News / History
New book celebrates the role open spaces play in our lives
Authors say parks are part of “the soul of the suburb”
Mark Phillips
RESEARCHING and writing a new history of Brunswick’s parks was a journey of discovery for its two authors.
There were pockets of Brunswick that Cheryl Griffin and Annette Whiter had no idea existed before they embarked on the project that has resulted in A Walk in the Park, the latest publication of the Brunswick Community History Group.
The book, which will be launched this Saturday, is the most comprehensive record of parks and public open spaces to have been put together about Brunswick.
Griffin, who edited the history group’s 2023 publication The Streets of Brunswick has done most of the writing while Whiter provided dozens of original new colour photographs.
It was while taking photos that Whiter made several fresh discoveries that ended up being included in the book.
One of them, the Merri Corner Community Garden at the bottom of Donald Street, she literally stumbled upon while taking other photos.
“I was down there looking at Phillips Reserve and Roberts Reserve and directly across the road there’s this community garden on the corner that’s been there since 2009 that I didn’t know existed,” she said.
Another gem that Whiter discovered was the Victoria Street Litter Trap in Kirkdale Park, which was created from a public sculpture commissioned by the Merri Creek Management Committee and has a functional role of collecting rubbish that would otherwise flow into the creek.
The book emerged from ‘discards’ of research by Griffin for The Streets of Brunswick. Her original manuscript had included a section on Brunswick’s parks which could not be fitted into the final book.
Additional research has resulted in a lavishly illustrated 91-page book that tells the story of almost 60 open spaces ranging from large nature reserves like the Merri Creek corridor to tiny pocket parks.
Once a weighbridge outside the Retreat Hotel in Sydney Road, this building was relocated to Brunswick Park, which is the suburb’s oldest park and one of the few that was intentionally designed as a public open space. Photo: Annette Whiter
Traversing Brunswick from west to east, Griffin says the book should be used more as a companion for exploring rather than a definitive guide or encyclopedia about the suburb’s parks.
Whiter’s photos attempt to convey a key element of the character of each park.
Griffin said the role of parks in the community was sometimes overlooked, but the value of shared open spaces should not be underestimated.
The important role that parks play in the community was reinforced by the Covid lockdowns, when they became a refuge for people from the confines of their home. The increase in apartment living in Brunswick over the past decade has fuelled a new thirst for open space.
Griffin says parks are part of “the soul of the suburb”.
“Preparing this book has renewed my appreciation of trees and open spaces,” Griffin writes.
“Apart from the practicalities of regenerating urban areas through making our neighbourhoods more liveable and greener and creating more shared common spaces where we can meet, exercise or just enjoy nature, we need places to feed the soul.”
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One of the themes through the book is how Brunswick’s open spaces have been shaped by several distinct phases of development. Several of the largest and most popular parks in Brunswick began as industrial land until they were no longer useful for that purpose.
Griffin said that unlike Coburg, which was laid out with a village reserve, Brunswick’s earliest European residents made no provision at all for public space when they began settling the land in the mid-19th century.
Even as late as the 1990s, Brunswick had the second lowest proportion of open space in Victoria.
With the exceptions of Brunswick Park, dating back to 1907, and Warr Park (1912), parks and reserves were developed in fits and starts, including when exhausted clay pits and quarries were transformed after also serving as rubbish tips, most notably Clifton and Gilpin parks in the centre of Brunswick.
Other parks were reclaimed from railway easements or farming lands. The trend continues today with the more recently opened Bulleke-bek, Michelle Guglielmo and Yubup parks being converted from industrial land and commercial land – in the latter case, a foundry.
But the development of parks has not all been in one direction: a section of the book also looks at a handful of parks that no longer exist because they have been built on, including gardens to the south and north of the Brunswick Town Hall.
Griffin said the book’s designer, Katrin Strohl, should also be acknowledged for her graphic interpretations which brought the manuscript alive.
A Walk in the Park will be launched at 1.30pm on Saturday in the upstairs members’ lounge at the Wild Geese Hotel on the corner of Sydney and Brunswick roads. Copies will be available for $25 at the launch and afterwards at Brunswick Bound, Brunswick Library and History Victoria Bookshop.
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