Collingwood Children’s Farm: local gardeners slam charity for taking their plots

Collingwood gardeners are sharpening their pitchforks for a fight against one of Melbourne’s most iconic charities. How has it got to this stage?

Locals say the Collingwood Children’s Farm are stripping them of their plots. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Local gardeners have renewed their attack on the Collingwood Children’s Farm over plans which they say will destroy their small community, claiming that bulldozers will soon remove years of hard work.

Work began on Monday to upgrade the charity, which has been closed since a December Work Safe notice ordered remediation work to be done citing unsafe structure including crumbling retaining walls and snakes.

While the farm say that the state government-funded plans will align the organisation closer to its foundational aims of helping society’s most vulnerable, some locals say that their plots have been deliberately targeted by the not-for-profit.

Collingwood resident Lindel Cooper fought back tears on Monday when she told Leader that, as an immigrant to Australia with no friends beyond her husband, the Children’s Farm became her surrogate family.

“They have locked us out without consultation,” Ms Cooper, who has cultivated cabbages, broccoli, carrots and Asian greens on her plot since 2017, said.

“They will bulldoze it.”

Another gardener, who did not want to be named, said that the Collingwood Community Gardeners, an organisation representing approximately 70 gardeners, offered to fix any safety issues free of charge.

“Why get rid of our wonderful community?” they asked.

“I’ve lived here all my life. Aren’t I the community?”

The small allotments are located on some of Melbourne’s oldest settled land, and now form an integral part of one of the state’s most historic precincts.

The land, first colonised in the 1840s by Edward Curr before it was used by the neighbouring Abbotsford Convent, became tied to the inner-north’s Greek population in the 1980s, who became significant in cultivating the small plots.

“They say that they wanted to keep it open. We’re not the one’s putting up these fences,” the gardener said.

They said the Children’s Farm concept plans would strip the area of its history and turn it into “Disney Land.”

But the Children’s Farm, located on a scenic bend in the Yarra River beside the 19th-century Abbotsford Convent, insisted that no land would be bulldozed while updated plans would simply allow greater community access.

A spokesperson for the farm said that heavy machinery will be needed to clear parts of the garden, which did not meet safety requirements for Crown Land, while the Children’s Farm has not been allowed to provide lawful access to gardeners to collect their tools.

“The gardens are on Crown land, and there is a higher duty of care than if they were on private property,” a Children’s Farm spokesperson told Leader.

The spokesperson said it was “incorrect” to say that community gardeners were ignored.

They said the new design would allow the land to be enjoyed by hundreds.

“Thousands of people want to get involved,” a spokesperson for the Children’s Farm said.