Simple pleasures in the concrete heart of Melbourne

18 May 2006

The suburb of Abbotsford is in the concrete heart of Melbourne. Its streets feature poky terrace houses, fallen leaves and busy souvlaki shops. Its most prominent landmark is Victoria Park, the former home of the Collingwood Football Club, an inner-city icon. So it comes as a surprise to find a patch of land in Abbotsford that is tilled by vegetable gardeners. From 1865, when land in Abbotsford was taken up by the nuns of the Order of the Good Shepherd, it has been the site of a convent and a female reformatory. Those in the reformatory worked in vegetable gardens and orchards that thrived on the rich soil of the land’s flood plain on the Yarra River. In 1979, the Collingwood Children’s Farm took over the convent’s farmland, part of which was maintained as a vegetable garden. Since then, the small plots in the garden have provided a rare connection to the earth for inner Melburnians. Jo Searle, a 36-year-old social worker, has been riding her bike along the Yarra River to reach her plot at the children’s farm for five years. A drugs and alcohol counsellor in Footscray, she says the bike journey, and tending to her vegetables, gives her a chance to clear her head. 'I like the physical nature of it,' she says, 'I like the digging. I like feeling exhausted when I get home.' Home for Searle is a flat in Clifton Hill that she shares with her eight-year-old daughter Meg. During Searle’s childhood in Surrey Hills, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, her parents had owned a small farm at Balnarring on the Mornington Peninsula. When her parents sold that farm, she took up the plot. 'It’s for people who don’t have back yards,' she says. 'You can come here and it feels like you’re miles and miles from anywhere.' For some, the attraction of tending a plot has less to do with the view of towering gums on the opposite bank and the sense of quiet by the river than it has to do with reconnecting with a former life. A good proportion of the vegetable gardeners are immigrants from southern Europe; Greeks and Italians whose forebears worked the soil in their rural homelands for centuries. Tending plots enables former immigrants to maintain a sense of continuity and connectedness with their forebears' culture. Others vegetable gardeners at the children’s farm are from the housing commission flats in Collingwood.

AUSTRALIA

Simple pleasures in the concrete heart of Melbourne

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