susan Priestley, Altona, A Long View, 1988: 170

199 Lack, 1991: 75
200 Lack, 1993: 55
201 Lack, 1993:136
202 Judy Maddigan and Lenore Frost, Maribyrnong Record: Past Images of the River, 1995: 30
203Ford and Lewis, 1989: 41
204 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 52
205 Lack, 1991: 255

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12.2.6 Halls, cinemas, drive-ins and dance halls

Nineteenth century recreation often centred on outdoor activities, such as sport and what would
be now called ‘passive recreation’, such as picnics or strolling in parks, gardens or beaches.
While indoor recreation was often based on private homes, as communities developed public
halls became important venues for meetings, concerts, plays, balls and dances. Often church
communities constructed their own small halls and, increasingly in the late nineteenth and then
twentieth century, local progress associations provided halls for community activities, as at West
Footscray and Maribyrnong. Youth clubs, scout and guide groups and sporting clubs also made
use of local halls. Footscray , from the nineteenth century, possessed some large, privately–built
halls, such as the Federal and the Royal, and some of the local churches, as they secured enough
finances to fund better facilities, built imposing parish halls, such as Peter Fraser Hall, built by
the Barkly Street Presbyterian Parish in 1935, and St. Augustine’s massive parish hall in
Yarraville, built in 1930. Most of the halls dotted around the City of Maribyrnong, however, are
of more modest proportions and many have been recycled for a number of uses over the decades.
Nevertheless, they are significant as illustrators of the development of communities at different
periods in history.

In recent times ‘community centres’ have often replaced the simple hall of the past. The former
City of Sunshine, along with state and federal governments, funded Maribyrnong’s Marie Mills
Community Centre in the 1980s. More recently, in the late 1990s, Braybrook received an
impressive community centre, located on Skinner Reserve.

Footscray and Yarraville are well known for their early cinemas. Many of them opened in the
second decade of the twentieth century, but were later converted or replaced by grander cinemas
in the 1930s. The Federal Hall in Nicholson St, Footscray was used for exhibiting moving
pictures from 1906. It was converted into a ‘picture palace’ in 1910206. In 1911 the Grand
Cinema opened its doors in Paisley Street as Footscray's first purpose-built cinema. Closed
during the Depression, the Grand was refurbished and reopened as the ‘New Grand’ in the late
1930s. It finally closed in the 1980s. The Trocadero and Barkly Picture Theatres were both
opened in Barkly Street in 1914. Yarraville's St George's Theatre opened in the converted Murray
Street Hall in 1913207. The Yarraville Hall became the Lyric Theatre. In 1938 the purpose-built
art-deco Sun Theatre, in Ballarat Street was opened. The Roxy Theatre, opened after World War
Two, was located at 49a Ballarat Road, Maidstone. It shared its building with a confectionery
store208. In 1957 the last picture theatre to be built in Footscray, the La Scala, opened, screening
mainly foreign films209 .

At Maribyrnong an open air cinema operated in the first decade of the twentieth century at the
Riverview Tea Rooms near the Anglers Hotel. This must have been a precursor to the Sunset
Drive-In which opened in Rosamond Road in the 1950s, the third drive-in to be built in
Melbourne210. The Drive-In was replaced by the Highpoint Homemaker Centre in the 1990s.
Highpoint Shopping Centre, however, was eventually expanded to include a complex of Hoyts
cinemas.

206 Lack, 1991: 93

207iLack, 1991: 193
208 Sands and MacDougall, Melbourne Directory, 1995
209 Lack, 1991: 353
210 Ford and Lewis, 1989: 64

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Dance Halls also became increasingly popular in the 1920s, before the depression of the 1930s
made it difficult for many people to afford to patronise them. Many of the City of Maribyrnong’s
dance halls made use of existing halls, such as the Federal and Royal Halls or shared the same
facilities as the picture theatres. Green’s Palais operated at Green’s Buildings in the 1920s on the
corner of Barkly St and Geelong Road. The Orama Palais de Danse and Theatre in Hopkins
Street opened in 1926. Seddon also had its own Palais.

12.3 Radio transmitting station

A transmitting station for ABC Radio 3LO was erected at Braybrook in the 1930s. Reputedly the
mast was the largest in Australia at the time and it had the strongest transmitter. It is also said
that the concrete building which housed the transmitter is still to be found in the Telecom
storeyard at Maidstone211. Radio Street gained its name because of the transmitter station.

12.4 Worshipping
Churches are another manifestation of the different waves of settlers arriving in an area. The
earliest established churches within the City of Maribyrnong were Catholic, Church of England
(Anglican) and Wesleyan (Methodist) congregations, which gained early reserves within the
township of Footscray. The Wesleyans at first held services in a private home, before moving to
a timber church in Napier Street and then to a church reserve in Hyde Street where they built a
bluestone church in 1871212. The Church of England first held services in Footscray in 1855 and
secured a church reserve in Cowper Street in the 1850s and also built a bluestone church here.
The congregation sold this early site to Bevan and Co., makers of railway rolling stock, in 1887
and moved the bluestone church to a new site in Paisley Street, where they also built a new brick
and stone church (St Johns) in 1891. St Monica's Catholic Church was also early established
(reputedly first in a tent) and then in a timber church before a bluestone church and school was
begun in the 1860s. The bluestone church that is still located at St Monica's dates from the 1870s.

The Presbyterians at Footscray held services in the Mechanics Institute building and built their
second bluestone church in Barkly Street in 1886. The Baptists also began in a wooden chapel in
Paisley Street, but were able to build a new church in 1904. The Paisley Street Baptist Church
was associated for thirty six years from 1895 with Joseph Goble. The solid, often bluestone,
church buildings that are dotted around central and old Footscray and Yarraville are very tangible
reminders of the strength and growth of the Wesleyan, Church of England, Catholic and
Presbyterian denominations in the study area in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Outposts of these early parishes stretched to Yarraville and Upper Footscray and then West
Footscray as they began to be populated. While many congregations, such as these early ones,
began with modest or temporary buildings and then moved on to more permanent churches,
others did not. Wesleyan Chapels were often modest timber churches that remained as the
community's church. Maidstone, for example, was said to have had a chapel in 1858. A
Wesleyan Chapel was listed in directories in Carlyle Street Maidstone between the 1890s and
1920s, after which it does not appear. The building may have been moved or used for another
purpose. A Scout Hall is listed in the same street from the 1950s and a Salvation Army Hall had

211 Gilbert Lyle Williams, The History of the Medway Golf Club, From Mia Mias to Manicured Meadow 1935-
1990, 1992: 20
212 Butler, 1989: 4-81

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appeared around the corner in Studley Street by this time. Braybrook's early Wesleyan Church
was located just outside of the City of Maribyrnong , in Worcester Street, but by 1917 Braybrook
boasted a Church of England Hall, on Ballarat Road, between Melon and Vine Streets. At
Maribyrnong a timber Methodist Church was erected in Raleigh Road (on the corner of
Rosamond Road) in 1911213. It is no longer there. Maribyrnong's first temporary Catholic
Church, a former recreation hut moved from Broadmeadows Army camp and opened by
Archbishop Mannix in 1949, has remained as St Margaret's Church, though the parish was able
to begin building brick school rooms in the 1960s.

Post World War Two population expansion and migration brought new churches and
denominations to the area. Maidstone Catholics had been served by St Johns West Footscray
since the 1930s, but the parish was able to expand and build a new church, presbytery and parish
hall, named Our Lady of Perpetual Help, in 1962. Braybrook and Tottenham Catholics worked
hard during the 1950s to establish a church , presbytery and school, only to have it burn down in
1961. The parish inhabited a remarkable range of temporary homes before rebuilding the church
in 1966 and the school in the 1970s.

Migration in the decades since World War Two did not just add numbers to the existing parishes
and initiate the building of new churches for pre-existing denominations. It also meant that
denominations never seen before in the City of Maribyrnong began to establish their own
churches, sometimes in new buildings, sometimes in existing buildings that were being recycled.
At the same time the amalgamation of Methodist, Congregational and Presbyterian churches into
the Uniting Church in the 1970s, the change of some former residential areas into commercial
precincts, and the declining proportion of residents of Anglo-Celtic backgrounds meant that
many of the older church buildings in the City of Maribyrnong were no longer used by their
original congregations. Some were taken over by recently-arrived religious groups, such as the
Macedonian Orthodox Church, which took over the Methodist Church in Victoria St, Footscray.
Other newly-arrived religions recycled other buildings, such as the Yarraville fire station, which
became St Nicholas’ Greek Orthodox Church214. Such re-use of buildings is a very tangible
reminder of the ways in which the City of Maribyrnong’s population and cultural life has altered
dynamically over the last 160 years.

The very wide range of religious buildings in the City of Maribyrnong now includes mosques and
temples as well as churches. Each of them is another indicator of the cultural life of the city.

12.5 Honouring the fallen and commemorating significant people

The service of local men and women in overseas wars has been commemorated in many ways by
various communities. After World War One the Returned Servicemen's League erected a
Soldiers' Memorial Cenotaph in Footscray Park. It was unveiled in 1921 and claimed to be the
only one in Australia erected by ex-servicemen. It was moved to the front of the RSL Hall in
Geelong Road in the 1960s. The RSL Hall, formerly Amaryllis, a private home, was purchased as
a Memorial Hall to those who served in World War One. Funds raised locally paid for this hall,
which was opened in September 1921, and for a Citizens' Memorial, a marble statue of the figure
of Victory, placed at the entrance to Footscray Park, on Armistice Day, 1922215. This memorial
was also moved to another location in the park when Ballarat and Geelong Roads were widened

213 Ford and Lewis,1989:.32

214 Lack, 1991: 372
215 Lack, 1991: 239

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in the 1960s. Michaelis-Hallenstein erected a memorial to workers from the company who fell in
World War Two. Unveiled in 1920, the memorial still stands on Tannery Reserve in Hopkins
Street, although the factory is no longer standing216.

After World War Two, an Avenue of Honour commemorating those who had served, was
planted along Geelong Road. It was composed of desert and claret ash trees, with each tree
bearing a plaque with a serviceman's name. Two 20 foot columns to mark the ends of the avenue
were donated anonymously and placed at the corner of Geelong Road and Nicholson Street and
Geelong Road and Somerville Road. Road widening in the 1960s also decimated the Avenue of
Honour and a traffic accident took out the Somerville Road column, though the Nicholson Street
column and some trees and plaques remain217 Another War Memorial, a granite monument, was
unveiled near the Dynon Road Bridge after World War Two.

Yarraville also had a branch of the RSL which erected a war memorial in Stephen Street
Yarraville. The Maribyrnong-Maidstone RSL branch took over the Maribyrnong Public Hall and
added a monument to both world wars sometime after World War Two.

Other monuments within the City of Maribyrnong were erected to honour public figures. The
Rev Goble, long-serving and much-loved pastor at Footscray Baptist Church was honoured with
a marble statue erected in 1933, a year after his death. The Simpson Street reserve in Yarraville
features a memorial erected in 1906 to honour Charles Fels, a baker. The Yarraville Gardens
boasts a Cuming Memorial, erected in 1917 while in 1941 the Lawson Society erected a bronze
plaque by a specially-planted Lawson tree in Footscray Park commemoration of writer, Henry
Lawson. When this tree was removed, the plaque was moved and attached to a tree stump in
another part of the gardens. A bronze bust of Henry Lawson now stands near the tree stump. A
memorial to the first principal of Footscray Technical School, Arch Hoadley, is located near the
corner of Geelong and Ballarat Roads

13 Developing local government

The current City of Maribyrnong is the result of the amalgamation of most of the former City of
Footscray and parts of the former City of Sunshine. Footscray was constituted as a municipality
in June 1859, became a town in 1886 and a city on January 20 1891218. Not all of what was later
regarded as Footscray was included in the city. For example, what is now Kingsville and part of
West Footscray, west of Williamstown Road and south of the Bendigo railway line was included
in the Shire of Wyndham (Werribee) from 1871 to 1921.

Footscray's first town hall, built of bluestone, opened in 1876 in Napier Street. Before this the
Council had used the Mechanics Institute as a meeting place. In November 1936 a new Town
Hall was opened on the same site as the former town hall. This is now the municipal office for
the City of Maribyrnong.

Braybrook, Maidstone, Maribyrnong and Tottenham were originally part of the Shire of
Braybrook, which began as the Braybrook District Road Board in 1860. The Braybrook Road

216 John Lack, ‘The City of Maribyrnong’s War Memorials at Footscray –What Future?’, a paper presented to the
Footscray Park Advisory Committee, 30/11/1999: 9
217 Most of the material relating to Footscray War memorials is taken from John Lack, ‘The City of Maribyrnong’s
War Memorials at Footscray –What Future?’
218 Lack, 1991: 131

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District encompassed a large area that not only included Deer Park and Derrimut, but much of
what is now Kensington as well. Members of the Road Board met at the Braybrook Hotel. In
1871 the Road District became a shire and the council met at the Kororoit Creek Hotel until a
Shire Hotel was built at Deer Park. From 1918 the council met at Sunshine. The Shire of
Braybrook became the City of Sunshine in 1951. The amalgamation of parts of Sunshine and
Footscray occurred in 1994 when the City of Maribyrnong was formed.

14 Sickness and health

14.1 Hospitals
Early private hospitals in the City of Maribyrnong tended to be run primarily as lying-in hospitals
for women. There were a number of these hospitals dotted around Footscray in the nineteenth
and early twentieth century, usually located in what had been private homes. In an industrial area,
where workplace accidents were common, a general hospital was much needed. The move for a
local public hospital, to serve not only Footscray but also the wider Braybrook and even as far as
St Albans, began in 1919. A committee was formed to work towards a hospital and a site in
Eleanor Street had been selected by 1920. Although the Footscray Council provided the £ 10
deposit needed to secure the land, the Committee had raised the full £ 2,000 to pay off the land by
April 1921219. It was to be another thirty years before the Committee, which was a coalition of
large local firms and working people, were able to achieve their hospital. The Charities Board
was a major obstacle to the achievement of a hospital, as it opposed the establishment of
hospitals outside inner Melbourne, where several large hospitals were located. In 1939 the
Governor of Victoria opened the Footscray Out-patients’ and Welfare Centre on the site of the
future hospital. The centre offered four 4-hourly clinics per week and was the first public health
facility offered in Footscray220. It was to be another fourteen years before the Footscray and
District Hospital, complete with a nurses' home, opened in June 1953. The hospital, with some
additions, later became the Western General Hospital and then, in the 1980s, became a campus of
the Western Hospital, with another large campus built at Sunshine.
The Department of Mental Health had, in the meantime, established a psychiatric unit adjacent to
the Footscray hospital, in Gordon Street.

14.2 Infant health and kindergartens

The first infant welfare centres in Victoria were opened in 1917 in Free Kindergartens in
Richmond and Carlton. The following year the Victorian Baby Health Centres association was
formed and they worked with municipal councils to provide baby health centres. An alternative
to the Baby Health Centres association was the New Zealand-based Society for health of Women
and Children, which worked with a much smaller number of Victorian councils to provide infant
welfare centres from 1920. Footscray was one of the first municipalities to open a baby health
centre under the Society for Health of Women and Children, or Plunkett system. The first infant
welfare centre in Footscray opened above a shop in Nicholson Street. By 1923 the Council had
opened another Plunkett Infant Welfare Centre in Yarraville because of the great demand on the
Footscray centre. With a donation from Mr Tweddle, a businessman and philanthropist, the
Society for Health of Women and Babies also established the Tweddle Hospital for Babies in

219 Lack, 1991: 235

220 Mary Sheehan, personal communication

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Footscray in 1924. Footscray Council donated the land for the centre in Gordon Street221. The
hospital served as a training school for nurses in the Plunkett system of infant welfare, but was
also the first hospital in Australia that took in mothers as well as babies to assist with feeding and
other problems. It was rebuilt in the 1950s and has now been moved from its original site.

Maribyrnong had an infant welfare centre, operating out of the Methodist Church in Raleigh
Road by 1928. When the Maribyrnong Public Hall was built the infant welfare centre moved to
that site, but later to a purpose-built site in Rosamond Road. Another Maternal and Child Health
Centre operated in connection with the Maribyrnong Pre-School centre, which opened in Warrs
Road in the 1950s.

During World War Two the Footscray Mechanics Progressive Women's Committee urged the
Council to establish a creche and kindergarten for the children of munitions workers. It was
established in Albert Street, next to the infant welfare centre. Both buildings have since been
demolished. More infant welfare centres, often combined with pre-school centres, were added as
the population expanded in new areas such as Kingsville, West Footscray, Braybrook and
Maidstone in the post World War Two era. It was also in the post World War Two era that
kindergartens, sometimes provided by Council and sometimes by churches, began to spread
through the study area.

14.3 Burying the dead

There is only one cemetery within the City of Maribyrnong. Footscray Cemetery was reserved in
May 1860, when an area of 22 acres (9 hectares) was set aside as 'a site for a public cemetery in
connection with Footscray and its vicinity'222. It is possible that earlier than this there was a burial
ground in the grounds of the Anglican Church Reserve at Footscray, which was granted in
1854223. The first burial at Footscray Cemetery did not take place until 1869. It seems likely that
it was easier to bury people at Williamstown, where the cemetery was established in 1857, than
at Footscray, where the population was not large enough to support an undertaker in the early
years. By 1935 the Cemetery trustees had to purchase an extra four acres of land fronting
Richards Street because they feared running out of space in the original reserve. This extra land
eventually became a lawn cemetery. In recent decades Footscray cemetery has been the only
metropolitan cemetery that allows traditional stone monuments to be erected on new graves,
making it popular with people such as southern and eastern European migrants who prefer such
monuments. There has also been a movement towards erecting mausolea at the cemetery224. In
1985 the cemetery was declared closed. This means that no new graves can be created, although
existing plots can still be used for burials.

221 Lack, 1991: 261

222 Victorian Government Gazette ,15 May 1860: 902, quoted in Dr Peter Bell 'Draft History of Footscray Cemetery'
in David Young and Associates, "Draft Footscray Cemetery Study', 1999
223Bell, 'Draft History of Footscray Cemetery', 1999
224 Bell, 'Draft History of Footscray Cemetery', 1999

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Appendix 1 Bibliography
Published Sources
Anderson, Hugh, Saltwater River History Trails, Sunbury to the Sea, Red Rooster Press, 1998
Archer, R.J., Euchred, Melbourne, 1888
Billis R.V., and Kenyon, A.S., Pastoral Pioneers of Port Phillip, 1974
City of Footscray, Footscray, A Pictorial Record of the Municipality from 1859 to 1988, 1989
City of Moonee Valley and V.C.C.C.M. The Wurundjeri Willam The Original Inhabitants of
Moonee Valley, nd,
Eidelsohn, Meyer, Stony Creek, The Journey of a Waterway and its People, Friends of Stony
Creek, 1997
Fiddian, Marc, Trains, Tracks and Travellers, A History of the Victorian Railways, 1977
Footscray and Braybrook Publicity Committee, Forging Ahead, 1947
Ford, Olwen and Lewis, Pamela, Maribyrnong: Action in Tranquility, Melbourne's Living
Museum of the West and Sunshine City Council, 1989
Hirst, J.B., The World Of Albert Facey, 1992
Housing Commission of Victoria, Housing Commission of Victoria, First Twenty-Five Years,
(pamphlet)
Jones, Valantyne J., Solomon's Ford, 1983
Lack, John, A History of Footscray, 1991
Lack, John(ed), Charlie Lovett's Footscray, City of Footscray Historical Society, 1993
Lack, John, McConville, Chris, Small , Michael, Wright, Damien, A History of the Footscray
Football Club Unleashed, 1996
Maddigan, Judy and Frost, Lenore, Maribyrnong Record: Past Images of the River, 1995.
McKay, Margaret, The Phoenix Parish, Twenty Five Years at Christ the King, Braybrook, 1977
Neale and Co., 'Local Industries in Williamstown, Footscray and Yarraville. A Complete and
Authentic Description of Each of the Principal Manufacturies in the Above Districts'. 1882
Popp, Edith, Glimpses of Early Sunshine Dawn of a District from Aboriginal Times to 1901,
1979
Priestley, Susan, The Victorians, Making Their Mark, 1984,
Priestley, Susan, Altona, A Long View, 1988
Sutherland, Alexander, Victoria and its Metropolis: Past and Present, 1888, Vol. 2
Vines, Gary, Quarry and Stone, Melbourne's Living Museum of the West, 1993
Vines, Gary, Meat and Meat Byproducts, Melbourne's Living Museum of the West, 1993
Williams, Gilbert Lyle, The History of the Medway Golf Club, From Mia Mias to Manicured
Meadow 1935-1990, 1992

Directories and Government Publications

Sands and McDougall Victorian Directories
Victorian Government Gazette
Victorian Parliamentary Papers

Journal Articles
Alan Gross, 'Maribyrnong', in Victorian Historical Magazine, Vol.XXII, no.2, September 1947
Barry York, ‘‘A Splendid Country’? The Maltese in Melbourne 1838-1938’, Victorian Historical
Journal, Vol. 60, September 1989

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 Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

Newspapers
The Herald

Unpublished Sources

Reports
Bell, Dr Peter ,'Draft History of Footscray Cemetery' in David Young and Associates, "Draft
Footscray Cemetery Study', 1999
Butler, Graeme, Footscray Conservation Study, 1989
Ford, Olwen and Vines, Gary, Pipemakers Park Conservation Analysis, Melbourne’s Living
Museum of the West, 1996
Ford, Olwen and Vines, Gary, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West, in association with
Graeme Butler and Francine Gilfedder, City of Brimbank, Draft Post-Contact Cultural Heritage,
1997
Lack, John and Ford, Olwen , Melbourne’s Western Region: An Introductory History,
Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West, Melbourne Western Region Cultural Heritage Study,
1986
Lack, John , ‘The City of Maribyrnong’s War Memorials at Footscray –What Future?’, a paper
presented to the Footscray Park Advisory Committee, 30/11/1999
Allom Lovell and Associates, 'Maribyrnong Heritage and Open Space, An Assessment of the
Defence Site Cordite Avenue Maribyrnong, 1998
Mayne, Alan, May, Andrew, Lack, John, Heritage Study City Link Development Site, July 1989
Rhodes, David, Debney, Taryn and Grist, Mark, Draft Maribyrnong Aboriginal Heritage Study,
1999
Gary Vines, Western Region Industrial Heritage Study, Melbourne's Western Region Heritage
Study, Living Museum of the West
Walker, Johnston, Boyce, Melbourne Western Region Heritage Study, Evidence of History, 1986

Australian Heritage Commission Files

AHC Register of the National Estate Database, file no: 2/12/051/0005 Defence Explosive
Factory Maribyrnong
AHC Register of the National Estate Database, file no. 2/12/051007, ADI Footscray (Indicative
Place)
AHC Register of the National Estate Database, file no. 2/12/05/0009 ADI Maribyrnong

Theses
Jill Barnard, 'Expressions of faith: Twentieth Century Catholic Churches in Melbourne's Western
Suburbs', M.A. thesis , Monash University 1990
Olwen Ford, 'Voices from Below: Family, School and Community on the Braybrook Plains
1854-1892' M.Ed thesis, University of Melbourne, 1993

Maps and Plans

Land and Survey Information Centre
Sydney C10, Parish of Cut-Paw-Paw, Hoddle. 1840
MD1C 1859, Selwyn
Melbourne RL 41, 'Plan of the Borough of Footscray by Gustav Tulk, 1877
Roll 126 'Melbourne and Suburbs', Hilde, 1923

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 Environmental History City of Maribyrnong

State Library of Victoria Map Collection

Map of the 'Suburban Lands of the City of Melbourne', 1851
'Plan of 1120 allotments near the municipality of Footscray, (nd) in volume EF 912.945 S14,
pp48-49
`Plan of Maidstone', 821.08 1858
`Plan of Township of South Braybrook’, EF 912.945 S14 1853-1860
Volume EF 912.945 S14, ‘Suburban and Country Plans’, (various)
Volume 820bhf Vol. 5
Volume EF 912.945B32 Vol. 48.
Living Museum of the West
Port of Melbourne General Plan., Melbourne Harbor Trust, 1920

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Appendix 2 Principal Australian Historical Themes

HT.01 Tracing the evolution of a continent's special environments
HT.01.01 Tracing climatic and topographical change
HT.01.02 Tracing the emergence of and development of Australian plants and
animals
HT.01.03 Assessing scientifically diverse environments
HT.01.04 Appreciating the natural wonders of Australia
HT.02 Peopling the continent
HT.02.01 Recovering the experience of Australia's earliest inhabitants
HT.02.02 Appreciating how Aboriginal people adapted themselves to diverse
regions before regular contact with other parts of the world
HT.02.03 Coming to Australia as a punishment
HT.02.04 Migrating
HT.02.04.01 Migrating to save or preserve a way of life
HT.02.04.02 Migrating to seek opportunity
HT.02.04.03 Migrating to escape oppression
HT.02.04.04 Migrating systematically through organised colonisation
HT.02.04.05 Changing the face of rural and urban Australia through migration
HT.02.05 Promoting settlement on the land through selection and group
settlement
HT.02.06 Fighting for the land
HT.02.06.01 Resisting the advent of Europeans and their animals
HT.02.06.02 Displacing Aboriginal people
HT.03 Developing local, regional and national economies
HT.03.01 Inspecting the coastline
HT.03.02 Exploring and surveying
HT.03.02.01 Looking for inland seas and waterways
HT.03.02.02 Looking for overland stock routes
HT.03.02.03 Prospecting for precious metals
HT.03.02.04 Exploring
HT.03.02.05 Surveying
HT.03.03 Exploiting natural resources
HT.03.03.01 Hunting
HT.03.03.02 Fishing and whaling
HT.03.03.03 Utilising mineral resources
HT.03.03.03.01 Mining for gold
HT.03.03.03.02 Mining for coal
HT.03.03.03.03 Producing lime and cement
HT.03.03.03.04 Quarrying
HT.03.03.03.05 Extracting oil & gas
HT.03.03.03.06 Mineral processing
HT.03.03.03.07 Mining for tin
HT.03.03.03.99 Mining for other resources
HT.03.03.04 Utilising forest resources
HT.03.03.04.01 Extracting forest resources
HT.03.03.04.01.01 Extracting hardwoods
HT.03.03.04.01.02 Extracting softwoods
HT.03.03.04.01.03 Extracting rainforest/cedar
HT.03.03.04.01.04 Extracting sandalwood
HT.03.03.04.01.05 Extracting wattle
HT.03.03.04.02 Processing forest resources
HT.03.03.04.02.01 Milling timber
HT.03.03.04.02.02 Manufacturing board or paper
HT.03.03.04.02.03 Manufacturing charcoal
HT.03.03.04.02.04 Distilling eucalyptus oil
HT.03.03.04.02.05 Processing sandalwood
HT.03.03.04.02.06 Processing wattle bark
HT.03.03.04.02.07 Sleeper cutting
HT.03.03.04.02.08 Splitting posts

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HT.03.03.04.02.09 Woodchipping
HT.03.03.04.02.99 Other processing of forest resources
HT.03.03.04.03 Transporting forest resources
HT.03.03.04.04 Managing forest resources
HT.03.03.04.04.01 Protecting forest resources
HT.03.03.04.04.02 Working in the forest
HT.03.03.04.04.03 Sustaining forest resources
HT.03.03.04.04.04 Administering forest resources
HT.03.03.04.04.05 Protesting in the forest
HT.03.03.05 Tapping natural energy sources
HT.03.04 Engaging in primary production
HT.03.04.01 Developing sheep and cattle industries
HT.03.04.02 Trapping and hunting
HT.03.04.90 Other primary industry
HT.03.05 Recruiting labour
HT.03.06 Establishing lines and networks of communication
HT.03.06.01 Establishing postal services
HT.03.06.02 Developing electronic means of communication
HT.03.07 Moving goods and people
HT.03.07.01 Moving goods and people to and from Australian ports
HT.03.07.01.01 Safeguarding Australian products for long journeys
HT.03.07.01.02 Developing harbour facilities
HT.03.07.02 Moving goods and people on inland waterways
HT.03.07.03 Moving goods and people on land
HT.03.07.03.01 Moving goods and people by rail
HT.03.07.03.02 Moving goods and people by road
HT.03.07.03.03 Getting fuel to engines
HT.03.07.04 Moving goods and people by air
HT.03.08 Farming for export under Australian conditions
HT.03.09 Integrating Aboriginal people into the cash economy
HT.03.10 Altering the environment for economic development
HT.03.10.01 Regulating waterways
HT.03.10.02 Reclaiming land
HT.03.10.03 Irrigating land
HT.03.10.04 Clearing vegetation
HT.03.11 Feeding people
HT.03.11.01 Using indigenous foodstuffs
HT.03.11.02 Developing sources of fresh local produce
HT.03.11.03 Importing foodstuffs
HT.03.11.04 Preserving food and beverages
HT.03.11.05 Retailing foods and beverages
HT.03.12 Developing an Australian manufacturing capacity
HT.03.13 Developing an Australian engineering and construction industry
HT.03.13.01 Building to suit Australian conditions
HT.03.13.02 Using Australian materials in construction
HT.03.14 Developing economic links to Asia
HT.03.15 Struggling with remoteness, hardship and failure
HT.03.15.01 Gambling on uncertain climatic conditions and soils
HT.03.15.02 Going bush
HT.03.15.03 Dealing with hazards and disasters
HT.03.16 Inventing devices to cope with special Australian problems
HT.03.17 Financing Australia
HT.03.17.01 Raising capital
HT.03.17.02 Banking and lending
HT.03.17.03 Insuring against risk
HT.03.17.04 Co-operating to raise capital (co-ops, building societies, etc.)
HT.03.18 Marketing and retailing
HT.03.19 Informing Australians
HT.03.19.01 Making, printing and distributing newspapers
HT.03.19.02 Broadcasting
HT.03.20 Entertaining for profit

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HT.03.21 Accommodating travellers

HT.03.21 Catering for tourists
HT.03.22 Selling companionship and sexual services
HT.03.23 Adorning Australians
HT.03.23.01 Dressing up Australians
HT.03.23.02 Caring for hair, nails, and shapes
HT.03.24 Treating what ails Australians
HT.03.24.01 Providing medical and dental services
HT.03.24.02 Providing hospital services
HT.03.24.03 Developing alternative approaches to good health
HT.04 Building settlements, towns and cities
HT.04.01 Planning urban settlement
HT.04.01.01 Selecting township sites
HT.04.01.02 Making suburbs
HT.04.01.03 Learning to live with property booms and busts
HT.04.02 Supplying urban services (power, transport, fire prevention, roads, water,
light & sewerage)
HT.04.02.01 Providing water
HT.04.02.02 Providing electricity
HT.04.02.03 Providing sewerage services
HT.04.03 Developing urban institutions
HT.04.04 Living with slums, outcasts and homelessness
HT.04.05 Making towns to serve rural Australia
HT.04.05.01 Settling
HT.05 Working
HT.05.01 Working in harsh conditions
HT.05.01.01 Coping with unemployment
HT.05.01.02 Coping with dangerous jobs and workplaces
HT.05.02 Organising workers and work places
HT.05.02.01 Structuring relations between managers and workers
HT.05.03 Caring for workers' dependent children
HT.05.04 Working in offices
HT.05.05 Trying to make crime pay
HT.05.06 Working in the home
HT.05.07 Surviving as Aboriginal people in a white-dominated economy
HT.06 Educating
HT.06.01 Forming associations, libraries and institutes for self-education
HT.06.02 Establishing schools
HT.06.03 Training people for workplace skills
HT.06.04 Building a system of higher education
HT.06.05 Educating people in remote places
HT.06.06 Educating indigenous people in two cultures
HT.07 Governing
HT.07.01 Governing Australia as a province of the British Empire
HT.07.02 Developing institutions of self-government and democracy
HT.07.02.01 Protesting
HT.07.02.02 Struggling for inclusion in the political process
HT.07.02.03 Working to promote civil liberties
HT.07.02.04 Forming political associations
HT.07.03 Federating Australia
HT.07.04 Governing Australia's colonial possessions
HT.07.05 Developing administrative structures and authorities
HT.07.05.01 Developing local government authorities
HT.07.05.02 Providing for the common defence
HT.07.05.02.01 Preparing to face invasion
HT.07.05.02.02 Going to war
HT.07.05.03 Controlling entry of persons and disease
HT.07.05.04 Policing Australia
HT.07.05.05 Dispensing justice
HT.07.05.06 Incarcerating the accused and convicted
HT.07.05.06 Incarcerating the accused and convicted

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HT.07.05.06.01 Evading justice

HT.07.05.06.02 Using convict labour
HT.07.05.07 Providing services and welfare
HT.07.05.08 Enforcing discriminatory legislation
HT.07.05.09 Administering Aboriginal Affairs
HT.07.05.10 Conserving Australian resources
HT.07.05.10.01 Conserving fragile environments
HT.07.05.10.02 Conserving economically valuable resources
HT.07.05.10.03 Conserving Australia's cultural or natural heritage
HT.08 Developing cultural institutions and ways of life
HT.08.01 Organising recreation
HT.08.01.01 Playing and watching organised sports
HT.08.01.02 Betting
HT.08.01.03 Developing public parks and gardens
HT.08.01.04 Recreating in the outdoors
HT.08.01.05 Experiencing the natural environment
HT.08.02 Going to the beach
HT.08.03 Going on holiday
HT.08.04 Eating and drinking
HT.08.05 Forming associations
HT.08.05.01 Associating to preserve traditions and group memories
HT.08.05.02 Associating to help other people
HT.08.05.03 Associating for mutual aid
HT.08.05.04 Worshipping together
HT.08.05.03.01 Maintaining religious traditions and ceremonies
HT.08.05.03.02 Founding Australian religious institutions
HT.08.05.03.03 Making places for worship
HT.08.05.03.04 Evangelising
HT.08.05.03.04.01 Running city missions
HT.08.05.03.04.02 Founding and maintaining missions to Australia's Indigenous
people
HT.08.05.05 Associating to pursue common leisure interests
HT.08.06 Honouring achievement
HT.08.07 Remembering the fallen
HT.08.08 Commemorating significant events
HT.08.08.01 Remembering disasters
HT.08.08.02 Remembering public spectacles
HT.08.09 Pursuing excellence in the arts and sciences
HT.08.09.01 Making music
HT.08.09.02 Creating visual arts
HT.08.09.03 Creating literature
HT.08.09.04 Designing and building fine buildings
HT.08.09.05 Advancing knowledge in science and technology
HT.08.09.05.01 Understanding Australia's climate
HT.08.10 Making Australian folklore
HT.08.10.01 Celebrating folk heroes
HT.08.10.02 Myth making and story-telling
HT.08.01 Living in and around Australian homes
HT.09 Marking the phases of life
HT.09.01 Bringing babies into the world
HT.09.01.01 Providing maternity clinics and hospitals
HT.09.01.02 Promoting mothers' and babies' health
HT.09.02 Bringing up children
HT.09.03 Growing up
HT.09.03.01 Courting
HT.09.03.02 Joining youth organisations
HT.09.03.03 Being teenagers
HT.09.04 Forming families and partnerships
HT.09.05 Growing old
HT.09.05.01 Retiring
HT.09.05.02 Looking after the infirm and the aged

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HT.09.06 Mourning the dead

HT.09.07 Disposing of dead bodies

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Appendix 3 Study Area

Jill Barnard Graeme Butler Francine Gilfedder & Gary Vines, 2000: Volume 2, Appendix 3