Friends of Merri Creek have been conducting oral history interviews with residents who have lived on the Creek before 1970. The interviews form the Merri Creek Oral History Project.
This is an interview with Frank Cox who, as a Coburg Councillor for many years, had an influence on the improvements on the Creek. The interviewer is Ruth Shiel. The date is 12 September 2012. The interview takes place in Frank’s house in Village Drive, Reservoir. The interview is part of the Merri Creek Oral History Project.
RS: Could we start by getting some of your personal background. Where and when were you born?
FC: Bacchus Marsh, 97 years ago.
RS: Where did you live before you came to Coburg?
FC: I lived in the Latrobe Valley, I lived in Brighton, I lived in two or three places just after the war. From the Mallee, I came down to Coburg in 1947.
RS: Whereabouts in Coburg did you live?
FC: I lived in Elizabeth Street in the shops there for quite a few years, then I lived in Jackson Parade in Coburg for many years as well. Then I came to the Retirement Village.
RS: And where is Jackson Parade in relation to the Creek?
FC: Just down the road, it just runs off Murray Road close to the Murray Road bridge.
RS: When you first came to Coburg, what was the Merri Creek like?
FC: The Merri Creek was just overgrown, when we had a lot of wind and rain, the plastic bags would get caught. People would come into my shop in Elizabeth Street and say, ” Well the fleet’s in today”. That was my first connection with the Creek. Nothing took place on the Creek for a long, long time. I was elected to the Coburg Council in 1957 . In about the middle 60s they decided to form what was known as the Merri Creek Co-ordinating Committee. That only consisted of two municipalities, Coburg and Brunswick. We looked after the northern end, and Brunswick the southern end of the Creek. That was the body there that was to clean the Creek out, channeling and things like that. And that worked pretty well for a while, and they were able to basically set out measures for how close you could build next to the Creek, and all sorts of things.
The Newlands High School was set up then. Motor bike riders used to drive in where the High School is now, so we had to get it fenced to stop that. We had to go to the Government to get a boundary line, but now that fence has disappeared, so they can now just about build down right to the Creek!
So the question of the Creek itself didn’t play any great part in what I was doing.
RS: Do you remember what the water quality was like?
FC: Not really, no. I was too busy raising a family and running a shop and all sorts of things to get involved in those things.
RS: Did the locals use the Creek much?
FC: No, I don’t think so. They tried to walk along the Creek at times, but the main concern was the flooding that the Merri produced . There was the Lake just up the road, at Murray Road, and that created a lot of problems when the floods came down. All the rubbish that came down with it. But that was about the only thing that I had much idea of about the Creek.
It was when the Co-ordinating Committee was formed that I became much involved. That went on for quite a while and it seemed to get things going, then the Board of Works took over the creeks. That changed the situation.
The Coburg Lake park area was very good, there used to be a high tower there where the kids could dive in and go swimming. But that Creek became so polluted that the Council pulled the whole tower down, and wouldn’t let the kids go in there. I have some thoughts as to whether that Lake should be there at all. At the entrance to the Lake at the top end, there was a cross over there, it was a dangerous one, I remember, when it was in flood. There was a small girl that got drowned there. I arranged to get a railing across so that the water would flow over it, but you had a railing to hang onto. I think that is still there.
Where the Edgars Creek joined the Merri, there used to be a lot of flooding. I became interested because this was just down the road from me, near the Murray Road bridge where the basketball stadium is now. The flooding went right out as far as the golf driving range, which is still empty land of course. They were going to build a freeway through there, but they didn’t, we stopped them.
RS: You worked for quite a while with Kodak. How do you think Kodak related to the Creek?
FC: After I got out of business, small businesses were closing down, and we closed the shop down , they offered me a job. They had offered me a job earlier which I didn’t want then. Later I went back to Kodak, I thought I’d spend some of my retirement there. Kodak was a very good company, they built on an old football ground, they were a good employer. I was a Commissioner on the Board of Works then, they wanted me back to fill a position, because another chap was retiring. The boss just said, you do what you want to do, as long as I know where you are. So I spent the last five years working for Kodak, and I spent a lot of time between the Board of Works and the Council. I helped them build that big building on top of the hill there. We got all the planning changed for that. All that time with my other work on the Board and the Council, they never docked me one cent. But unfortunately they have passed on, the camera business is completely different nowadays. They had a big chemical area from which they took all the developing materials to their shops. The factory extended right down to the Creek, and then they bought the place up the hill which used to be McKays dairy in the old days.
RS: You said that Kodak built a bridge over the Creek?
FC: Yes, they built a bridge across the Edgars . The architect told me that this bridge has a slant on it like no other bridge . That went in there because the traffic into Kodak became very difficult in Elizabeth Street, the stuff going in and out and everything. They built the big place across the road. It’s four storeys high, but it only had one floor . It was the most modern factory that was built then, it was all done by push button! It was very economical . That is still there, the rest is not there. I don’t really know what is happening with that building at this stage. I’ve heard many stories, but I don’t know.
RS: Getting back to the Board of Works, what did they do to mitigate the flooding?
FC: Well, the floods would come down with a good solid half an hour’s rain way up at Kalkallo . All the water would come down and wash out anything in the system , so that you couldn’t walk under the bridge there at Murray Road. The Edgars would come into it there as well, and all that area would be flooded. It went down to Edna Grove further down the Creek off Nicholson Street. All those houses there would all get flooded out. So it was quite a problem as to what they could do with that.
The Board of Works was in control there. They bought about four houses, and left open spaces so that the water could flow through. That was the first step that the Board took on the whole issue. That worked for a while , but later they came on to putting in retaining basins. They built one,that is still there at the moment, across there from the hotel in Kalkallo. If you look straight across , you can see it, but it is hard to distinguish . Waterfalls were coming straight from the valleys into a farmhouse there. The retaining basin would contain the water and let it flow across or under Sydney Road, and into the Merri and continue on. That solved the flooding problem. It’s a system they use in a lot of creeks these days. It was very successful. That water came in at such a pace from the hills. We investigated right up to the source of the Merri. Once the water was contained, it was fed through easily. The cattle grazed on it when the basin was empty, but when the water was coming they had to get the cattle out of it. The Board of Works, I remember, paid a couple of million for that area. The landowner was Mr. Ng. The flooding stopped, but all the rubbish would finish up at the Coburg Lake.
A lot of other things took place. Industry moved in to the northern part of Coburg, and into Broadmeadows particularly and to a lesser degree into the top end of Edgars Creek. That was polluting the Creek quite a lot. We had a lot of problems there, I think they still have problems. But today they can trace back the material that has been let into the Creek. I remember one time when I still lived in Coburg, there was this terrible smell and I couldn’t make out what it was. Anyrate I rang up my mate and said, what’s this terrible smell coming out of the Coburg Lake. Well it was some paint crowd that was letting stuff out at two o’clock in the morning. And of course it all stopped in the Coburg Lake. So we a thought,fair enough, let’s get rid of it. So I went to the Board of Works and said let’s get that stuff out of there as much as we can. No, you can’t do that, they said. I said, why? Oh, the people down stream will complain about it, they replied. Well, we weren’t going to put up with that. Well, I knew a couple of blokes, one bloke’s wife was driving the car, the other had the key, they drove down there, used the key, let it all go, then hopped in the car and drove away (laughs). Nobody knew what had happened! That pollution went straight down, and got rid of the smell. There was never one complaint about that. That was an untold story ( laughs).
It showed that the Lake itself was becoming a bit of a catchment area. See at that stage, the Merri Creek Co-ordinating Committee was virtually only Coburg and Brunswick. There was a small amount from Preston coming in, where Preston touched on to it at the top. They had cleaned it up quite a lot, once that happened, the question of the Merri Creek seemed to fade away. For some reason, the Co-ordinating Committee seemed to go quiet. I remember Anne McGregor as the last secretary and David Redfearn from Northcote Council was on it then. It was decided it would have to go, and by that time I was dropping out of the Council, I’d had 33 years , that was long enough.
The question was, what was going to be done for the Creek. There were still problems there. My thoughts then and still are, that the Lake is not serving any purpose at all but as a collection spot for a lot of rubbish. I think somewhere along the line, someone should think of letting it go. It’s very bad water if kids get in it. And it may really stop the flow possibly.
The other part of the issue, which is common to all those waterways, is to try to get a pathway on each side where possible, cleaning up some of the stuff on the edges. That I think would attract push bike riders and even the walkers. It would help the public appreciate the Creek. I don’t think they worry much nowadays about snags and such in the Creek. The main idea should be to get the public interested in the Creek right through. Flooding no longer takes place, which used to be the red hot question. I remember once there was flooding near the golf course bridge, and I got caught in the car there.
Once the flooding was controlled, people lost interest in the Creek. The original Committee seemed not to be able to increase public support much. An old mate, Murray Gavin, and I , we thought about this a long time ago. We went down there a couple of times , the south side of Bell Street bridge, cutting
down all the blackberries and everything like that. It was a difficult job . We did it so people would come to use the Creek as a walking track or a push bike track. But we didn’t get anywhere because I dropped out of the Council , and Murray did himself. And there was nobody else to pick it up . There was no flooding to worry about. I keep coming back to that issue. When there were big floods they had the TV cameras there, and all sorts of things. That now wasn’t happening.
Creeks generally serve a purpose, and they should keep them as clean as possible. I don’t know whether you would ever be able to say that they should be absolutely clean , simply because the industrial areas are hard to control. And you get some people like the Thompsons in Coburg who would concern themselves with a very local area. They didn’t look at the Creek as a whole. And the Creek, as all these creeks are , they all finish up in the Yarra. You need to work backwards. If you could get paths , they tried to do something with this with pushbikes . It’s following that system . I think if you got that , people would stop and use them more for walking . They would then think more about the Creek. if you have people thinking about the Creek, they are more likely to help clean up the Creek. I think the starting of the Merri Creek Co-ordinating Committee was a very good thing, there’s no doubt about that.
Those people and the people down at Brunswick did a marvelous job.
RS: You mentioned before that pollution came from Pentridge. What was that?
FC: Pentridge, at one stage, there was a little bridge in Newlands Road, which is still there, we left it there and built another bridge, but while we were doing this, one day we couldn’t work out where this smell was coming from. We traced it back to Pentridge, all their slush and all the rest of it was coming into the Merri. That was just before we built the table tennis centre. And as a result of what was happening with the Creek, we decided to build the swimming pool. So that is a history of how all those things happened. And it was all tied into the Merri Creek.
So that was an area that was brought back into life, it had been becoming a bad area. So that is the reason I’m still of the opinion that the Lake doesn’t solve anything. It is difficult to control industries, so it would be better if stuff was allowed to continue on.
With creeks, you have to start at one end or the other to try to improve the water quality that’s going into the Yarra, because that finishes up in the bay
If you only try to fix one section it’s not going to work. Whether you are going to get any government at this stage to come on board, I don’t know. I think it would be better if a government body was set up to take on all the creeks that come into Melbourne to see control handled properly. Not just isolated here and isolated there. That’s what the Board was doing, and it was a good set-up. Unfortunately the Board got mixed up in problems of one kind and another, but the Board itself was a good body, with control of all the waterways. The Board of course was disbanded, and many people today think it was the worst thing the Government did, and I helped to do it! There were problems with Trickey when he was the Chairman, but Croxford was the real bugbear. I was Chairman of the Northern Region, and I would run into Croxford in Canberra and elsewhere and got on alright. But the Northern Region was also disbanded, which is a pity.
The municipalities tend to live inside their own boundaries, you can get a lot of work done here, but not there, because next door couldn’t care less. So you need to have a main body that would look at all these creeks, like the Merri and the Darebin and those that eventually join up. There are some good areas, Christine Campbell has been working a lot on that area near the basketball courts which used to be rough country. We had to build a bridge down there so that people could walk along the Merri there right through to the bridge, and could finish up in Carr Street and right through those whole areas of the Merri. That was the general idea that we had to try to bring the whole area of the Creek together.
We hadn’t the time then, but this is one of the things that they should seriously consider, that would be a good thing for the municipalities all the way down, to all be under one appropriate body to control development. That crowd that pulled down Pentridge, they broke all the rules. They built right down to the Creek, they should have been stopped but they weren’t apparently. And there was a big drain that came in there, a storm water drain, that brought a lot of water in from near the corner of Bell Street and Sydney Road. That brought a lot of rubbish in. An appropriate body would have been able to track these things through. In that day and age, of course, it was just get the water out of your road. I think we have grown up a bit since then.
But that’s my idea. Whether I will be around long enough to see it happen, I don’t know! You need to clean up all the area, they have machinery now to do that, to get rid of the blackberries and all that. There are some high slopes, but that shouldn’t be a great problem.
RS: The move to put the freeway down, were you involved in the campaign against it?
FC: Yes, the freeway was to come up from the Clifton Hill area , and was to come right across and to stop at Bell Street. Then it was to come right up that slope where the big Kodak building is built. It was to go straight through there and pick up Camp Road. It didn’t seem to us that it was going to serve any purpose. They were going to bring it close to where I was living in Jackson Parade. I found survey pegs around there! There was a Councillor , he was all for it, a great idea he was yelling and screaming at Council meetings but he woke up one day and found pegs and things outside his place!! Oh, we’ve got to stop this freeway. It’s marvelous how people change their mind. So we stopped that, it couldn’t serve any purpose.
RS: The. Council was really against it?
FC: Oh yes, we opposed it. It got stopped ultimately.
RS: So it wouldn’t have been much use to have the freeway up the Merri?
FC: No, but in some cases freeway and bypasses are necessary, for example the Maltby Bypass at Werribee which the Board of Works built. It’s a car society and you probably have to accept that.
In regards to the Creek, you have to look at things slightly differently from when the Merri Creek Co-ordinating Committee came in. The running of the Merri Creek is certainly a lot better through their efforts, there’s no doubt about that, they were the front runners in the whole show. But now we just have to take another look at the whole area and its maintenance and money has to be spent on both sides of the Creek.
If that is done, it will attract people to the Creek. You still can’t walk down some parts of the Creek
RS: Well, thank you very much, Frank, for taking part in the Project.
This is an edited version of the interview.
