Spectral Coordinates – by Brigid Magner
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
I live in the inner northern Melbourne suburb of Coburg, formerly known as ‘Pentridge’, within walking distance of Merri Creek. When rummaging through a bunch of documents the other day, I found the survey map for my street, which was labelled in an expert copperplate hand. Till then, I hadn’t registered that I live in the ‘Parish of Jika Jika’ in the ‘County of Bourke’. Jika Jika, also known as Billibellary, was a revered elder of the Woiwurrung. His name was given to a parish which dispossessed his people, as well as to a notorious wing of the Pentridge prison that no longer exists. Seeing my family home mapped out on this survey made me feel uneasy and complicit.
Moreland, the municipal region in which Coburg sits, was named after the estate of Farquar McRae, a surgeon who was known to wield a stockwhip when angry. Moreland estate was purchased with the proceeds of his grandfather’s slave plantation in Jamaica. This is hinted at on a council street sign, but most people probably haven’t thought about the implications of this connection.
Walking around the streets of Coburg and the neighbouring suburb of Brunswick, I have begun to take note of sites that harbour stories which are partly or wholly invisible. Each of them has a name that was superimposed on those that went before. As these spots cannot always be visually identified, I have gradually built up a list of Google Earth locations to fix them in place, largely to assure myself that they do exist – and that they are worth mapping.
Randazzo Park (Brunswick Central School)
37°46’04”5144°57’54”E
One day last year, fleeing the tedium of home, I walked along Sydney Road and turned down Albert Street. Just past the old Salvation Army Citadel, I stopped at Randazzo Park. The name of this small green space is spelt out letter by letter on concrete balls placed around it. I sat down to catch my breath and noticed a neatly painted paragraph on a navy blue boundary wall:
The Secretary, Education Dept. Melbourne, School 1213 Brunswick Oct. 28 1889. Sir, I beg to report that the school bell is out of order. The contractor who has just finished the new classrooms repaired the rope last week, but it broke again the following day. I should be glad if it could be properly placed in order, as it is very awkward without it. I have the honour to be Sir your most obedient Servant. H. Teacher. [Signature]
I was intrigued by this random quote about the broken rope of a school bell. Patient searching later revealed that this park is located where the Brunswick Central State School once stood. It turns out that Eve Langley, the brilliant cross-dressing bohemian writer of The Pea Pickers (1942) and White Topee (1954) was one of its students.
At the age of thirteen, Langley left Crossover, north of Warragul, where her mother managed the hotel. She moved with her family to Brunswick, where her mother Mira took up with an ‘Irishman’. Brunswick Central School was overcrowded, with poor conditions and inadequate sanitation. Langley was in a class of two hundred, far more children than she had ever seen at one time.
In her notebooks Langley wrote:
It was a huge dull red blue black place, roaring with children […] It was terrible. I felt lonely. I missed the small schoolroom at Crossover […] The change of scenery was dreadful. The godlike faerie existence we had led at the Crossover was gone, there was only hot asphalt, the dingy fly-spotted shops […] and the sad dull company of city children.
Her family spent less than a year in Brunswick before leaving on 3 May 1918. Although Eve and her sister briefly attended the Dandenong State School, they did not pursue their formal education much further. At the onset of puberty, Helen Vines notes, an ‘undefined psychological illness’ ended Eve’s education. When she was fourteen, she began working as a domestic servant and later as a printer's ‘devil’, or apprentice, at Walker, May & Co in the Melbourne CBD. Here in the city, she first dressed publicly as a boy, before undertaking the itinerant agricultural labour she recounts in The Pea Pickers.
In the mid-1970s, the original school was bulldozed and replaced with a concrete structure. Ten years later, it amalgamated with the Brunswick East School. If the Victorian-era school had been kept, it would have been eligible for a heritage permit, but the 1970s replacement was demolished to build a housing estate. Staff at the Salvation Army Citadel occasionally field questions from people who wander in asking what happened to their old primary school. There was a close relationship between the Citadel and the school. During the Second World War, a canteen was set up in the Citadel to provide hot meals for the children because so many had mothers doing shift work in nearby factories. In return, the Army band would practice in the grounds of the school. The Citadel continues to offer free food for people living in poverty, often with queues extending towards Langley’s old school.
Moreland train station (scar tree memorial)
37°45’17.3”S 144°57’41.1”E
Train stations create ecosystems, I read recently. An overlooked element of the ecosystem surrounding the former Moreland train station was an unassuming ‘cement tree’ memorial surrounded by circular seating. It was the stump of an old gum, cast in cement, with a bronze tablet featuring a raised likeness of the tree in all its glory, bearing the inscription:
This plaque is to record that on this site stood a stately old gum tree. Local residents claim that an Aboriginal canoe was cut from its trunk. Because it became dangerous it was removed on 9.4.1968.
While the Wurundjeri-willam were able to take bark for a canoe with a stone hatchet and leave the tree alive, settlers felled them in droves as raw material, with little concern for the consequences.
A newspaper article from 1980 reports that the tree was diseased and needed to be cut down for public safety, presumably because it might drop its branches on passersby.
Before work began on the Skyrail overpass in 2020, the memorial vanished, along with all the trees where hundreds of birds used to roost. The impending death of these trees was protested by crowds massed in Gandolfo Gardens, where trees wore hand painted tags with slogans like ‘leaf me alone’ and ‘help me!’. The works continued as planned, despite camp-outs and vigils.
To my relief, the memorial was returned to a slightly different location in mid-2021; it had been displaced from its original site by a signal box displaying an old railway lever system. The memorial plinth is now overlaid by a new material, mimicking the texture of the long-deceased trunk.
Peering through a fence after its reinstatement, I spoke with a construction worker who asked me to explain the vague inscription. He asked me what I thought of the new train station and I replied that I was glad that it had been densely replanted after all the tree-felling. Speaking of the residents, he said, ‘they are never pleased when we come, but they like what we leave behind us.
Why am I so attached to this long dead tree when over a hundred living trees were destroyed forever in the same operation?
The continuing existence of the Moreland scar tree memorial reassures me that at least one person was thinking about Coburg’s deeper history in the late 1960s and felt strongly enough to raise funds for a plaque. Its ongoing existence shows care for trees, even if this one was cut down, commemorated and later mummified in a synthetic coating.
Apart from the Canary Island date palms that were temporarily relocated and returned, the only other survivor is a large Scots elm tree, on the other side of the station. It stands next to the Shirley Robertson Children’s Centre, where my own kids used to go. I have walked past thousands of times without realising it was the scene of a violent crime.
I spotted this elm tree on an episode of Jess Hill’s documentary, ‘See What You Made Me Do’, and discovered that in 1987, Vicki Cleary, who used to work at the centre, was stabbed by her ex-partner as she walked to her car. Her bother Phil has been campaigning against family violence ever since. A dramatised re-enactment filmed at this site brought the full horror of the incident home to me.
A laminated sign was taped to the tree after the murders of Jill Meagher and Eurydice Dixon, which occurred in the same neighbourhood:
To Vicki, Jill and Eurydice.
Our Sisters stolen from us.
Stop the violence
The sign is the only trace of this brutal act, but it must linger in the memories of long-term residents.
Bush Reserve (Strangway Farm homestead)
37°44’27”5144°57’18”E
While walking my dog at Bush Reserve, I almost fell over bluestone footings that turned out to be the remains of the Strangway Farm homestead. My attention was drawn to an oddly positioned information board that told me these ruins were once the home of William Thomas, Assistant Protector of Aborigines in Port Phillip and Victoria from 1839 to 1867. The protectorate was terminated in 1849, but Thomas was retained as ‘Guardian’ in the counties of Bourke, Mornington and Evelyn from January 1850.
Built in 1842, Strangway Farm was ‘a hub of everyday life’ and ‘family celebration’ and a resonant site of cross-cultural contact. It also belonged to the Kulin people, who used it as a pit stop on hunting expeditions; a place to eat, sleep and share knowledge. Thomas’s wife would often cook cabbage, meat and bread for large groups of Aboriginal people, including William Barak and Billibellary. The family nursed Billibellary’s son, Simon Wonga, when he hurt his foot, and he later named his baby daughter Susannah to honour Mrs Thomas.
Thomas was described in The Age after his death as a genial man who was universally beloved, ‘especially by the blacks’. His attempts to ‘protect’ Wurundjeri people were ultimately doomed to failure, but many members of the Kulin Nations recognised him as an ally, calling him ‘Marminata’ (good father).
Thomas’s teenage daughter, also named Suzanna, tragically died by drowning in a nearby waterhole. He records his dismay in his journal:
Thursday 13 November 1845. On arriving at home Meet with an awful dispensation of providence O Lord sustain me and Mine, my Dear Daughter Suzanna drowned during my absence.
Friday 14 November 1845. All most distracted this day & past night, do not leave my home.
Saturday 15 November 1845.(…) Inter my Dear Girl, O Lord aid me.
In a marginal note, he writes ‘Awful Dispensation’. On 17 November 1845, the Melbourne Courier reported that the coroner’s inquest for the district of Pentridge had declared: ‘That the deceased had been accidentally drowned whilst attempting to procure water from a waterhole or pond.’ Two days after burying his own daughter, Thomas notes in his journal that ‘Little Susannah is dead.’ Billibellary’s granddaughter and his own child, gone in a matter of days.
These deaths must have thrown a pall over Strangway Farm. The grief-stricken tone of Thomas’s journal stays with me whenever I visit Bush Reserve. I’ve observed that despite the signage, almost everybody walks straight past the homestead’s foundations, just as I once did, towards the basketball court or the playground.
Brunswick Terminal Station (Stony Park mansion)
37°46’30”S144°59’11”E
On walks along Merri Creek, I’ve often wondered why there’s an electrical hub within touching distance of the trail. Writer, artist and aviator Ethel Marian Sumner Casey, known as Maie, provides clues in her memoir An Australian Story 1837–1907 (1962). Her maternal grandfather Theodotus Sumner’s Stony Park mansion was demolished to make way for the Brunswick Terminal Station and the Stony Park estate, later named the Sumner estate. She writes: ‘The jungle has closed over it now – a jungle of concrete, of steel masts, of electric transformers’, Casey writes; ‘the paddocks are filled with neat streets.’
Casey tells of her childhood visits to the old Stony Park residence, which burnt down in 1885 and was later rebuilt as a ‘cold and pretentious’ grey stucco British Italianate mansion which was ‘heavy and ornate, without grace’. For her, the first version of Stony Park was the best; consequently, she felt little regret for the slow demise of the second mansion. The demolition took years, ‘like something being eaten by ants, mouthful by mouthful.’ The demolition crew, possibly from the famous Brunswick company Whelan the Wrecker, knocked down one wall at a time, before moving on elsewhere, extending the process interminably. Wrecking was big business in Brunswick, with refuse tossed into pits which were later transformed into parks.
If Casey were around today, she would recognise very few landmarks. She noted that ‘the first house on Sydney Road was a hotel, the Sarah Sands, and it is still there.’ It still remains at the intersection of Brunswick and Sydney Roads (after being gutted and reconstructed) with high rise apartments looming over it.
Reading shadow sites
Historically, Brunswick and Coburg have been suburbs of industry and upheaval governed by councils that have shown little concern for heritage. Peter Carey’s novel Amnesia, which is partly set in Coburg, refers cynically to ‘the council’s planned destruction of all memory’. Much has been lost, yet Aboriginal storytellers and settler narrators such as Thomas, Langley and Casey have enabled remnant memories to circulate.
As I was assembling the coordinates of these four sites from Google Earth, I became obsessed with the time-lapse function that allows a user to see the same location at regular temporal intervals; yet it’s not possible to see anything before the advent of Street View in 2007. The pace of change is so rapid that the site of the scar tree memorial was completely razed during the time I was writing this piece. All around it, trees were cut down, while others were fenced off, or excavated and returned. Google’s satellite view has not caught up with these changes, showing a barren construction zone devoid of vegetation. Occasionally, eyewitness reports can be more up to date than these ever-present mapping systems.
On her Literary Tourist blog, Nicola Watson encourages us to ‘to see through the material skin of things to another deep-down reality, that, once perceived, transforms and enlivens what is merely there.’ In these locations around Moreland, deeper stories lie latent beneath the ones we know, and sometimes emerge in ghostly ways as we pass by. ▼
If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.