The rich used to send it their sewage, now this suburb is an oasis of creatives

In a series, The Age profiles Victorian suburbs and towns to reveal how they’ve changed over the decades.See all 43 stories.

Greg Scott moved to the gritty Melbourne suburb of Collingwood 15 years ago to discover his next-door neighbour was the notorious criminal Mark “Chopper” Read, who claimed to have used blowtorches on his victims and bolt cutters on their toes.

“It was a pretty interesting way to be introduced to Collingwood,” Scott recalls.

He had recently graduated from the University of Canberra, where he’d studied industrial design. The young man who’d grown up in genteel Canberra had never met anyone quite like Read.

“I felt it was important not to be too intrusive on a bloke like Chopper, but he’d often be sitting in his front yard, drinking – of all things, Vodka Cruisers – and we’d have a bit of a yarn. We got on OK.”

Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, the face of an old Collingwood.Credit: Jon Reid

Here was a sharp intersection in the rapidly evolving culture of Collingwood, which vies with Fitzroy for the title of Melbourne’s oldest suburb.

Read, though retired from crime, was an extreme symbol of a disappearing Collingwood: hard and violent and unpredictable.

Scott was part of a new tide of young, educated creatives intent on converting the edgy history of Melbourne’s inner north into something that might capture the future.

Read died of liver cancer in 2013, having contracted hepatitis C years earlier, possibly from using shared razor blades in Pentridge Prison, where he had a fellow inmate cut off his ears.

Scott went on to team up with three mates to create the Bodriggy Brewing Co, taking its name from the stonemason of the old industrial building in Abbotsford, once part of Collingwood, in which they established the business.

From left: Greg Scott, Jon Costello and Peter Walsh, three of the four partners in the Albion Hotel.Credit: Simon Schluter

These 21st century entrepreneurs were grasping at something that has become the new Collingwood anthem: sustainability. It is a sentiment that was unimaginable in the bad old days; in the 1860s, six big breweries and two distilleries were reported to be pouring endless pollution into the air and the Yarra River.

Recently, Bodriggy became Victoria’s first brewery to be certified carbon neutral. It uses recycled materials and solar, purchases carbon credits and has farmers collect the operation’s spent grain for their pigs, among other innovations. The current plan is to push further into the green by reducing emissions by another 30 per cent by 2030.

The latest venture of the four partners is the rebirth of the Albion Hotel in Collingwood’s Smith Street.

Built in 1847 for a working class with such a fierce thirst that barely a street corner existed without its own pub, the old hotel had become as outdated as Chopper Read when Scott and his mates, Peter Walsh, Anthony Daniel and Jon Costello, took it over last year.

They spent four months remodelling the interior to give the place an easy-going pub character they believed would be attractive to Collingwood’s newer tribes, who are among the most enthusiastic Greens voters in the nation, despite Collingwood having been a Labor stronghold for most of its history.

“We feel we’re the custodians of the building,” says Scott. “We wanted to give it a new life, honour its history and make it feel like a living room for today’s diverse crowd.”

A changing landscape

Until relatively recently, and certainly through the last couple of decades of the 20th century, no one in their right mind would have chosen to pour money and effort into redeveloping a hotel in Smith Street.

There was so much heroin openly circulating there in the 1980s and 1990s that the popular name for the area was “Smack Street”.

It had the same benefits for drug dealers and users that were much prized by the 19th-century gangsters, sly groggers and illegal betting outfits: a long line of sight down a straight street to observe approaching police, laneways for disappearing and good public transport to bring customers from afar.

Since the early 2000s, however, the influx of young professionals and the consequent skyrocketing of real estate prices, resulting in an exodus of the less well-heeled and the movement of drug dealing to other areas of inner-city Melbourne, has restored Smith Street to its old status of desirable main street.

The 2021 census found that Collingwood citizens had catapulted up the wealth scale, achieving Melbourne’s 14th-highest median weekly income for individuals: $1338. Ten years previously, the suburb was ranked 65th.

A Collingwood street scene.Credit: Simon Schluter

Replete with good coffee and eating places, fine furniture retailers, art galleries and a great shout of nighttime bars, live music and pubs beckoning crowds, Smith Street was in 2021 granted the exalted title of “coolest street in the world”, as judged by the editors and 27,000 international readers of Time Out magazine.

But amid all the industrial-edged gentrification and the sprouting of multi-storey apartment blocks, some with luxurious residences that sell for multimillion-dollar figures – one major developer, Tim Gurner, declared the suburb brought to mind New York’s Greenwich Village – reminders of the past and an awkward future still soar high.

Collingwood’s three public housing towers, two on Hoddle Street and another on Wellington Street, have provided affordable shelter to generations since they opened in the early 1970s. Initially, they served those uprooted during slum clearances, and later, immigrants from Europe, South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

But the 20-storey towers, each floor with 10 apartments, are living on borrowed time.

The Victorian government announced last year that all 44 of Melbourne’s public housing towers would be demolished.

A young man wishing to be known only as David tells me he has lived for 10 years in one of those towers after he, his mother and a sister arrived from Vietnam.

Aged 17, David attends high school, works in a fast-food restaurant and worries about where his mother might find a home in an unspecified future.

David says no one in his tower seems quite sure when the flats might be emptied out, or how or where the thousands of tenants might be rehoused.

There is, he says, a sense of community there. Every month, families pour down his tower’s lifts to gather in a little outdoor area to fire up barbecues and share food and stories. “It’s sort of like a festival,” he says.

David says he and his mother live pretty contented lives in their apartment, despite the shouting that often breaks out among other residents, and the pounding on the front door when someone is locked out.

He worries, however, about single mothers with babies visiting the communal laundry in his block, because – and it’s almost a casual throwaway line – “that’s where the junkies go to shoot up”.

Collingwood, in short, hasn’t quite shrugged off its past.

Making good

Still, you need almost no time there to perceive the new order sweeping the suburb.

Last week, taking coffee in one of Collingwood’s numerous excellent cafes – the vegan Smith and Deli – I fell into conversation with a young couple, Tessa Carroll and Ben Heenan.

Tessa Carroll and Ben Heenan, pictured with baby Anderson, make sustainable clothing.Credit: Simon Schluter

They run, they told me, what they call a “sustainable and ethical” clothing business, the Common Good Company.

Using recycled cotton saved from cutting room floors – which doesn’t need dyeing and saves the immense amount of water required to grow new cotton – they manufacture T-shirts, hoodies, sweaters, hats and tote bags.

They launched their business in the most unpromising of times: the COVID lockdown of 2020. Saddled with their first run of T-shirts without a way of selling them, they cut them up and fashioned them into face masks. A week later, the government mandated the wearing of masks.

“For every two masks we could sell, we donated one to a local public housing tower, where people were locked up and afraid,” Carroll says. “It just seemed the right thing to do.”

Word got out and leading fashion magazines, including Vogue, wanted to know about this Common Good Company and its products.

Four years later, they have close to 1000 clients. Using an embroiderer and a printmaker in Collingwood, they specialise in branding their apparel for clients to promote their own businesses.

Not just any businesses, however. This is Collingwood. Each has to align with Heenan and Carroll’s ethical and sustainable values. They nominate the alcohol-free beer company Heaps Normal as one of their favoured clients, and say they wouldn’t accept commissions from fossil fuel companies and the like.

When they were just starting out, they tell me, they absorbed the pain of knocking back an order for 20,000 bucket hats to promote a one-day event. The couple couldn’t abide the idea that most of these hats would quickly end up in landfill.

Fighting for space – and spaces

The transition from industrial struggle town to today’s relatively affluent inner-city suburb intent on making itself sustainable hasn’t been smooth, of course. Sentiment runs deep among older, resilient residents.

Virginia Dods remembers that when she moved to the area 30 years ago, her grandmother – whose family was prominent in Kew, the suburb sitting high on the eastern bank of the Yarra, peering down on Collingwood – was horrified.

Nevertheless, Dods discovered a proud and determined community anxious about the changes being imposed by outsiders.

She spent years as the voice of the now-defunct Collingwood and Abbotsford Residents Association, watching as developers won the majority of VCAT hearings against the local community.

She recalls a group of traders funding a group called Your Collingwood to protest plans for multi-storey apartments at the intersection of Wellington and Langridge streets. The traders feared the corner would become a wind tunnel.

Virginia Dods remembers a proud and determined community when she moved in to Collingwood 30 years ago.Credit: Simon Schluter

Today, large developments sit on all four corners of the intersection, the wind whipping between them.

Collingwood is such a tiny place. Squeezed into its 145 hectares, smaller than a small farm, are more than 9000 permanent inhabitants. Tensions are inevitable.

When the City of Yarra spent $2 million recently to transform a tiny children’s playground in Cambridge Street into a shared pocket lawn and playground, a very Collingwood argument ensued. Parents were furious their children were left with one swing and a couple of metal climbing bars.

Others wanted more contemplative lawn. Representatives of the LGBTQI community declared the area was a “gaybourhood”, and protested that the argument had been reduced to “leveraging a heteronormative perspective that people with children are more valid families”.

The council – itself internally riven after two of the former five Greens councillors quit to become independents last year – is now planning to return more playground equipment to the pocket park.

What’s in a name?

Collingwood got its European name in 1842, just seven years after Europeans sailed up the Yarra River to create a village.

The Woi Wurrung people of the Wurundjeri clan already had a name for the area, of course, a river flat adjacent to a series of bends in the Yarra near a natural rock outcrop that created a small waterfall.

It was “yalla–birr–ang”, according to notes made by anthropologist Alfred Howitt, meaning, he scribbled, “the wooden point of a reed spear”.

Europeans, paying no heed, initially gave the area the plain name Newtown. Blocks were auctioned off from 1838.

Among the first buyers was a flour miller named John Dight, who built a mill on the little waterfall that inevitably became known as Dights Falls.

Nearby, he purchased a handy piece of flat ground that became known as Dights Paddock. Later, Dights Paddock would become a famous sports ground, renamed Victoria Park.

Newtown offered no music to the ear of Charles La Trobe, the first superintendent of the Port Phillip District. He instructed his surveyor Robert Hoddle to rename it Collingwood.

It was in honour of Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood of the British Naval Fleet, second in command to Horatio Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar.

Collingwood, when he was not fighting on the high seas, retreated to his vast estate in the Northumbrian hills and valleys – England’s least populated area, lending irony to his name being attached to a suburb on the other side of the world that would become so overcrowded that shacks leaned on each other.

Hoddle Street and the Collingwood Town Hall in 1886.Credit: State Library of Victoria

Cuthbert Collingwood, however, was an early champion of the very sensibility that today’s residents would have no trouble relating to: call it green sustainability.

Wherever he wandered with his faithful dog Bounce, Collingwood carried a pocketful of acorns, scattering them across the land. He urged others to emulate him so that new forests of oak would grow. He wanted a sustainable supply of wood for the ships of the British fleet. Collingwood’s old forests can still be found in north-east England.

Collingwood is more than a suburb, really. Its story is too sweeping.

It is more even than the Australian rules football club that bears its name and gave the area hope and joy during the desperation of a Depression in 1892, when local worthies established the Collingwood Football Club during a meeting in a backroom of the Grace Darling Hotel, which still stands proud in Smith Street.

The footy club, which also invested Collingwood with rare dignity by winning an extraordinary four grand finals as the Great Depression sank its claws into the community in the 1920s and ’30s, now has more members than any other – 106,470 of them at last count, from all around Australia.

The suburb itself seems too restless to be confined within its own cramped boundaries.

Search for the Collingwood railway station, or Victoria Park, and you will find yourself in the neighbouring suburb of Abbotsford. The extravagant old Collingwood Town Hall is in Abbotsford, too.

So is the much-loved Collingwood Children’s Farm, sprawling along the Yarra River, where the bushland peace sacred to the original inhabitants is still capable of calming the spirit. It is all but impossible to imagine you are a couple of hundred metres from crowded streets and the bustle of commerce.

The Collingwood Leisure Centre’s swimming pools are in the relatively salubrious Clifton Hill.

Blame history. In this old territory, boundaries have shifted.

The area now occupied by Collingwood and a significant slice of Abbotsford was once known as East Collingwood, or simply The Flat.

Blame Jeff Kennett, too. Until 1994, the City of Collingwood embraced the current suburb plus Abbotsford and Clifton Hill.

But in 1994, when Kennett announced a wholesale amalgamation of Victoria’s municipalities, the City of Collingwood ceased to exist. It was incorporated into a new City of Yarra, which also included Fitzroy, Richmond and a slab of Northcote.

It left many of the celebrated old Collingwood institutions beyond the boundaries of what now was no more than a small suburb, bounded by Smith Street to the west, Hoddle Street to the east, Alexandra Parade to the north and Victoria Parade to the south.

A new chapter

That little place is much mythologised. Collingwood is the fictionalised “Carringbush” of one of Australia’s most sensational novels of the 20th century, Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory.

Its central character was the legendary John Wren (barely disguised by a disapproving Hardy as “John West”). Hardy, a communist, copped a criminal libel charge for his troubles, but was found not guilty,

The real Wren made his name in the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s as an illegal bookmaker, showman, puller of political strings and millionaire who spread some of his wealth among the poor – and especially among Collingwood’s grateful footballers.

The son of illiterate Irish immigrants, he left school at 12 to work in a wood yard and then in a factory as a “boot clicker” – a common job for Collingwood boys, who carved out the leather for boots, their knives “clicking” on the carving blocks of the factories.

His early wealth came from his illegal totalisator (tote), or betting shop, in a backroom in Johnston Street.

It remains memorialised in the name of Collingwood’s rock/punk/grunge music pub, The Tote. The pub itself defeated Victorian authorities when tough liquor licensing laws threatened its survival in 2010. Rallies of up to 10,000 live music fans demanded the state government back down. It did, and the music plays on.

Though the complicated Wren eventually moved to a mansion in Kew, he enjoyed wide support among the Collingwood working class while being reviled by the Melbourne establishment.

The author Paul Daley, formerly of The Age, explained part of the genesis of Collingwood’s anti-establishment attitudes in his 2011 book Collingwood: A love story.

He wrote of the Collingwood Flat as a swampy lowland downhill from the richer areas of East Melbourne, Carlton, North Fitzroy and Clifton Hill.

“The wealthy always welcomed the rain because it cleansed their streets and gutters, effectively flushing the offal and excrement of their livestock and the sewage from their shops and homes down into Collingwood,” Daley wrote.

“Many things contributed to Collingwood’s identity, but for a major influence on its social awareness, it is hard to go past the fact that, for a good part of the year, its poorest residents effectively dwelt in the shit of the city’s richest.”

Time, of course, heals.

The Collingwood Flat was drained. The toxic soup that went into the Yarra from the factories and businesses that lined the riverbank – wool washers, slaughterhouses, tallow works, tanneries and breweries – eventually could be tolerated no more, and the river was restored to a measure of health.

And all these years later, resilient Collingwood is making its own history again, and hoping it’s sustainable this time.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.