A PEOPLE’S GARDEN, TO BE DESTROYED NEXT MONDAY, FEBRUARY 14TH!
One of Melbourne’s oldest and most loved Community Gardens will be destroyed forever next Monday, February 14th, if the new Collingwood Children’s Farm management gets its way.
For forty-three years, local gardeners have worked the vegetable plots at the Collingwood Community Gardens. The three-quarter acre garden was established by Greek and Turkish migrants in 1979, when the Collingwood Children’s Farm was also founded. The Gardens are as old, if not older, than the Farm itself. Thousands of people have worked these plots growing pumpkins, tomatoes, asparagus, beetroot… in fact hundreds of different varieties of fruit, vegetables and flowers with love and care for decades. Gardeners work their 4m x 5m plots early morning, after work, on weekends, rain and shine. We help each other, we share our knowledge, we are community.
But 9 months ago, on June 2nd, 2021, the committee of management of Collingwood Children’s Farm, without notice, suddenly locked the gardeners out of their plots.
Why? They claimed they had suddenly discovered the site was unsafe, and must be completely demolished with heavy machinery. In fact, they had ordered a Safety Report, knowing it might provide them with an excuse to lock out the Gardeners.
We, the gardeners of the garden were shocked and traumatised. We knew this wasn’t true. It was an excuse to destroy the community garden and expel the Gardeners from their plots. We believe the farm’s Committee of Management has become too corporate and bureaucratic, and want to change the purpose of the Community Gardens to provide a source of income for the Farm. There is no provision at all for community allotment gardening in their new vision, despite being used for that purpose continuously, and very successfully, for more than four decades.
They want to create a garden with no trace of the past, and no chance for Gardeners to farm their own plots.
We used to love and support the Collingwood Children’s Farm, and for decades generations of Gardeners worked closely with them to improve the entire precinct. So we offered to work with management in good faith to improve the Community Garden.
At first the Committee of Management wouldn’t meet with us at all, and wanted to push ahead with demolishing the site as soon as possible. Finally, the State government forced them to come to the table to try to work out a solution. We wanted to preserve the deep heritage of this special place, allow the community to keep gardening on their precious allotments, and offer new opportunities for people to join and become involved. After a few months of stonewalling by the Farm’s Committee of Management, the State Government asked the Gardeners to provide our own vision for the Gardens. We jumped at the opportunity.
Shockingly, days after sharing our own community vision for the Gardens, we discovered the Collingwood Children’s Farm and State Government had blindsided us. A huge $860K grant had been awarded to the Farm, at the very time we were drafting our own vision, which will allow the Children’s Farm to destroy the Gardens and redevelop it in their own vision.
Below, we’ll tell you how you can help us to save the Community Gardens. But first, catch your breath, and find out a bit more about how it all went wrong.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE COLLINGWOOD CHILDREN’S FARM.
For thousands of years, the Yarra Bend was hunting, farming, and meeting land for the Wurundjeri people, who maintain a close living connection with the place. In 1863 the convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd was founded. When they vacated in the 1970s, the Collingwood Children’s Farm was created, so that housing commission kids could experience farm life. Local Greek and Turkish migrants, many of them factory workers, created the Community Garden at the same time, as part of the farm. The Farm has been a place of joy for many, including the gardeners who supported the Farm for decades. Thousands of people have worked the community garden plots, passing them from one family to the next. Until the lockout, anyone could apply for a garden plot within the City of Yarra, and start farming it for a small annual fee. Multiculturalism has thrived, transfer of knowledge has flourished, as different cultures and age groups worked cooperatively for the benefit of all. It is a strong community; resilient, productive, engaged.
HOW IT ALL WENT WRONG
Six years ago, a distance suddenly started opening up between new farm management and the gardeners. We believe the new management has become increasingly focused on the farm as a corporate opportunity – for weddings and photo shoots, corporate days out, commercial market gardening and the like. The current allotment gardening model wasn’t providing them with enough income. In 2016, they even proposed drowning it with an ornamental lake. A lovely back backdrop for their weddings, but a ridiculous proposal that fell flat. But the seed was sown. We are convinced they just wanted the Community Gardens gone.
In 2020, a new report on the Farm’s future was released. The author, an external consultant, called the community garden ‘dysfunctional’ (by then it had been running successfully for 40 years!) despite the author himself applying for, and being allocated, a precious plot by Farm management - irrespective of the fact that scores of community members had waited patiently on the list for many years for the phone call that would never come. The author now sits on the Committee of Management. When attempts to create a new communal model failed, the Committee of Management ordered a safety report.
THE SAFETY REPORT
The ‘safety report’ is a vastly exaggerated assessment of the community garden site. It has taken ordinary garden conditions such as uneven paths and fence posts and portrayed them as lethal hazards. It warns of snakes from the Yarra. No-one has been bitten by a snake on the plots in living memory. The CFMEU, on a request by Yarra councillor Steve Jolly, even offered to fix the site free of charge, while respecting its important cultural history. The farm’s management refused the offer.
Melbourne MP Adam Bandt has since taken up the cause in Federal Parliament and is a strong supporter of the Community Gardeners. The Yarra City Council have also been strong supporters of the Gardeners’ plight. But still the Children’s Farm persisted.
WHAT WE WOULD LOSE
The safety report is being used as a smokescreen to destroy one of the oldest Community Gardens in Australia and replace it with a top down bureaucratic model, with no provision for allotment gardening by the community. Forty-three years of precious cultural history will be lost. History that was first created by Melbourne’s Greek and Turkish-Australian community and now supported by members of the Italian, German, Hungarian, Fijian, Tongan, Iranian, Yugoslavian, Irish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Scottish, English, Macedonian, Australian, Dutch, and Native Canadian communities.
WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN
We, the community gardeners have formed a community association called the Collingwood Community Gardens Association. We demand the scheduled destruction of the Gardens to cease immediately and the day-to-day management of the Gardens be handed back to us, the Community. We want the Gardens to be run by the community, for the community. We have presented a vision for the Gardens that will improve access to the plots for the disabled community, remediate all safety issues, and build on the strong community tradition of knowledge sharing that already occurs at the Gardens. Read our management plan here.
HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT US
If you love inner-city Melbourne, its diversity, its community, its traditions, its multiculturalism, help us save the Collingwood Community Gardens!
1. Follow our Facebook Page so you can stay informed of developments and share with your networks
2. Sign the petition to show your support
3. Join us THIS SATURDAY, February 12th, for the Save the Community Gardens Rally. It may be your last chance!
4. Contact the following members and say you want them to stop the destruction of the Gardens:
Richard Wynne, member for Richmond:
Email: richard.wynne@parliament.vic.gov.au
Facebook: Comment on Comment on Richard’s FB Post on the $860K Grant
Phone: 03 8683 0964
Lily D’Ambrosio Minister for energy, environment and climate change:
Email: lily.dambrosio@parliament.vic.gov.au
Phone: 03 9422 5171
And cc in:
The Community Gardeners
Email: digging.in.gardeners@gmail.com
Please take five minutes to do this! Do it on your phone now!
Say something simple, that you want to stop the Collingwood Community Gardens from being destroyed and for the Gardens to be managed by the community, for the community.
This is our last chance. Next week it will all be gone.
We thank you so much!
