Rediscovering the Merri Creek

For years the Merri Creek had been treated more as a spare bit of land than as a waterway. It had bluestone and clay quarries. It had tips. Factories discharged effluent into it. People who grew up here remember it as a wasteland of metre high fennel, punctuated by cyclone wire fences. There was also a Board of Works master plan for Melbourne freeway construction that saw the creek as a road waiting to happen, and there was a road reservation running right down the bed of the creek.

During the 1970s, local awareness of the creek began to emerge. Labor branches and MPs joined with community activists in campaigns to stop the freeway, and revitalise the creek.
This was the beginning of a revolution in the role of the Merri in our community. Attitudes to the creek and the way it is managed have changed totally.

An important early step in this change was to see the creek as a single waterway.
Having Labor controlled councils in Brunswick, Coburg, Northcote and Preston helped get the co-operation needed for a co-ordinated approach to managing the creek. The Merri Creek Management Committee, chaired for many years by Northcote Labor councillor David Redfearn, was established to give form to the new vision of the creek as a single entity. The Councils had to agree to cede some of their statutory powers over the creek to the Committee.

One practical problem that had to be resolved was to work out who actually owned the land along the creek. It was something no-one had really stopped to think about before.
As well as a waste disposal and road reservation, the creek valley had been used by the State Electricity Commission (SEC) as a route for power pylons. In those days, statutory authorities like the SEC wielded great power and operated in a grey area where they seemed almost immune from government control. The SEC had closed off significant sections of the creek to public access. Robert Dorning beavered away as a Brunswick Labor councillor to persuade the SEC to open up the land at the base of the pylons to public access.

David Redfearn and Robert Dorning later worked from opposite sides of the Merri to get the footbridge built across the creek. Bridge building was strictly controlled, and it took a significant effort to get permission to build the bridge at all. It was also the first time a local community had been allowed to have a say in the design of a bridge.

A key moment in the revival of the Merri was the creation of Ceres. The land had been a bluestone quarry, then a municipal tip. It was made available for community use by a Brunswick Labor Council, and became the base for many community projects funded by successive Labor State and Commonwealth governments. Many of these focussed on the ecological rejuvenation of the creek environment. In 1982, the Brunswick Labor Council leased the land to Ceres.

The 1970s campaign against the freeway had been successful, but the creek would not really be safe while the reservation was still in place. In 1992, Carlo Carli as advisor to Planning Minister Andrew McCutcheon made sure the freeway reservation was removed in the last months of the Kirner Labor government. After being elected in 1999, the Bracks Labor Government instructed VicRoads to sell the land in the old freeway reservation that it still owned.

Like many such projects, the Merri Creek Linear Park and Ceres were visions driven by community activism, and realised through the support of sympathetic councils and governments. Many individual Labor people were involved as activists in these projects, while Labor administrations made key decisions on funding and law. It is a legacy to be proud of.


- Siobahn Hannan
Brunswick Labor History Series
No. 01/2005