City of Darebin Heritage Study Volume 1 Draft Thematic

DAREBIN HERITAGE STUDY STAGE 2Then they eventually went on to the Eastern and Victoria Market to sell their flowers. (Jones1994: 5-6)James Railton had a nursery in Raglan Street in the 1860s, which was still operating in the1920s (Carroll 1985:27; Summerton, 1997).Aboriginal associations with rural industryDespite a number of Aboriginal people working as labourers for pastoralists in the Melbournearea in the late 1830s, the documented history of Aboriginal-early European settler relations inDarebin is characterised by mistrust, at least on the part of the settlers. Indeed, one of the mainreasons that the Native Police Corps established their headquarters at the confluence of theYarra and Merri Creek in 1842 was in response to a number of alleged ‘outrages’ by Aboriginalpeople, reported by settlers on the Darebin Creek (Lemon, 1983:16).In the 1850s, Aboriginal people were frequenting Shepherd’s Run, a large grazing area betweenHigh, Bell, James and Murray Roads, asking the Shepherd family for food. A former soldierliving on the run threatened them with a sword, and they did not return. Obviously some ofthe early settlers were nervous about the presence of Aboriginal people nearby, and theyregarded Shepherds Run as a safe place because of this incident. Men of the local district wouldpitch tents near the house on Shepherd’s Run for their families when they had to go away fromthe district (Carroll, 1985:23).Aboriginal people are also recorded as having frequently camped near a spring on a propertynear what is now the corner of McColl Street and Plenty Road in Preston. Although theoriginal recording is by a woman whose parents owned the property around 1900, it is claimedthat these people camped in this area up to around the 1920s (Weaver, 1992:8).BrickmakingDarebin’s natural deposits of clay provided the raw materials for one of the area’s mostsignificant industries. As Carroll has pointed out, ‘making bricks was a natural industry forPreston’ (Carroll, 1985:59). This statement applies equally to Northcote. According to Swift,in the 1840s builders would sometimes dig a clay-pit on the site and make bricks by hand onthe spot for their new buildings (Swift, 1928:7).Darebin’s first recorded brickmaker, Gottleib Arndt, had two clay pits on the corner of Raglanand Collier Streets, South Preston in the late 1850s. Stott’s brickworks near the corner ofPlenty Road and Dundas Street, produced Preston’s first machine-made bricks, using horsepowered machinery in 1878. During the 1870s and ‘80s more brickworks opened at Preston,including the South Preston Brick and Tile Company works opposite Penders Grove, whichproduced hand-made bricks from 1883; and the Clifton Brickworks in St Georges Road,which opened in 1890 (Carroll, 1985:59-60; Vines & Churchward, 1992:88, 95, 98).However, the larger brickworks were in Northcote, the first being the Northcote Patent BrickCompany, established by the Groom brothers in the corner of Separation and High Streets in1873. The firm was the first in the area to use steam powered machinery. The firm was floatedas a public company in 1882, to become the Northcote Brick Company. A Hoffman kiln wasinstalled, and four more kilns were added over the next few years. The company wasNorthcote’s largest employer in the 1880s and its output rivalled that of Melbourne’s largestbrickmaker, the Hoffman Patent Steam Brick Company in Brunswick. The two companiesentered into a price fixing agreement, and at one stage contemplated amalgamation. In 1886,the New Northcote Brick Company opened next to the first Northcote brickworks. The twocompanies eventually amalgamated in the twentieth century. Northcote’s production of brickspeaked at over 58 million bricks in 1889-90, the height of Melbourne’s land boom, but theindustry suffered when the boom collapsed, and some of the works closed (Vines &Churchward, 1992:77-80), putting many local people out of work. The revival in the earlytwentieth century was slow, followed by a new, but smaller boom in the 1920s. Clifton Brickscontinued to operate until 1963 and the Northcote brickworks closed in 1977. Their huge46