The Edinburgh Gardens are Melbourne's equivalent of the British
village green.
They is a marvelous combination of open space, sportsground, barbecue
area, gardens complete with long-established European elm trees,
neighbourhood house, skateboard bowl, tennis and basketball courts, ethnic
festivals, bandstand, bowling greens and bocce links, remnants of the old
Melbourne rail loop, gracious living, living on the poverty line and a
magnificent grandstand dating from its days as the home of the mighty
Royboys and a small raised rotunda suitable for housing a very large speaker
or a very small band. And gazing down it all is an invisible Queen Victoria
on her plinth - after all she had granted the land. The plinth is still
there but the 1905 wooden statue of Her (very) Highness was swiped some time
ago. Maybe it is just as well - I'm not sure what she would make of some of
the couples on the grass.
The Edinburgh Gardens are non-judgemental. They've seen it all from
struggling depression football teams to trendy feminist parties. From local
kids who can't afford socks to wear to handsome African women in full
regalia who would knock your socks off.
And dads and mums and kids and geriatric uncles and courting teenagers
and spiked haired youths and newly arrived immigrants and old-timers and
Macedonian soccer teams and poncing frisbee-throwers in revealing shorts and
dedicated training athletes and dogs of doubtful parentage and possums
who've been here long before any human settlement and W-class trams rattling
by - taking it all for granted - believing that everybody in the world has
access to a park like this.
Well they don't. You only need to move a little further into the inner
suburbs before you find parks bristling with self-righteous signs like
"Passive Use Only!".
For the historically minded:
Queen Victoria provided the grant of land for the gardens
and they were laid out in 1865 by Clement Hodgkinson. The original design
incorporated an existing creek as well as ponds and billabongs. With the
coming of the ill-fated outer circle rail route, a railway line and station
were built in the middle of the park. Faint remains can be seen today. The
railways sub-let some of the land for commercial use, including a factory
producing tin cans known to the locals as "the cannery". Over time, the
creek was covered over, the cannery reverted to public parkland and numbers
of other changes have occurred.
In recent years, the Brisbane Lions football team have
acknowledged their origins from the Fitzroy Football Club by celebrating
their premiership victories at the old Brunswick Street Oval that is now
part of the Edinburgh Gardens and which was the home ground for the Fitzroy
Football Club for 84 years. (You can also find some additional information
regarding the history of the gardens in the feedback to our Melbourne
Newsletter of 22 April 2007.)
