City of Darebin Heritage Study Volume 1 Draft Thematic

VOLUME 2: THEMATIC ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORYdepression that brought unemployment and misery to many thousands, and halted furtherdevelopment for a decade or more.Closer settlementEconomic recovery came gradually to the study area, but by the turn of the century thebeginnings of a revival were apparent. As transport services began to improve and industryrecovered, some 1880s subdivisions began to sell, and a few new ones were developed. A newsubdivision of this period was Plant’s Paddock at Westgarth, subdivided by the RailwayDepartment in 1903. The Railways agreed to fund the cost of street making on the estate andoffered free rail passes to purchasers of the land (Lemon, 1983:141-2).During the 1890s depression the Victorian government attempted to settle more people onthe land by acquiring large estates and breaking them up into small farms for sale to people oflimited means. The Closer Settlement Act 1904 established the Closer Settlement Board, withthe power to acquire freehold land and subdivide it for sale to genuine settlers, thus cuttingout speculators. Occupation was by 31½ year lease, with a £50 deposit, and a requirement toreside on the property. A Crown Grant could be issued after 12 years on full payment of thebalance of purchase money. From 1906 the Board began creating smaller allotments to enableworkers to supplement their wages by cultivating their own land. These consisted ofAgricultural Labourers Allotments of a few acres, in the vicinity of larger holdings where theworkers could be employed. The Board also aimed to settle low paid urban workers in theirown homes, by making available Workmen’s Homes Allotments to men engaged in manual orclerical work and not owning land in Victoria. Lessees were required to build a house valued at£50 (Victorian Year Book 1913: 632).In 1906 the Closer Settlement Board purchased 233 acres of the Pender’s Grove Estate andsubdivided it into quarter acre Workmen’s Homes Allotments, and Agricultural Labourers’Allotments of four and five acres, the latter blocks being in the area near the Darebin Creek.Northcote Council insisted that the Board pay for street construction and set aside an area fora park. By 1913, 140 Workmen’s Homes Allotments and 37 Agricultural LabourersAllotments had been leased (Victorian Year Book 1913:632; Lemon, 1983:149). The two kindsof closer settlement allotments at Pender’s Grove demonstrate Thornbury’s urban ruralinterface at the time, where urban development was being encouraged in the more settledcentral area close to High Street, while the creek flats were still used for agriculture. Howeverby the 1920s, only a few houses had been built in the area west of Victoria Road and theeastern part of the estate was open paddocks (Map drawn by Roy Keeble). Closer Settlementwas not particularly successful in Darebin.Further out a similar Closer Settlement Scheme at Bundoora and Thomastown (just outsidethe study area) is commemorated in the name of Settlement Road (Kenna, 1988:162).2.4 Housing assistance schemes in the twentieth centuryHousing Commission of Victoria estatesThe Housing Commission of Victoria was established to improve the housing conditions ofpeople living in poverty in the inner suburbs. Soon after it was constituted on 1 March 1938,the Commission embarked in a program of ‘slum reclamation’ and house construction.Although the vast majority of the Commission’s work was carried out after the Second WorldWar, some of its earliest estates were developed in the study area in the early 1940s.Whilst ‘slum reclamation’ focussed on the inner suburbs such as Collingwood and Fitzroy, theresidents displaced by ‘slum clearance’ needed to be re-housed. The Commission sought landin the outer suburbs ‘connected by direct transport methods to areas in which reclamationoperations will be carried out’, with the intention of moving people from the inner suburbanslums to new houses. The northern suburbs, where land was cheap and where local councilswere keen for development, seemed ideal. Soon after the Commission was constituted, the29