Amble Through Place & Time

Walk or ride this eclectic 12-kilometre stretch of ‘burbs, bush, overlapping histories and intersecting cultures in one of Melbourne’s most inclusive suburbs. Story written by Kath Dolan, for Preston Place

Driving the length of Preston’s cool/ daggy, packed/ secluded, cosmopolitan/ utilitarian, ugly/ gorgeous High Street, what hits you are its glorious, melting-pot contrasts.

Gertrude Contemporary alongside Paintmobile and the Woolies carpark. Wellness spa abutting excavation site. The most dazzling, dizzying mix of food, retail, cultural and community services this side of Hopkins St Footscray.

From pho to Indian spices, Croatian books to African hair braiding, Middle Eastern groceries to design stores, street art to car yards, Aboriginal cultural services to migrant employment and training, and the convivial world-food feel of its much loved fresh food market, Preston retains the kind of diversity, inclusiveness and unvarnished quirk so many celebrated inner-city ‘destination’ suburbs lost long ago to gentrification.

It’s a testament to the waves of migrants who make Preston home, the custodianship of Traditional Owners the Wurundjeri People, and the cultural pride and resilience of the many First Nations people who live, work and study here.

Somehow it’s easiest to absorb Preston’s intersecting layers of history and culture on foot or bike.

Wandering Preston’s high streets, back streets and divine Darebin Creek Trail slowly gives the senses time to attune to the diverse influences in every direction.

It’s useful to orient yourself beforehand with a quick trip through time to understand some of the natural and human forces that have shaped this place.

Let’s go back in time…  To a time well before Preston was first settled as a township…  Before even the first custodians of this land.

Four hundred million years ago, this land was under a vast inland sea.

When this sea receded it exposed sandstone and layers of sediment, making way for Darebin, Merri and Moonee Ponds Creeks to form.

These eroded pathways and formed valleys, which filled around 50 million years ago with lava flows from volcanic eruptions right across western Victoria.

Over millions of years, the fledgling creeks cut through the cooling lava.

The human story of Preston began with the Wurundjeri people, who inhabited most of Naarm, now known as Melbourne.

The Wurundjeri Willam clan of the Woi wurrung language group lived in the area now called the City of Darebin.

For more than 40,000 years they cared for Country here.

This was a place of thriving biodiversity and sustainable living built on complex knowledge systems, cultural practices, lore, language, and kinship obligations.

The sacred lands and waters cared for them in return. The creeks offered reliable sources of water and teamed with life and food, including eels, fish and platypus.

Silcrete outcrops at Mount Cooper (now part of Bundoora Park) meant a ready supply of stone for their essential tools.

In the 1830s, British settlers disposed Wurundjeri people of their lands here and forced them onto missions far from their clans. In 1839 the government sold most of the land in what’s now the City of Darebin to graziers and land prospectors. Fertile land was carved into allotments for farms, dairies and market gardens. Less fertile places into potteries, tanneries and bacon-curing factories.

In the late 1880s the Collingwood to Whittlesea railway line reached Preston, sparking a land boom that almost doubled the population to 3600.

Residential and industrial growth accelerated into the 1920s and 30s, when capital works to combat the Great Depression introduced parks, reserves and roads and the first of the area’s many schools and educational institutions were built.

Before and especially after World War 2, as Aboriginal missions closed and many people returned to working class suburbs like Preston, Northcote and Fitzroy, they organised to support one another and campaign for social justice and self determination. Darebin became a pivotal connection point and home to more than 20 influential, community-controlled organisations including the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Association and Victorian Aboriginal Health Service.

Post-war immigration swelled Preston’s population by 37% in less than a decade. Migrants from Europe, particularly Italy and Greece, were drawn to the area’s affordable housing local industries like manufacturing.

Waves of migration, from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, have been shaping multicultural Preston ever since.

By 2011 more than half its residents spoke languages other than English.