Melbourne places, suburbs you may not know exist
Cocoroc, Newlands and Kerrimuir are all in Melbourne, but unless you live around the corner, you may not even know they exist. Take a look at some of the city’s little-known neighbourhoods.
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Do you reckon you know Melbourne?
The city is full of small neighbourhoods and obscure suburbs many of us haven't even heard of.
Here are some fast facts about some of our lesser known suburban locales.
COCOROC
Cocoroc, about 10 minutes south of Werribee, was one of early Melbourne’s most important locations.
It was home to employees of the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works sewage farm.
The farm was the business end of Melbourne’s sewage system, which was completed in the 1890s to clear Melbourne’s back lanes of raw effluent and reduce the incidence of diseases like typhoid.
Because the farm was so isolated, the MMBW built Cocoroc for the families of the staff, who ran the treatment plant and performed agricultural duties including cattle breeding and grazing.
Through the first half of the 20th century, Cocoroc gained a post office, three primary schools, a church, a hall, a swimming pool, tennis courts and an oval for football and cricket.
As the workers bought cars and became more mobile, they abandoned Cocoroc. By the early 1970s, the Board of Works closed the town.
Cocoroc still exists as a locality. Drive down Farm Rd from Werribee and remnants of the town still exist.
HARRISFIELD
This unofficial suburb that is part of Noble Park but is still recognised in the Melway as its own locality.
It sits on the south side of the Princes Highway and east of Corrigan Rd in Noble Park and in 1926 was named after Edgar Harris, who was a farmer in the area and a Dandenong Shire councillor.
Like many parts of Melbourne’s southeast, farming gave way to post-war housing.
Harrisfield still has its own primary school.
KERRIMUIR
This quiet little corner of Box Hill North is bounded by Station St, Springfield Rd, Middleborough Rd and the Easter Freeway (well, it was Koonung Creek once). Kerrimuir is tiny but it has a primary school, a post office and a small shopping centre.
The origin of its name is not clear, but it might be related to Kirriemuir, a town in Scotland that was the birthplace of Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie and the home town of late AC/DC front man Bon Scott.
Kerrimuir Primary School’s emblem is a Scotch thistle, which lends credibility to that claim.
DALLAS
Despite the name, this northern suburb has nothing at all to do with Texans, J.R. Ewing and Cadillacs with steer horns bolted to the bonnet.
It’s wedged between Broadmeadows and Coolaroo, with Pascoe Vale Rd in the west, Barry Rd in the north and the Upfield railway line in the east. In fact, Upfield station is in the northeast corner of Dallas.
Dallas was developed in the 1960s and was named after Victoria’s Governor at the time, Sir Dallas Brooks, who retired as Victoria’s longest serving governor in 1963.
NEWLANDS
Just north of the old Pentridge prison, Newlands is a part-industrial, part-residential suburb that stretches along Newlands Rd and the Merri and Edgars creeks in Coburg.
It’s thought to have been named after a farm that existed there in the 19th century.
It was the site of a series of unsuccessful subdivisions in the 1920s and ‘30s and was later developed by Victoria’s Housing Commission and private developers.
It’s home to the heritage-listed bluestone Newlands Rd bridge and, for now at least, the Village Coburg Drive-In.
EUMEMMERRING
This patch of suburbia between Doveton and Hallam is bounded by the Eumemmerring Creek, the Princes Highway and the South Gippsland Freeway.
Eumemmerring is thought to be an Aboriginal word meaning pleasure or agreement.
The suburb was only gazetted in 1981 (before then, it was considered part of Doveton), but its European origins go back to 1839, when the Eumemmerring pastoral run that covered much of the district, which was established.
ABERFELDIE
The suburb lies west of Moonee Ponds and lies between the Maribyrnong River and Buckley St.
In the 1840s, Scottish settler James Robertson named his property Aberfeldie after Aberfeldy, a town in Scotland.
Settlement there began before World War I and finished soon after World War II ended, but it was not officially gazetted as a suburb until 1998.
EDGEWATER
This modern housing estate is in the northern part of Maribyrnong, between Gordon St and the western bank of the Maribyrnong River, hence the name.
The Edgewater estate was developed on former federal government land in the 1990s and is close to Highpoint shopping centre.
GRUYERE
It was a century after European settlement before the village of Gruyere, near Coldstream, was known as Gruyere at all.
Swiss grazier and vigneron Paul de Castella, who bought the vast Yering station near Yarra Glen in the 1850s, suggested the name Gruyere for the local parish.
Gruyere is a Swiss cheese from the town of Gruyeres in Switzerland.
The local post office opened as Cahillton in 1892 but was renamed Gruyere in 1950.
As the name suggests, dairying is one of the main industries in Gruyere along with viticulture and fruit-growing.
TRAVANCORE
This little piece of Art Deco magic is in the southeastern part of Flemington where Mt Alexander Rd and the Moonee Ponds Creek meet.
It was named after a mansion and estate built in Flemington in the 1850.
Originally known as Flemington House, the mansion became known as Travancore when horse trader Henry Madden took ownership in 1907.
He named the mansion Travancore, the city in India where he sold many horses to the British Army.
When the area was subdivided in the 1920s, local streets were named after other Indian places.
Today, many heritage-listed Art Deco homes remain there.
CAPEL SOUND
This is the artist formerly known as Rosebud West.
The name was changed by the Mornington Peninsula Shire in 2016 following a resident campaign.
Capel Sound is fringed by Rosebud, Tootgarook, Boneo and the southernmost shore of Port Phillip.
COONANS HILL
This corner of Pascoe Vale South, which rises above the Moonee Ponds Creek and CityLink, was named after Michael Coonan, an early settler and farmer.
It lies in the southwest corner of Coburg, bounded by the tollway, Bell St, Moreland Rd and Melville Rd.
Residential development began slowly in the 1920s but took off after World War II.
YALLAMBIE
Yallambie is squeezed between Macleod, Viewbank, Greensborough and the Plenty River.
Its name is an English corruption of a Wurundjeri word meaning “to rest” or “remain”.
The Bakewell family named its extensive pastoral run Yallambie Park in 1842 and a grand homestead built in the 1870s is these days surrounded by 1970s-style brick veneer homes.
The area is known for Simpson Barracks, an army base that was established in the 1940s and expanded in the 1960s, which now supports many hectares of remnant bush.
Yallambie’s boundaries were stretched in the 1990s with the construction of the Streeton Views estate from former army land along Lower Plenty Rd.
The estate was named after Heidelberg School painter Arthur Streeton, and the local school to be renamed Streeton Views to attract newly-arrived families.
CREMORNE
Cremorne is the southwest corner of Richmond, hemmed in by Punt Rd, Swan St, Church St and the Yarra.
Although the name Cremorne was first recorded in 1853 to describe the area, Cremorne was not gazetted as a suburb until 1998.
It was both an industrial and residential area and also featured Australia’s first amusement park, Cremorne Gardens, which was as notable for its seedy underbelly as it was for its many attractions.
HADFIELD
It was once part of Glenroy and bordering the Fawkner Cemetery, Hadfield has been around since the 1950s, but the name was officially recognised only 20 years ago.
Sheep grazed in Hadfield until the post-war suburban sprawl swamped Hadfield.
It was named after Rupert Hadfield, a former president of the Broadmeadows Shire.
KINGSVILLE
The name of this suburb was a marketing exercise.
Kingsville was established in 1907 when the Kingsville, Queensville and Clarendon subdivisions were created just outside Footscray, on the south side of Geelong Rd near the intersection of Williamstown Rd.
The Kingsville name stuck, and the Kingsville Primary school was established there in 1919.
But it was 70 more years before this neighbourhood on the western edge of Footscray, a stone’s throw from the Western Oval, was not recognised as its own entity by the City of Maribyrnong.
LABURNUM
Laburnum is a tiny area of Blackburn that surrounds a railway station of the same name bounded by Whitehorse Road, Gardiners Creek, Middleborough Road and the Lilydale/Belgrave railway line.
It’s a bushy little pocket of Blackburn that’s name for a golden-flowering shrub that’s common in the area.
CLARINDA
This corner of Clayton South has undergone three name changes since European settlement.
The area is bounded roughly by Centre, Clayton, Clarinda and Old Dandenong roads, and was at first known as Bald Hills when early market gardeners and farmers began to clear the coastal heath in the area.
But there is another Bald Hills, near Ballarat, so in 1900 the area was named Bayview, then renamed Clarinda around the time the local post office opened in 1911.
Sand mining occurred in the southern part of Clarinda during the 20th century.
Housing was built in the area as Melbourne sprawled in the 1950s.
SEAHOLME
Slotted between Millers Rd, the Altona Coastal Park and Port Phillip, Seaholme could be called Altona East, but that wouldn’t be anywhere near as colourful.
Seaholme has its own railway station but there has not been a post office there in almost 50 years.
The seaside suburb developed from the 1920s.
GARDEN CITY
It’s the suburb that looks like it sounds.
Most of the estate, on the west side of Beacon Cove in Port Melbourne and south of Williamstown Rd, was constructed in two stages in the 1920s and ‘30s on what was the marshy lower reaches of the Yarra River that was reclaimed with silt dredged from the river.
The houses and street layout were constructed by the State Bank and, later, the Housing Commission, in an English “Garden City” style.
Additions to the estate were built as late as the 1980s.
SYNDAL
This suburb with a railway station is between Mount Waverley and Glen Waverley where Blackburn Rd and High St.
Syndal was named after the local railway station, which was named after a farm and orchard in the area that was owned by Supreme Court judge Sir Redmond Barry – the man who sentenced Ned Kelly to death in November 1880, then died just days later.
Agricultural pursuits gave way to housing after World War II, and by the 1960s Syndal was fully settled.
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THE PATCH
Up by Monbulk in the Dandenongs, legend has it that a timber-cutter felled some blackbutt trees in the 1860s and, a decade later, the area was a grassy patch in the forest.
By the 1890s, berries were grown in the area to supply Melbourne buyers and the Monbulk Jam Factory.
These days, more than 1000 people live in The Patch, which now takes in a part of what used to be Monbulk and is now home to more than 1000 people.