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| Cobug at the end of the twentieth century: a row of neat Californian bungalows (known locally as State Bank houses). |
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| Photo by Jenny Lee, 1999. |
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| Coburg mid-nineteenth century: Pentridge Stockade, 'the first established recepticle for criminals' surrounded by farmland. |
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| Watercolour dated 1849, by an unknown artist. Contributed by the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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Coburg, eight kilometres north of Melbourne, was originally named Pentridge by the surveyor Henry Foot, whose wife was a native of Pentridge in Dorset.
Its history has been shadowed by the presence of Pentridge prison, which was Melbourne's main jail from 1850 until the 1990s. The prison site was partly chosen because of its then rural location, and partly because of the availability of basalt. Prisoners were kept busy breaking stone for roads and cutting it into blocks to construct the prison itself. This was hard labour indeed. The jail grew into a massive structure surrounded by high bluestone walls, inside which new prisoners were broken in by a regime of separation and silence.
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| Image entitled 'The penal establishment at Pentridge - the silent system'. Three prisoners are shown wearing hoods with slits for their eyes. |
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| Wood engraving published by Ebenezer and David Syme, in The illustrated Australian news for home readers, August 20, 1867. |
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Local residents soon began to look for ways of distancing their village from the prison. In 1867 a local priest, Father Charles O'Hea, called a town meeting to choose a new name. The meeting was divided. A Catholic contingent suggested Tipperary, Donegal and Limerick. Protestants plumped for Coburg to honour Queen Victoria's husband, a member of the German royal house of Saxe-Coburg. The royalists won the day, and Coburg became the official name in March 1870.
Melbourne's land boom in the 1880s brought speculative development along the railway and tram lines, but much of the surrounding country remained farmland until after World War One. Then, in the 1920s, street after street of detached Californian bungalows sprang up, many financed by the State Bank of Victoria. Coburg's population more than doubled between 1920 and 1930, reaching 40,000 in the latter year.
The scope for urban growth has been limited since then. Coburg's population in 1996 was only about 9000 greater than in 1930. Postwar Coburg is a mixed suburb, with pockets of manufacturing, a commercial strip centred on Sydney Road, and one of Australia's largest concentrations of inter-war houses, many of which have been renovated in the 1990s.
Coburg now faces a watershed with the closure of Pentridge prison. In 1999 the prison site was sold to a local company, which has slated it for a major redevelopment, combining residential subdivisions, knowledge-based industries, arts and entertainment facilities and a historical precinct around the imposing structure of the 'bluestone castle' itself.
Further reading: Richard Broome, Coburg: Between Two Creeks (Lothian, 1987).
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Jenny Lee for ITF.
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