Inner-city gardeners will chain themselves to the fences of their beloved veggie patches if necessary to stop the planned demolition of the Collingwood Children’s Farm community gardens, starting on Monday, after an eight-month furore over the future of veggie gardening on the site.
Yarra councillor Stephen Jolly was one of many impassioned speakers at a rally to “save the Collingwood Community Gardens” on Saturday morning, rousing the green-thumbs in the crowd to escalate from petitions to non-violent demonstration next week.
Community garden plot holders who have been locked out of the community garden at the Collingwood Children’s Farm rallied on Saturday.Credit: Scott McNaughton
“Stand in front of those plots, and stop any tradies, any companies who want to come in and bulldoze that plot in a peaceful direct action,” he said.
Tears were shed during speeches from gardeners who claim the razing of plots would undermine the site’s history and their connection to the gardens which have provided about 70 riverside allotments to families to grow produce since 1979.
“This garden means so much to me and to us all,” said a tearful Lyndale Cooper, a Malaysian-Australian woman who said the garden had given her a community when she first came to Melbourne and knew no one.
“It’s really heartbreaking that we will lose our community if this is bulldozed. Please give it back to us.”
The garden saga began last June when farm management announced the land needed to be cleared to start the gardens again from scratch after an external consultant’s report found there were unacceptable risks of visitors being bitten by snakes and impaled by star pickets.
Since then, more than 100 people working the plots have been locked out while the gardens have become overgrown. Contention has since centred over the issue of safety, with gardeners claiming the site could easily be made safe if they were given access again, while management maintains major works are needed to reach the required standard of safety for the public.
“We had working bees every weekend [before the lock-out]. It just didn’t get to that point that we needed it to get to,” farm chief executive Conor Hickey said.
Farmers dispute this, claiming they had been willing to do the works themselves but had been restricted by the farm on what they could work on during such working bees.
Gardners are concerned the promise of a post-demolition community consultation to redesign the site would be a whitewash in favour of redeveloping it into a social enterprise model where no one person had any guardianship of allotments.
Local Janine Pearlman, a plot gardner of five years, said she believed such a model meant people would have less incentive to be involved.
“Gardening is about investment, right? You actually literally invest in the soil, you regenerate the soil, it’s a relationship to a place,” she said.
Last week local MP and Housing Minister Richard Wynne announced $860,000 of taxpayer dollars would be gifted to “improve safety and accessibility, ensuring all community members can enjoy the garden”.
The gardens were last year deemed extremely risky.Credit: Justin McManus
Farm chief executive Ms Hickey said the money was a “hallelujah” moment for the organisation, and prompted the announcement that contractors would start clearing the land next week.
“We [now] have the money to do that remediation, we’ve got the money to engage the community professional consultation piece, we’ve got the money to redesign so let’s just get every single person involved in that process,” said Ms Hickey.
The farm has previously flagged that “seismic” changes were planned for the entire site, moving to a user-pays model for many of its services and seeking more partnerships with businesses, governments and philanthropy groups.
Ms Hickey said most new community gardens being built were moving away from private allotments.
“We’re taking into consideration the fact that it’s 2022 and there’s a growing population and [City of] Yarra’s population is booming. If 50 individuals have spots, like private use on public land, we’re not actually doing our job as a committee of management, managing farmland,” she said.
“We’re inviting everyone back to the garden. How that looks though, is completely down to the community consultation piece.”
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