Video Transcript
This is a model of the Atherton Gardens housing estate. It was built in Fitzroy, which is an inner suburb of Melbourne, between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. It’s one of my favourite parts of the exhibition because it tells a hidden history. Lots of Melbournians are familiar with the high-rise estates on the skyline of Melbourne, but not many people know about how they were developed.
In the 1960s and 70s, the Housing Commission of Victoria built twenty-one high-rise estates in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, and they housed tens of thousands of people. The high-rise estates were built in areas that were considered slums by some, but not everybody agreed with that assessment. By the early 1970s, locals were protesting about the wide-scale demolition of their neighbourhoods and development of the high-rise estates stopped.
The original neighbourhood that you can see was reconstructed using both aerial and streetscape photographs, and plans of the area. The model’s made up of two different sections – the front part is the original neighbourhood, whilst the back part shows two of the four towers that were actually built on the estate in the early 1970s.
There were about fifty shops in the original neighbourhood, many of them along Brunswick Street and Gertrude Street, and you can see some of them along the front here.
The Atherton Gardens estate was named after Atherton Street, which was one of eight streets in the original neighbourhood. A number of families lived on this street, squeezed in alongside industries. When the bulldozers came through, all of these people were displaced, and had to find new homes.
The new high-rise concrete towers each housed two hundred families and provided modern facilities. Today, these concrete towers still provide a cherished home for many thousands of people in Fitzroy.