City of Darebin Heritage Study Volume 1 Draft Thematic

VOLUME 2: THEMATIC ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORYclose to city centres where they had markets for their produce (Jupp, 1988:304-5). The MerriCreek flats were ideal. Although the gold generation of immigrants were overwhelmingly male,some were able to bring wives to Australia and a few married European women and raisedfamilies (Yong, 2003:8). Northcote resident Gordon Murphy remembers that women as wellas men worked in the Merri Creek gardens. He remembers the Lee family, a second generationChinese Australian family, who also ran a greengrocer’s shop in Northcote (Yong, 2003:94).Mrs Harris, who grew up in Ivanhoe in the 1930s remembers that the Chinese working theDarebin Creek flats were single men (Watson, 1974:33). Lexie Luly remembers seeing thegardeners on the west bank of the Merri Creek watering their vegetables with watering canscarried on long poles across their shoulders (personal communication 2007)Much of the Merri Creek area formerly cultivated by Chinese gardeners is now public park,including Northcote Golf Links.Twentieth century Aboriginal communityFrom the 1920s onwards, an Aboriginal population began migrate to Melbourne in search ofopportunities, driven by closure and mismanagement of country reserves and also by the1930s Depression and the Second World War. Whilst Fitzroy, where rents were cheap, wasthe focus of this migration, Aboriginal people settled in many other suburbs. Migration toFitzroy generally originated in three areas, with an initial migration from the Cummeragungaarea in New South Wales followed by others from Framlingham and Gippsland. At the sametime, Wurundjeri people were migrating back to Melbourne from Coranderrk and settling inareas such as North Melbourne and the Western suburbs. (Broome, 2005:287).In 1927 a young Yorta Yorta man from Cummeragunja mission moved to Melbourne lookingfor opportunities as an Australian Rules footballer. The footballer, Doug Nicholls, was rejectedby the Carlton Football Club, but recruited by the Northcote Club, where he was animmediate success. He was employed as a labourer by the Northcote Council, and played forNorthcote for five years, before joining the Fitzroy team in 1932. Following a religiousconversion at the Northcote Church of Christ, Nicholls was ordained a Pastor, and ministeredto the Aboriginal community in Fitzroy.In 1947, Nicholls was appointed curator of Northcote Park, where he resided in a house thatcame with the job. Nicholls and his wife Gladys opened their home to young Aboriginesmoving to Melbourne. As the need for accommodation grew, the Nicholls were instrumentalin establishing a girls’ hostel in the former Anglican vicarage in Cunningham Street, opened1958, and a boys’ hostel in the same street in 1962. The Douglas Nicholls Centre was builtnext to the girls’ hostel in 1967.Nicholls received the support of the Northcote Council in his work amongst Aboriginalpeople (Lemon, 1983:271-2).Figure 5Pastor (Sir) Douglas Nicholls(right), 1976[DHE: ID 723]23