What was on the land of Chadstone Shopping Centre before the retail mecca was built there?
IT’S known as Melbourne’s ultimate shopping mecca, but before Chadstone Shopping Centre came along, the land it now stands on had a sadder purpose.
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CHADSTONE Shopping Centre has been Melbourne’s shopping mecca for almost 60 years but the history of the site it sits on goes back way further.
The shopper’s paradise stands on the former site of the Convent of the Good Shepherd — a reformatory where “poor and neglected” girls were trained for domestic service — but the line between neglected and criminal children was often blurred, with claims of mistreatment and bullying surfacing in recent years.
Girls aged 11- 14 were sent to the convent both by families and the Children’s’ Court on account of their ‘unmanageable, unsatisfactory moral behaviour’.
They went to school and worked in the laundry six days a week, as well as undertaking garden chores.
Of 300 girls housed in Good Shepherd schools in 1985 — only 18 were wards of the state.
In 1958 and 1963 parts of the Convent land were sold for development of the shopping centre.
Chadstone Shopping Centre was opened on October 3, 1960 and was advertised as a ‘new era in suburban shopping’.
It wasn’t the first shopping centre in Victoria (that mantle goes to Bell Street Mall in Heidelberg) but it was the biggest, and the only one that included a department store.
It included 72 shops, a three-level Myer, a supermarket, radio station, exhibition hall, medical centre and child minding facilities.
In 1984, 3.2 hectares of land, including the convent, chapel and other buildings of the Good Shepherd complex were sold and later demolished to make way for a car park extension for the shopping centre.
It’s since seen many extensions and refurbishments that have made it the biggest shopping centre in the Southern Hemisphere.
What’s in a name?
The suburb of Chadstone, formerly called Oakleigh, gets it’s name from an early weatherboard cottage on a small farm at the property built for William Johnson in 1858 at the corner of Chadstone and Dandenong Roads.
Stonnington Council says Johnson sold the property to John and Emma Evans in 1879, who used part of the land as an orchard, supplying plums, cherries, apples and pears to the community.
In 1909 the property was sold to the Convent of the Good Shepherd next door.
They demolished the cottage and used the land for market gardening and grazing cattle — this part of the land was later sold to the Myer family for Chadstone Shopping Centre.
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