Collingwood

by Daley, Paul

  Much has been made in fiction and purported fact of Wren’s unimpressive physical attributes and lack of sporting prowess, which limited him to being an ardent fan of the Magpies and the local cricket team. But the truth is that Wren was an accomplished sportsman who played football for the same junior clubs as Doc Seddon, my grandfather and many other aspiring firsts players. Had he had the inclination to do so, he could probably have played for the Magpies. Instead, he opened his illegal betting shop, a move that brought fame—or more precisely, infamy—through the acquisition of money, legally and otherwise. Money bought Wren local, state and, later, federal political influence that he sometimes used for no other reason, apparently, than to consolidate his own business interests and power base. But there is no doubt that, despite amassing enormous wealth on the backs of those who could ill-afford to gamble, he was one of the most steadfast benefactors of the poor of the community.

  He was also an enormously generous but insistently silent patron of the Collingwood Football Club. Doc was barely four years old when Wren opened the Tote, but they would later became great mates when the younger man distributed money for the millionaire; in return, the millionaire would use his significant political influence to do Doc a great favour later in life.

  John Wren and Doc Seddon are familiar names around my family. Seddon and my grandfather, William Bourke, were closer in age, contemporaries around the local cricket and football clubs. They had much in common. Wren and Bourke, meanwhile, worked as clickers in the boot trade, although at different times. And as a Collingwood industrialist involved in the racing game, in which Wren also had extensive interests, Bourke was later part of the same milieu. Bourke, like Wren, gave money to the club and he helped where he could to support its needier players, although he was not nearly as great a philanthropist in the broader Collingwood community. Wren left the area to live in Kew but walked through Collingwood daily; my grandfather eventually left to live and raise a family in Albert Park, but he worked daily in the City of Collingwood.

  For Wren, the Collingwood Football Club was the heart of the community. It was, therefore, over the years the means by which he could both practise his benevolence by distributing money and providing jobs to the residents in most need, and simultaneously extend his influence within the community. After all, for many residents of the Flat, the home matches at Victoria Park represented the only bright moments in lives that were otherwise defined by mind-numbingly monotonous, soul-destroying and physically disabling factory work, and socially crippling disadvantage. Former player Wally Utting, who grew up in Collingwood during the Great Depression, said, ‘Collingwood had nothing going for it except the Club and its greatness.’

  From the moment the club was formed, Collingwood harnessed the oppression that was at its core, channelling its energies into winning on the football field. It took Collingwood just five seasons to win its first VFA flag, in 1896. The next year, the team entered the fledgling but more competitive and professional VFL competition with big ambitions and hopes. It did so in the knowledge that its schools, factories and streets were bursting at the doorways with boys and young men who wanted to play for the Magpies. Decades later, the Collingwood premiership captain Lou Richards would explain: ‘I was born into a Magpie family and reared in the Magpie nest, kicking tin cans and paper footballs around the streets of Collingwood.’

  In Collingwood, the paper football symbolised grinding poverty. But for kids like Doc Seddon, a natural with a big dream, it also symbolised hope.

  3

  Liverpool Street

  Victoria Park Primary School, just a stone’s throw from Liverpool Street, had barely opened in 1889 to meet the needs of the children who lived around the football ground, when a fire destroyed it. It would be another nine years before the school took students again. It was still being rebuilt when Doc and Louie reached school age, so for a time they had to go to nearby Abbotsford Primary School, where the girls were required to wear pinafores and many of the boys wore a uniform that resembled a sailor suit with a high white collar.

  After it reopened, Victoria Park Primary School quickly gained a reputation not only as a tough school, with its fair share of rough and ready kids, but also as a ‘football factory’ that produced junior Australian Rules players of enormous potential. While he was still at the school, Doc played for the Abbotsford Juniors, where he quickly forged a reputation as a tough nut around the packs, and as a handy team member in defence and in the ruck. He had grown into a tall, well-developed boy with a lopsided smile that could easily be mistaken for a sneer.

  Louie was football mad, too. Victoria Park had built a reputation as the home of the VFL’s most vocal and, at times, most abusive, foul-tongued and fearsome barrackers, and women and girls were among the loudest of these fans. Those among Collingwood’s sizeable legion of female supporters who couldn’t afford the price of an entry ticket sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to see their heroes on the ground—young women were known to climb with their boyfriends onto the roofs of the terraces in the streets surrounding Victoria Park so that they could catch a game. Smith Street on Friday and Saturday evenings was a known haunt of the players, and young women, with their mothers or their paramours—or alone—wandered under the eaves too, in the hope of a chance encounter.

  The best place for the boys and the girls of Collingwood to see their idols was on the paddock at club training on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Doc and Louie were regulars, often walking the short distance to the ground together. Like the other kids, they stood behind the picket fence at the edge of the oval while the players went through their paces. Afterwards, the young fans lingered outside the change rooms, often until dark, until the players emerged. They would then offer to carry home the kitbag of anyone who’d let them, but ideally someone really notable like the great Bill Strickland, Jack Monohan or Bill Proudfoot, or the exciting and always controversial Dick Condon.

  Fred and Frances Newby, Park Street, Collingwood, about 1915. Seddon family collection

  John Wren, a finely boned man of below average height and distinctively large ears, who was nearly always neatly dressed in a three-piece suit, was inevitably at training when Doc and Louie were there. Wren would lean forward on the fence and, without ostentation, observe the players closely. He’d wander over to the selectors and have a chat and, occasionally, head into the change rooms—he was one of the few people, besides a select few club officials, who were always welcome to do so.

  As adolescents in the newly federated Australia at the dawn of the twentieth century, Doc and Louie took advantage of the simple pleasures of their neighbourhood. When the football wasn’t on, both played cricket for local teams. During Melbourne’s stifling summers, when parched, dust-filled northerlies blew down from the bone-dry Mallee district, they’d brave the pollution and swim in the river at Dight’s Falls. Paddling around down there could be a treacherous pastime. The old flour mill was long since gone, replaced during the 1870s, for a time, by an explosives factory. But the giant waterwheel that had once powered the millstone was still in place, gradually rotting away but still creaking and groaning as it slowly revolved with the endless momentum of the vast brown river. Those who ventured too close could be sucked underwater and ground up under its great weight. It had claimed many victims over the years.

  Not far from the falls, the once notorious Reilly Street drain ran into the Merri Creek. The drain was originally a giant open sewer that ran across the Flat from Fitzroy. It carried human waste, industrial effluent and food scraps—and pretty much anything else that people wanted to dispose of—in a vast, stinking river that meandered down to the creek. Those who were unfortunate enough to fall into it sometimes died. In heavy rain it would overflow and disperse its contents across the Flat. In the late 1880s, however, the drain was deepened and covered over; Collingwood’s citizens proudly boasted that they had the largest, if not the deepest, covered wastewater disposal system in
all of the Australian colonies. In dry weather the drain was a boon for the local children, who would enter it at the creek and chase rats all the way up to Fitzroy.

  The children of the area also made the most of the local tip that sat by the Yarra, along with at least one municipal night-soil dump. Attracted by the garbage that fell into the river, schools of minnows and sleek eels bred and fed within the filthy slick that covered the water close to the bank. This part of the river was a great attraction for many of the local children, including, most probably, the adventurous Doc and Louie. One local said, ‘There used to be rats there and we used to amuse ourselves killing the rats and sliding down the inclines in the tip on bits of tin.’ The children foraged in the tip, and on summer evenings they used hooks fashioned from safety pins to catch the fish and eels that they attracted to the water’s surface with makeshift lamps—beer bottles filled with kerosene, with rag wicks.

  And then there was the fun that could be had on the trams that clunked their way up Johnston Street from the river and along Smith Street. Boys and girls would run to keep pace with the tram, get a handhold on one of the rails and fling themselves into the rear driver’s compartment to hitch a free ride … until the conductor eventually twigged and expelled them.

  Some children, meanwhile, made a few pennies by collecting the horse manure that lined the gutters of the main roads, placing it into paper bags and selling it to either the Chinese market gardeners who tilled the fields down on the riverbanks, close to Victoria Street, or to backyard vegetable growers. The best places for horse poo were outside the literally dozens of family-run pubs that lined Collingwood’s backstreets and main roads.

  Your nose could generally lead you to the nearest pub in Collingwood, for they were marked by the unmistakable, pungent aroma of horse shit and the strong ammonia smell of piss, chaff and beer slops. The draught horse teams that made deliveries from the nearby breweries would stop at the kerb outside a pub and chaff bags would be placed over the horses’ faces to ensure they remained still while the wagons were unloaded. The chaff spilt, the horses did their business on the street and the old barrels dripped onto the lot, creating an unholy aromatic brew even before the empty kegs were loaded.

  The pubs, like the football club, were pivotal to Collingwood’s sense of community. Men who could not afford to do so drank the money that should have fed their families in the same way that they gambled it away at Wren’s Tote. But the pubs were also a meeting place for sporting clubs and community organisations.

  The Collingwood team for that weekend’s game would be posted in some pub windows on Friday night. On a match-day Saturday when a game was being played at Victoria Park, the public bars were packed from opening time. They would largely empty just before the bell sounded to mark the start of the first quarter at 2 p.m., then there would be an almighty surge of men running along Trenerry and Abbott streets for saloon doors just before half-time. Scores were pinned to noticeboards in many of the pubs at the end of each quarter.

  Neither Doc nor his father nor his elder brothers would venture anywhere near the pubs. It seems that Doc’s mother, Catherine, who was brought up poor in Richmond, was all too mindful of the dangers posed by strong drink. When Doc was still a boy she extracted from him a promise that he would never imbibe or frequent hotels. He stuck to his word—no easy task, given he spent a lifetime around a football club where the social activities revolved, for the best part of a century, around the beer barrel.

  From boyhood, Doc was a physical fitness fanatic who worked hard at football training and ran and exercised regularly to supplement his agility and match readiness. It is likely that another reason he had for eschewing alcohol, in addition to his promise to his mother, was that it impeded his sense of self-control. He did, however, develop one passionate vice—cigarettes. ‘Doc never drank but he always had beer in the house for anybody who wanted to come in and have a drink. He smoked like a chimney. Every time I saw him in a photograph he had a cigarette in his hand,’ says Doc’s grandson, Allan Monohan.

  From the time he could first afford it, he smoked heavily and there is little doubt that he introduced Louie to the habit, too. It can’t have enhanced her fitness on the pitch for the Collingwood Women’s Cricket Team, but it was one of the many things Doc and Louie came to share.

  Despite being a non-drinker, Doc was never—at least in his younger years—a wowser. So he probably would have been as bemused as many of Collingwood’s other residents by the antics of the Salvation Army—the Salvos—who established their barracks in Wellington Street and then set about saving souls.

  Like many young people from the Flat, Doc and Louie would often walk up Johnston Street so they could then wander along Smith Street to look at the shops, smoke cigarettes and chat to their mates on non-football Saturday afternoons. The terrain was so familiar to them: they’d walk past the Don clothing shop, Bennett and Woolcock butchers and Lloyd’s ham and beef shop. They’d pass half a dozen greengrocers and wave to that rather odd Mrs Reidberg as they went by the window of her strangely out-of-place Paris House haberdashery, then continue past Wren’s Tote, with the cocky—a porkpie hat pulled low over his eyes and a smoke in his mouth—keeping watch for the constabulary, and finally they’d walk past the bakeries: Tressida’s, Maynard’s and Bowden’s. And there they’d be, the Salvos, on the corner, cult-like in their military regalia, with their tambourines rattling, their snare drums beating and their trumpets blaring as they sang their odd testimonials to try to win back the lost souls of the Flat, urging them to stay away from the Devil’s Dens—the pubs on every corner that exuded that foul, noxious aroma!

  ‘Don’t go into that place, it will bring us disgrace, it will drive your poor parents to the grave,’ they’d sing, quite needlessly really, as Doc and Louie strolled past together.

  Doc and Louie were, in their own adolescent way, a pair, if not quite a couple. And that made sense to them and to those around them. After all, they had been born just a few doors apart, they had gone to school together and they had always played with each other in preference to their own siblings. They also knew each other’s parents and brothers and sisters; for all their foibles, their strengths and weaknesses, and, in the Newbys’ case, their social pretensions, each had run in and out of the other’s home as if it was their own. Their relationship was well known on the local streets. Some called them mates while others went a bit further and said they were sweethearts, although usually in a teasing rather than accusatory or judgemental way.

  The truth was that they were teenagers who were leaving school, readying themselves to make their way in a tough world whose horizons were effectively Reilly Street to the north, Victoria Street to the south, the Yarra to the east and Smith Street to the west. As such, Doc and Louie probably didn’t analyse their friendship in quite the same way that others might have. They were together because that was just the way it was and the way that it always had been. And if a certain longer-term expectation—even just a fleeting dream of commitment—occasionally simmered somewhere beneath that reality, then it was probably some years away from coming to the boil as far as each of them was concerned. Doc and Louie were probably far greater hostages to the anticipation of others than they were to their own more relaxed expectations and plans.

  Nobody who sought to predict the future when looking at Doc and Louie as teenagers would have been at all surprised if they had later decided to marry. It happened all the time in Collingwood; in the years to come, two of Doc and Louie’s own children would choose life partners whom they had first met, as children, in their own street.

  Conversely, nobody would have been that surprised if Doc and Louie had drifted apart from one another.

  As it turned out, they didn’t do one or the other. They did both.

  Doc was twelve and about to leave school, and Louie was eleven, when Liverpool Street in Collingwood ceased to be.

  Despite being linked to Me
lbourne’s city centre by the tram, Collingwood was still comparatively isolated from the rail network that was rapidly connecting the expanding northern and western suburbs. And so, in the final months of the nineteenth century, as post-depression Australia stood on the precipice of a new federation of its colonial states, the Victorian Government compulsorily acquired Liverpool Street, one of Collingwood’s earliest established thoroughfares. The dozen or so houses that stood there were promptly demolished and a new railway line quickly laid so that the northern suburbs were now connected via Collingwood to the heart of Melbourne at the ornate Princes Bridge Station.

  The Seddons moved a short distance away to a rambling brick terrace house on a busy corner in Hoddle Street. It was only a short hop from there to the most important places in Doc’s life: Victoria Park for Magpies matches and training sessions; the shoe factories around the river, the products of which he would spend much of his life delivering; the bluestone St Philip’s Church, where his big family worshipped and wed, and from where they were ceremoniously sent to the grave; and the Newbys’ new place in Park Street. Fred Newby bought another house in nearby Turner Street for his ageing parents.

  The Park Street house was a simple but comfortable double-fronted, semidetached weatherboard, with a low, white picket fence and a high-pitched roof of corrugated iron. Between the Newbys’ front door and the new railway station stood Gahan’s Reserve, a park that the local council had erected on the swamp behind the town hall and around which Liverpool Street had once arced. It was a beautiful, open, community space by the Collingwood standards of the time, at the centre of which was a big round flowerbed, its infant European shrubs and bushes protected by wire meshing. Gravel paths, neatly edged with mossy rocks, weaved around the flowerbeds. But it was as if old Fred Newby couldn’t quite let go of the past, for every time he left his new home, he could not help but look at the spot where his old one had stood.