by Daley, Paul
Women like Frances Newby who had few children, a husband in work and money in her purse, would promenade up and down Smith Street in the late afternoon, dressed in their finest clothes and pushing their toddlers in prams. As they strolled along the footpaths, which were shaded by the porticos slung over the entrances to many of the stores, they would pass drapers and produce merchants, a string of hotels that included the bluestone Grace Darling, shoe repairers and saddlers, bakers, and the barrowmen who sold fruit and vegetables from the street corners. Horse troughs lined the side of the road, and horse-drawn carts carrying footwear from the factories or barrels of beer for the pubs negotiated the new tracks that had been laid down the centre of Smith Street for the cable trams.
In summer, Smith Street bustled well into the evening. But in winter the promenading women would head for home as dusk approached, turning into Johnston Street and walking down into the Flat just as the gas lighter rode from pole to pole on his horse. He performed an elaborate ritual whereby he would stand on his saddle, trim the wick of a lamp, turn on the gas and then carefully ignite it with a flame burning at the end of a long metal rod. One witness described seeing ‘the old lamp lighter run up twice a day with a ladder on his bent back, in the mornings to trim the four lamps on the old wooden bridge over the Yarra … and in the evenings to light the lamps’.
For Louie Newby, the excursions to Smith Street with her mother Frances were the start of a lifelong habit, one that would continue until she was an elderly grandmother and Collingwood identity in the 1950s. Dressed in a fur stole, she would stroll past the local shops and, a little diffidently perhaps, wait to be stopped by those who knew her and, of course, her story.
But the grandness of Smith Street in the late nineteenth century was just like the stunning town hall in nearby Hoddle Street. It was merely a distraction from the much less pleasant reality that only those who really could not afford to live elsewhere in Melbourne resided in Collingwood, especially on the Flat. Those with a genuine choice lived somewhere else.
And who could blame them?
Anyone who ventured into Collingwood from the more genteel eastern districts of Melbourne was confronted with a scene that was almost Dickensian in its human hardship and industrial malignancy. At least 120 factories were concentrated beside the river around the Flat. Chimneys and smokestacks of all sizes belched their fumes into the atmosphere. One old-timer from Collingwood recalled how the ‘chimneys were smoking like billio. All the factories had chimneys. Collingwood was dominated by smoking chimneys like you see in the English Midlands’.
On cloudy, still and cold days, the factory fumes and smoke from household fires combined with the mist that clung to the river’s contours to create a soupy smog that became trapped in the natural basin around the Flat. The result was a noxious, stinking pall the colour of mud and with a sickening aroma of sulphur and decay, which hung just above the tips of the chimneys and shrouded the streets in a translucent brown veil.
Because of the swamp-like environment of the Flat, mosquitoes and the diseases they carried were also rife, especially after rain. ‘There was nothing worse than the mosquitoes that were around here,’ a one-time resident of the Flat recalled.
Most people who lived in Collingwood worked in the factories or in service industries; those who could find alternative work were always well advised to do so. The factories were in reality little more than sweatshops, largely unregulated by unions and managed at the whim of sometimes unscrupulous bosses. The corrugated-iron, dirt-floored boot factories, for example, were sweltering, poorly ventilated furnaces in summer, while in winter, the girls who worked in the machine rooms routinely tied brown paper around their bare legs to ward off the chilly wind that blew through gaps beneath the walls. Alan Marshall, the author of How Beautiful Are Thy Feet, described a typical machine room:
The machine room is an oven … the iron roof is just above your head … and the girls with curved backs sitting in rows on old stools … the long benches and the black machines like heathen idols hungry for sacrifice … and girls that lay their hands upon them.
Melbourne’s health authorities, such as they were at the time, believed the atmosphere of the Flat to be so deleterious to public health that it was ‘miasmic’—that is, a carrier of deadly diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria and smallpox.
Dirt sores and weeping lesions that broke out without a specified medical cause, and with no known cure beyond better hygiene and nutrition, were common among the children, especially those who got around minus shoes and, of course, the many homeless urchins who had been abandoned or orphaned and who wandered the streets foraging for food scraps and shelter. These children often had to make do along with others of similarly low fortune for whom Collingwood was a mecca—the vagrants; the alcoholics; the mentally ill; the prostitutes; the opium addicts who congregated in makeshift hovels that were known as rookeries.
While the boom of the 1880s had increased the pressure on Collingwood to provide more accommodation for workers (and the rest of Melbourne’s urban poor), and consequently led to more land being subdivided, it ironically also sparked a new wave of dodgy, substandard construction. The vacant lots quickly disappeared and the free-standing weatherboard homes with gardens, which had been built in the 1840s and 1850s, were just as swiftly replaced by cheaper and smaller wooden row houses with shared party walls.
The generally poor housing and nutrition, minimal sanitation, filthy air and putrid, chemically tainted river water conspired to produce a hideously unhealthy environment that was unrivalled elsewhere in the colony, perhaps even the country.
The 1890s depression bit Collingwood hard, leading to factory closures and home repossessions. Liverpool Street, however, remained something of a novel little oasis. About seven out of ten Collingwood families rented their homes. But even though many of the residents of Liverpool Street were indeed quite poor, most lived in owner-occupied homes that had been handed down through the two generations that had passed since the street had been established in the 1840s. The weatherboards occupied by successive generations of Newbys and Seddons remained intact within their established gardens, and so, too, did the vacant lots where the children played.
For much of the time, especially during summer, life in the street was played out publicly. ‘Summer nights down in Collingwood everybody sat on their front verandahs to cool off. Children played ’til late in the streets and people generally were very neighbourly, stopping to have a chat as they walked up to the corner shop,’ reminisced a resident of the Flat.
They played cards and read newspapers, and they shared gossip with those next door over low side fences. The aromas of cooking—enough to elicit envy or pride, depending on the contents of a pantry—hung on the warm breeze. A sure indication of how each family was doing would come with the weekly or sometimes twice-weekly visit by the rabbit man, Macread, who would bang on a tin to announce his arrival while singing a high-pitched ‘Rabbie, rabbie, rabbie’. He’d skin and clean the animals on the spot, tossing the head and guts to the dogs of those who could afford sixpence a pair.
The big tribe of Seddon children often played among themselves on the street. All of them, that is, except for Doc, who assiduously sought out little Louie Newby. They would chase each other across the series of vacant lots across the road. They’d play cricket, her preferred game. They’d also kick a footy. A tightly scrunched-up newspaper with more paper rolled around it as reinforcement, all tied up with string, had to suffice for them. Few big families could afford to own one of the match-standard balls that were manufactured by Tommy Sherrin at his big, new factory down in Wellington Street. Sherrin had plied a roaring trade since he had begun commercially manufacturing footballs in 1883, but it remained a curiosity of his business that, up until the late 1880s, he sold most of his footballs to clubs outside Collingwood.
The municipality had a host of amateur football teams of varying standa
rds that comprised workers from the footwear industry and other assorted trades. But unlike most of the surrounding suburbs, which boasted first-class Australian Rules clubs that played in the Victorian Football Association competition, the district was still unable to field a disciplined, professional team that could proudly carry its own name—Collingwood. This was despite Dight’s Paddock becoming, in 1879, a much-needed sporting and recreation ground for the locals, where their teams could play, first and fore-most, cricket and football.
The genesis of Victoria Park lay in John Dight’s decision to sell land to a wealthy English investor, Edwin Trenerry, for a significant profit. Trenerry negotiated with the cautious and cash-strapped council to accept his gift of some 10.25 acres of the land, on the proviso that the council turn it into a sporting ground and that it spend £250 on each acre of land surrounding the ground, specifically on building sealed roads, gutters and footpaths. However, Victoria Park did not, as local myth would have it, rise on the philanthropy of Trenerry, whose name was given to a street that abuts the old footy ground. Rather, Victoria Park—the ground and the streets surrounding it—grew from an extremely shrewd business proposition that enabled Trenerry to convince the council to place what was, effectively, a shrine to Collingwood’s people at the core of a neighbourhood that he owned, and the infrastructure of which he also convinced the local authorities it was in their interests to pay for.
But what to do about a football team?
A ragtag of a local team, Britannia, had played its matches at Victoria Park since 1882. But the VFA considered it inadequately skilled in the fineries of the game and in the administrative capacities that would be required were it to join the colony’s premier football competition. The political manoeuvrings that led to the formation of the Collingwood Football Club in 1892 were as contentious as any of the momentous backroom upheavals that would come in the next century. In 1891, after intense lobbying from councillors, and especially after representations from the local Legislative Assembly member, John Hancock, and another local sports devotee and politician, William Beazley, Collingwood was told that it would be admitted to the elite state competition the following year if improvements were made to Victoria Park. The upgrading, which included lengthening the ground by some 30 metres, some top-dressing of the clay-based turf and the installation of a picket fence around the perimeter of the oval, were promptly carried out. Then came a bitter, angry meeting at the Grace Darling in 1892 at which Britannia was effectively disbanded in what amounted to a boardroom coup, and the Collingwood Football Club—the Magpies, an acknowledgement by the new club’s founders of the native birds that once nested in Dight’s Paddock—was born. Many former Britannia players and officials swiftly defected to the nearby Fitzroy Football Club, sparking an intense rivalry that would mark games between the Magpies and the Lions until Fitzroy merged with the Brisbane Bears Football Club 104 years later.
The Collingwood Football Club immediately became a rallying point for the community it represented, and which continued to grow. Indeed, the area around Trenerry’s streets developed quickly, with terrace houses, shops, two primary schools and a train station having been established by the time the first VFA football was bounced at Victoria Park, for Collingwood’s inaugural game against Carlton on 7 May 1892. The result may have seemed inauspicious, with Carlton defeating the Collingwood Magpies by a goal, but the die was cast: every local child with a paper football wanted to play for the team that represented the streets in which they lived. And the game was a sell-out, with some 16 000 spectators in attendance; it was proof that the people of Collingwood would support their own club in droves.
Rather than joining Fitzroy, Essendon or—heaven forbid!—Carlton, Collingwood’s most talented players stayed in their municipality and played for the junior feeder teams, such was their burning desire to one day run onto a ground wearing the black-and-white guernsey. One such man was William Meskill Bourke, who had grown up in the London, a tough workers’ pub in Johnston Street, not far from Victoria Park. As a teenager, Bourke, a boot-maker, played for Collingwood Trades, one of the feeder clubs for the Magpies, which comprised local tradesmen, mainly cobblers, and produced numerous first-class players. He was passionate about Collingwood: the suburb and the club. For whatever reason, despite his talent, Bourke couldn’t seem to make the Magpies’ seniors list. At first he knocked back overtures to play for other clubs, but in 1906 he joined Richmond—the Tigers—to play in the VFA. His decision to stay with Richmond rather than try to join another club, such as Collingwood, when the Tigers entered the more prestigious VFL in 1908, was due, it is said, to the influence of an old mate: the Collingwood premiership player Charlie Pannam.
Pannam was a true son of Collingwood. But after a disagreement with officials from the club that he had captained in 1905, as well as the lure of more money and, not least, an opportunity to coach, he defected to Richmond in 1907. That year was to be Richmond’s last in the VFA. The following year, the team was to play its first season in the more competitive, decade-old Victorian Football League, with Pannam, then thirty-four, as its captain-coach.
Greatly admired, Pannam was able to lure a number of talented junior players to Richmond. They included William Bourke who, at twenty-four, had perhaps two or three more seasons left during which he might make the senior list at Collingwood. In Richmond’s first two seasons in the VFL, Bourke, who was paid 30 shillings a week for his services, was the club’s leading goal kicker, booting twenty-five in 1908 and twenty in 1909 from the half-forward line. However, two hard seasons, through which he carried some serious injuries, were enough for him. He quit playing for the Tigers and returned to Collingwood, this time as a supporter and patron, although it is possible—but unverifiable—that he did actually make the club’s senior list at some stage. Around this time he also played a few games for Brunswick in the VFA and he continued to play cricket for Collingwood, as he had done throughout his football career. He was a contemporary and even a partner—or so it is said in his family—of the great Jack Ryder, who went on to captain an Australian eleven.
Bourke made a million in the boot trade and employed many Collingwood players. He later turned the London Hotel into the Austral Theatre, which would sponsor a lucrative prize for the fans’ favourite Collingwood player. He owned racehorses, including Nawallah, the winner of the 1928 Moonee Valley Cup, and we are led to believe he was dangerously big on the punt. Above all, for the entirety of his all-too-short life, he loved Collingwood. It was a love embraced by many in the generations of Bourkes that followed him.
It was soon after Nawallah’s epic win at Moonee Valley that things began to go wrong for Bourke. Eventually he would lose all his money, his boot factory in a fire, his horses and, as a relatively young man, his health. He died of a heart attack at home in 1932.
William Bourke was a grandfather unknown, beyond these few small matters, to myself and the rest of his vast horde of grandchildren—a vague, semi-historical, semi-mythical presence who linked us all to the Flat and who bred in most of us a tribal, unquestioning love of Collingwood the team, and a bittersweet nostalgia for Collingwood the place. He was little more than a shadow of a memory to his youngest daughter, Margaret, my mother, who was just seven when he died and who, I believe, endured for the rest of her life a yearning for a father she had for too few years.
What touches me most about my grandfather’s connection to the Collingwood Football Club is that the Magpies never forgot him. Not when he was down on his luck. Not when he went broke. And not when he died suddenly and tragically, so sadly diminished, leaving behind six children and a wife.
A week after William Bourke’s death, the legendary former Magpies player and club administrator Bob Rush wrote to my grandmother on that beautiful, official Collingwood letterhead that features a magpie looking into the past. William’s second-youngest child, Edmund Bourke, gave me the letter in July 2010 soon after my mother’s funeral, about the time
I began working on this book.
Dear madam,
At the last meeting of my committee, I was directed to convey to you and your family our sincere sympathy on the loss of your husband.
The late Mr Bourke was a former player of the Club and in more recent years a Patron and a keen supporter of the team.
In his time of prosperity he was ever ready to assist the Committee, particularly in the matter of employment for young players and we in common with his many friends regret the misfortune which befel his business in recent years and tender you our condolences in your trouble.
I was deeply moved when I first read this letter, and I feel emotional now after copying down its words and dwelling on its sentiment.
If there is a ‘Collingwood method’, then this must surely be part of it. I’ll buy it.
While other football clubs suffered badly during the depression years, Collingwood’s supporters rallied firmly behind it from the moment of its birth in 1892, which coincided with the collapse of some of Melbourne’s building societies and banks, and the financial crash of so many investors and industrialists upon whom the local economy and jobs relied. That same year came another defining moment in the life of the club—the decision by a 21-year-old boot-maker, John Wren, to defy the local police by opening his illegal betting shop, the Tote, at 136 Johnston Street, just around the corner from Smith Street.
Wren would become the most controversial, the most despised, the most loved and perhaps the most misunderstood of all of the sons of Collingwood, thanks largely to the fictional portrayal of him as John West in what his many defenders view as a malicious novel by Frank Hardy, Power without Glory. He loomed large around the suburb and the football club, as he still does today.