by Daley, Paul
From its beginnings as a densely settled home for a population of willing but cheap and vulnerable labourers, and with access to the Yarra River, the lifeblood of early industry, the Flat’s primary function was to service the material needs and demands of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. There was a sense of otherness among the people who lived in the rows of mostly rented, narrow-fronted timber workers’ cottages and the shanties that lined the streets and alleys. It came from an innate understanding among them that not only did the rest of the city and, indeed, the colony look down upon the Flat geographically, they also saw its people as social inferiors. The wealthy industrialists and the professionals lived south-east of the river, high upon a eucalypt-lined ridge that was notable for its cleaner air and lush parks and gardens, with neatly pebbled paths, and on the elevated land between the Flat and the city centre, in the far more genteel settlements of East Melbourne, North Fitzroy, Clifton Hill and Carlton.
Heavy winter rains would send torrents of water sheeting down from the top of the basalt plain that marked the beginning of the Flat at a well-worn cattle track, originally known as Eastern Road and later to become Smith Street. As the water neared the bottom of the valley, it divided into swiftly flowing channels that, in turn, deluged and overflowed the open drains. And there the water would sit—a vast, stinking, stagnant swamp a metre deep in parts—for days, even weeks, on the claypan of the Flat. 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. 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.
Perhaps this helps to explain, in part, why those who lived in the Collingwood of the late nineteenth century were characterised by such fierce parochialism and an unwavering sense of community. They were imbued with, if not exactly optimism, then at least a fervent hope—that no matter how tough were their lives presently, things could probably only get better. Such sentiments were led by the ambitions of their civic fathers and their pioneers, as evidenced by the establishment in 1863 of the Collingwood Mining Company to search for gold around Hoddle and Gipps streets. Prompted by a very small gold find under Smith Street, the company optimistically lodged its mining applications with the government of the colony. However, it sunk only one or two bores and then quickly collapsed. Alas, Collingwood’s streets would never be paved with gold.
After the land between the Yarra River and the track that would become Hoddle Street had been sold to speculators in 1838, a dozen families lived a bucolic but gentrified existence in the paddocks of Newtown, as it was then known. Among them was a land developer, John Dight, who paid £18 10s for the largest portion of land on sale, 26 acres, its border defined by a stretch of river that contained a set of low waterfalls, just below which was a shallow, natural stock crossing of sand and small pebbles. Dight would later build a flour mill on his land, using the swiftly flowing waters of what had become known as Dight’s Falls to work the giant millstone that was used to crush the wheat.
Recession struck the new settlement of Melbourne in 1842, the same year that Newtown became Collingwood. (It is ironic that, given the aristocratic lineage of Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood—the lord who had assumed command of the British fleet after Horatio Nelson was wounded at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars—his name was bestowed on an area that was set to emerge as Melbourne’s biggest slum.) The wealthy Sydney families who had purchased the first allotments were forced by the economic downturn to offload their land at fire-sale prices. One man, Lyon Campbell, went broke and mortgaged his majestic property, ‘Campbellfield’, which lay adjacent to John Dight’s land. When Campbell died suddenly in 1844, Dight, unable to forego an opportunity to snap up a bargain, paid £2308 for Campbell’s sprawling, manor-style home and all of his acreage. This land, located between the river, Johnston Street and a deep, open sewer known as Reilly’s Drain (later to become Alexandra Parade), soon became known as Dight’s Paddock. For more than three decades, it would remain as it had been when it had changed hands—an open, heavily wooded expanse that was home to flocks of native, fiercely territorial magpies, and where the Aboriginal people of the already dwindling Wurundjeri tribe gathered to camp with their dogs and to fish at the falls.
According to some accounts, the Wurundjeri, who had already been forced off other land around the river due to the burgeoning settlement and stock grazing, were known to kick a ball, roughly fashioned from possum skins, about Dight’s Paddock. It was a rich portent for the football ground that would emerge from the paddock as Victoria Park half a century later. By this time, the Wurundjeri had sadly all but fallen prey to alcoholism, venereal disease, violence at the hands of the European settlers, tuberculosis and malnutrition. They were eventually supplanted by another tribe—the Collingwood Football Club.
In 1851 Victoria became a new colony, separate from New South Wales. Its establishment heralded a boom that began with the discovery of gold in the fields of northern Victoria. Accordingly, industry expanded rapidly throughout Collingwood, especially along the banks of the river that defined the eastern border of the municipality, where wool-scouring and washing factories, tanneries, slaughterhouses, boot-makers, piggeries, brewers, soap- and candle-makers all sprung up. The Wurundjeri had once feasted on an abundance of eels, freshwater mussels, herring and waterbirds at the falls here, and on the mobs of kangaroos and hordes of possums that inhabited the riverbanks under the cover of mature banksias and eucalypts. But by 1855, Collingwood’s river was a murky soup of raw domestic sewage and factory effluent that included poisonous tanning chemicals and animal carcasses.
The gold rush and the ensuing flurry of industry created a housing shortage across Melbourne, not least in Collingwood, the factories of which were having trouble meeting the colony’s voracious material demands and finding enough workers to man the machines in their sweatshops—the workers had to live somewhere.
Few planning bylaws governed building on the Flat. This encouraged all manner of substandard housing. The local gums and banksias were felled to make hundreds of narrow, dark, iron-roofed, two- and three-room shanties in which fifteen or twenty people from two or more families often lived at a time. Dr John Singleton, who set up one of the City of Collingwood’s first medical practices around this time, later reflected:
I resolved to commence one in the poorest and most densely populated suburb in Melbourne. The municipality of Collingwood seemed most to answer the description. After much inquiry I found that a great number of the poorer classes, artisans with large families, labourers, aged people, widows and deserted women, often with many children to provide for, with others of the same classes, had gone to Collingwood, where the rentals were then very moderate, and the cost of food … equally so. I found also that although, as a rule, many of them were unable when ill to pay for medical attendance, there was yet at the same time no place but the Melbourne Hospital where they could get medical relief.
Despite being the most densely populated and rapidly expanding part of Victoria, and having been declared a city in its own right in 1876, Collingwood was unable to claim any of the grand public monuments or buildings that celebrated the post–gold rush prosperity across the greater metropolis. Fitzroy became a city in 1878, a full two years after Collingwood, yet it had boasted its own town hall since 1863. Eventually, in 1887, the Collingwood Town Hall was completed on a piece of untouched, otherwise unwanted swampland on Hoddle Street. Designed by the sought-after urban architect George Johnson and festooned with mansard roofs, pyramidal domes, elaborate wrought-iron latticework and an imposing brick-and-stucco clock tower, it was immediately hailed as an architectural and engineering icon of boom-time classicism, and as one of the grandest buildings
in Melbourne.
Financed through the sale of municipal land, together with a £40 000 loan from the government of the colony, it was a building that Collingwood could scarcely afford. While it stood as a towering testament to the against-the-odds stoicism that for close to a century would characterise Collingwood, home to some of Melbourne’s poorest and most disadvantaged people, the new town hall was in reality a facade that could not possibly mask the hardship that thrived just behind it, beginning with the small pocket of houses that comprised Liverpool Street.
While it was a street in name, it was in effect little more than a rural lane, muddy in winter and dust-blown in summer, that started at Gipps Street, near the vacant swamp behind the town hall, and ran just a few hundred metres to its abrupt end at Stanton Street. Along this stunted alleyway were dotted no more than a dozen or so average weatherboard and shingle houses with corrugated-iron roofs. Most of the houses were separated by vacant lots, upon which some of the residents grew vegetables and kept sheep, pigs and chooks.
By the time the Collingwood Town Hall opened, William Seddon, a printer and sometime labourer, had lived in the street for the best part of thirty-five years. Born in Birkenhead, in Cheshire, England, a town that was renowned for its shipbuilding and which watched the vast industrial city of Liverpool from across the Mersey, William migrated to Australia as a thirteen-year-old with his parents, James and Ruth, and his four younger brothers and sisters. The family had left Liverpool aboard a sailing ship, the Thames, in November 1852, drawn to Victoria like thousands of others by the opportunities associated with the gold rush of the 1850s. The trip from the poor backstreets of Birkenhead via Liverpool to the bustling port of Melbourne and then, appropriately, on to number one Liverpool Street in the heart of the new, poverty-stricken settlement of Collingwood, took the Seddons four months.
In many ways, the young William Seddon was comparatively more fortunate than many others who found themselves in Collingwood at that time, having arrived in Australia with seemingly enough experience to get a job in the printing trade, and settling into a new, albeit modest, house. His father and mother died in 1871 and 1873 respectively, having been predeceased by two of their children. They left the house to William, their eldest child who, at thirty-four, had just married Catherine, a nineteen-year-old domestic servant who had been born in nearby Richmond.
By the time William and Catherine had the first of their eleven children, little more than a year after taking ownership of their home, an established garden of conifers and gums had grown around their plain little house of pale weatherboard. An arch, blanketed by creeping purple wisteria, covered the entrance gate that nestled at the edge of a neat, white-picket fence. A path of black-and-white tessellated tiles—functional rather than beautiful but still a novelty at a time when the entrances to most Collingwood homes comprised dust or a little grass—indicated that William Seddon was doing comparatively well for himself.
Twenty-five years would separate the births of the couple’s first and last children, Ruth and Clyde. The Seddons effectively comprised two families—the older, adult children in their mid-teens to their twenties, and ‘the younger ones’, who included the baby, Clyde, a couple of toddlers and three preadolescent children. In photographs they always appear neatly dressed, in long trousers, long dresses and stockings and shoes during winter, and in shorts over summer. They seem well fed or, at the very least, not undernourished like so many other children of the Flat.
In reality, however, food was often very scarce and the children frequently went without. As adults they would remember, vividly, the hunger they had endured as children. When things were bad, Catherine employed ingenious methods to make what little food she could forage fill thirteen mouths. She would, for instance, bake a large suet pudding in a great, white-enamel basin. Unappetising and of dubious nutritional value, it comprised offcuts of fat from the local butchery, unwanted breadcrumbs from the baker and perhaps a little flour and milk. ‘Whichever of you eats the most pudding can have more meat,’ she’d declare, and the competition would begin as her starving children hopped into the meal. By the time the pudding was gone, their stomachs would be full. Which was just as well, for there was no meat.
The eldest of the younger Seddon children was Malcolm, born in May 1888 just as Australia was following the world into an economic depression, one that hit industrial Collingwood and its dependent workforce harder and earlier than the rest of the country. At the time of Malcolm’s birth his father was pushing fifty, and it is fair to assume that he was utterly preoccupied with providing for an ever-expanding family. Nonetheless, the physically imposing, taciturn and moustachioed William was taken with his sixth child’s independence of spirit and his agility. With his short-cropped sandy hair, his wide forehead, deep-set eyes, broad athletic frame and direct, unwavering gaze, the young Malcolm exuded a brazen self-confidence. But those who thought Malcolm arrogant were wrong. A shyness that bordered on diffidence and genuine humility were chief among the character traits that would define his personality, to his occasional detriment, for his entire life.
William recognised and acknowledged Malcolm’s complexity and nuanced personality. He was physically precocious, fearless and an early achiever at games, especially football. He was also tough and good with his fists when the circumstances required, a handy life skill on the mean streets of Collingwood. But he also had a strong sense of compassion and justice. He was sensitive, loyal and generous. He helped his mother and he cared for his younger siblings. And he loved animals.
As a lad of four or five, Malcolm found a bird with a broken wing in Liverpool Street. Other kids wanted to kill it. But Malcolm patched the wing and nursed the bird, keeping it in a backyard shed until it could fly again. So tenderly had the boy cared for the bird that William subsequently nicknamed him ‘Doc’, as in ‘Doctor’. From that moment on, he was Malcolm no longer; he was ‘Doc’ for life.
So the story goes.
Despite the Seddon family’s size and Doc’s proximity in age to his closest siblings—James, born two years earlier than him, and Margaret, born two years later—he was never especially close to his brothers and sisters. While he was protective of them and cared for them physically, he looked for others in Liverpool Street to play with.
Doc as a boy (fourth from right, front) with his brothers and sisters outside Birkenhead. Seddon family collection
He didn’t have to look far.
Four doors away at number nine lived an elderly couple, William and Esther Newby. He was a successful carpenter who possessed a head of thick, wavy hair and a full, bushy grey beard. She had sharp and rather bird-like features, appearing demure next to the commanding physical presence cut by her husband. But although thin-lipped, she possessed gentle eyes that exuded warmth, a certain softness and kindness. It is said that the pair was well-off when they sold up and left the charming village of Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire near London to set off on their long journey to Australia in 1854.
The fifth of their seven children, Alfred (‘Fred’), had far more of his mother about him than his father. He inherited her bright eyes, but also her soft jaw, thin mouth and an insubstantial upper lip that he tried, unsuccessfully, to camouflage with a vast, crescent-shaped moustache. He was an unworthy match, physically, for his wife, Frances. With her full mouth and swarthy complexion, her wide, almond-shaped eyes and thick raven hair, Frances was, in her younger years at least, a notable natural beauty. Soon after he married her, Fred bought the house at number eleven Liverpool Street, next door to his parents.
The couple had two daughters, May and Louisa Marion— Louie—who was born on 8 June 1889. (A later child, Frances, would die as a baby.) Compared to the Seddons at number one, the Newbys’ existence was quiet, sedate and relatively prosperous. Fred, a plasterer, was in constant work and his daughters were always well fed. They were raised in a circumstance of economic stability, and they enjoyed an added level of
emotional security due to the fact that their comfortably well-off grandparents lived next door. The hunger that was rife in the surrounding streets—at times, just five doors down—was alien to them. Although life was becoming increasingly uncertain in Collingwood, Louie and her sister had a relatively predictable and safe existence.
Louisa—‘Louie’—Newby as a girl. Seddon family collection
Despite the differences in their economic circumstances, however, the Newbys and the Seddons had something in common. In a predominantly Irish-Catholic neighbourhood, they were among the few Protestant families. But something else brought these families together.
Doc and Louie.
2
Paper Football Dreaming
Collingwood continued to grow much more quickly than any other municipality in Melbourne during the 1880s, yet it was fighting a losing battle when it came to claiming its share of the social and economic spoils of the great boom. Although it was engaged in a ceaseless effort to lobby the Victorian Government for more money, so that it might improve everyday conditions around the Flat through the construction of proper drains, roads and footpaths, the local council largely foundered in its quest to improve the lives of the ordinary working people who were the backbone of Collingwood.
Meanwhile, reflecting the prosperity of the industrialists who had invested in the breweries and the tanneries, the hat and boot factories, and the canneries along the river, Smith Street underwent a dramatic metamorphosis, whereby its dowdy wooden shopfronts were replaced by elaborate Gothic facades of brick and plaster, wrought-iron latticework and leadlight. The most beautiful, perhaps, was that of Foy & Gibson, a general-purpose store that grew out of Sydneysider Mark Foy’s haberdashery shops.