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Exploring Fishermans Bend North

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Work

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J Kitchen and Sons Factory site

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  The Drill Hall

  The Royal Australian Navy was established in 1911. Shortly afterwards this Drill Hall was built for the newly formed Navy. It inherited a sad collection of tired old ships. The first ship commissioned for the Navy was the HMAS Australia launched at Clydebank in Scotland in 1911.

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  Town Pier

  Town Pier, demolished in the 1950s, was used by the Navy for training purposes. Whaling boats were kept in the large sheds which were used to train in rowing and seamanship.

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  The Army and Navy Hotel

  This quaint and charming hotel is a reminder that the Sandridge Naval Brigade used to train in Dow Street.

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  HMAS Lonsdale

  These significant sites on the north and south sides of Rouse St were the home of HMAS Lonsdale, a training facility for the Royal Australian Navy. The sites were sold by the Commonwealth in 1992 and made way for residential development. Both sites are located on the former Sandridge Lagoon.

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  Great White Fleet

  From this place, in August 1908 you would have seen two lines of eight American battleships making up the Great White Fleet. at the mouth of the Yarra. The Great White Fleet visited Melbourne in August 1908.as part of a world cruise to demonstrate American naval power. The purpose of the voyage was to counter growing Japanese power in the Pacific. The ships visited Melbourne at the invitation of Alfred Deakin. The ships were painted white with gold trim. There were 14,000 sailors on those ships.

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  Answering the Call

  The location for the proposed 'Answering the Call' statue which will commemorate the significant presence of the navy in Port Melbourne.

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  Port Melbourne War Memorial

  Services are held at this memorial on Anzac Day each year in sight of the piers where troops left for both world wars. The AE2, one of the RAN submarines, was the first allied warship to penetrate the Dardeanelles. It was subsequently sunk by the Turkish Navy in the sea of Marmora.

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  Russophobia

  In the 1850/60s there was great anxiety about the imminence of a Russian attack on the Colony of Victoria. To counter this threat, batteries were placed on beaches around Port Phillip Bay. When a Russian vessel, the Svetlana, entered the bay in 1862 there was no gunpowder at Queenscliffe to give the salute. There was a growing sense that the colony needed a stronger navy to protect the vulnerable Victoria against the Russian and French threats.

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  J Kitchen and Sons

  J Kitchen started making candles in the 1850s and went on to become one of the largest soap and candle manufacturers in the state. The operation closed down in 2012, probably the longest continuously operating industry in Port Melbourne. Until 2012 it produced oleine, glycerine and stearine in industrial quantities as well as making familiar brands such as Velvet soap.All that remains of this sprawling industrial site is the fine 1925 administrative headquarters.

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  Steel Castings and Malcolm Moore:

  The site now occupied by Specsavers was once the home of Steel Castings. Here steel heated to 1600 degrees C was poured into sand moulds to create steel castings for heavy machinery. Over the road was one of the sites occupied by Malcolm Moore Industries which made cranes, buckets and other heavy equipment for the mining and other industries as far afield as Celebration Mine in Western Australia.

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  Turning the corner

  Merchants of Port, (formerly Salford Lads Club), next door to the headquarters of Globe, speaks of the changes taking place in Fishermans Bend. Good reviews attract people across Williamstown Road to this less familiar side of Port Melbourne. Vegetables, herbs and flowers transform this formerly bereft landscape into an appealing place to stop.

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  Airfield

  This is the approximate location of Richard Graham Carey's Melbourne Air Services. Carey was the first civilian to receive a pilot's license in 1916. He flew his Maurice Farman Shorthorns from here all over Victoria and further afield. He pioneered aerial advertising, using the underside of the wings of his planes for advertising as well as distributing leaflets from above.

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  Interactive

  Interactive is an example of the industry moving to Port Melbourne, attracted by the location close to the city and the freeway network. The company recently announced the expansion of their facility with the creation of 300 new jobs. Interactive offers computer services. Contrast their workplace with the steel foundry in Bertie St where men worked around furnaces heated to 1600 degrees C

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  North Port Station

  Once a full service station where you could buy a ticket to anywhere in Victoria, it is now a pleasant stop on route 109. In the heydey of industrial activitiy in Fishermens Bend, the railway line was continuously busy with freight to the piers, and workers to the industries west of the railway line.

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  Kitchens (Now Symex)

  Now boarded up and looking rather the worse for wear, this Art Deco building once housed the proud headquarters of the firm. With exceptional social facilities for workers, impressive boardroom and other fine features, it reflected the confidence of the industry at that time. At its peak, about 800 workers were employed here.

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  Woodruff Terrace

  These terraces, built in the late 1980s, retain the name of the large dairy that once occupied this site.

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  Port Melbourne Council Crest

  Note the Port Melbourne Council crest on this verandah. This is an unusual occurrence of the crest west of the railway line. Mostly, they can be seen on Bay St. The verandahs were added to buildings in the early 20th C.

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  Station Pier

  The pier, originaThe pier, originally built in 1854 as Railway Pier, was the ‘passenger gateway’ to Melbourne and the arrival point for hundreds and thousands of hopeful migrants after the Second World War. Countless arrivals who passed down the gangplanks and through customs recall this structure as their first memory of Australia. Station Pier is still a busy working pier. A large number of international cruise liners still dock here each year and the Spirit of Tasmania ferries its passengers to and from Australia’s island state. Today’s shipping schedules however are a faint echo of the frenetic activity of the past when ocean transport for people and freight was common. Gone are the enthusiastic crowds that came to throw streamers at the glamorous liners or board the paddle steamers for picnic cruises down the Bay to Sorrento and Queenscliff.

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  Port Melbourne Railway Station

  It is now a station for the light rail tram route 109 (stop 129 – Beacon Cove). Once the area near the piers was a vast industrial site. Between 1996 and 2006 it was radically transformed into the modern suburb of Beacon Cove by Major Projects Victoria and Mirvac. Stand on the former railway platform and appreciate the interaction of the old and the new. This railway line was the first in Victoria and was built to connect the port to the city in 1854. At one time the port and railways created employment for most of the men in Port Melbourne and many of Port’s factories were built nearby for easy access to the piers.

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  Victorian Centenary Bridge pylon

  The magnificent Victorian Centenary Bridge (designed to overpass the rail line) with its art deco detailing was demolished here in 1991. Only a lone art deco pylon remains as a souvenir of its splendour. This bridge, built during the depression by ‘susso’ or depression labour, celebrated 100 years of settlement. The art deco motifs of Centenary Bridge echoed those of the new and glamorous ocean liners and were intended by the Harbor Trust to create a fitting gateway to the State. The destruction of the bridge was part of a grand design by government and developers to create a luxury housing enclave that never eventuated. The Port Melbourne foreshore has been the subject of fierce debate as the local community struggled to preserve heritage in the face of intensive development.

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  The Rotunda

  The Women’s Welcome Home Committee built the picturesque Rotunda in 1918. Large crowds gathered at the Port Melbourne piers to see troop ships of young soldiers depart for both world wars. For families of the many that never returned, the view from the piers was often their last memory of their sons and brothers. Stand in the rotunda and imagine the music of brass bands performing here as surviving ANZAC troops disembarked at Station Pier; home at last after one of the bloodiest conflicts in history.

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  Liardet Memorial

  A memorial to Port Melbourne’s first permanent settler Wilbraham Frederick Evelyn Liardet, 1779-1878 is located on the foreshore opposite Nott Street. Liardet arrived with his wife Caroline and nine children in 1839 and erected a tent on the beach opposite what is now Bay Street. They had the extraordinary energy typical of many new immigrants. Within a year they had built a hut, a jetty, a watch tower and a rough road to the city for a daily mail run to Melbourne, dug a well, created a ferry service to Williamstown, and established the Pier Hotel. Liardet later painted early scenes of Melbourne that are now national treasures. His small tea-tree jetty was the forerunner of busy Town Pier at the end of Bay Street (1849-1950s). The Port Melbourne Yacht Club is now built on the site. Wilbraham had a gift for hitting every recession and wealth eluded him.

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  Seamen's Institute

  The building on the corner of Nott and Beach Streets housed the Seamen’s Institute , once a refuge for the crews of ships that brought immigrants from all over the world. During the last war it was a hive of activity as it accommodated refugees from south-east Asia fleeing from the Japanese invasion. By the beach, the two tiny ablution blocks have historic multilingual signs e.g. LADIES - DONNE - RYNAIKIA

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  Pier Hotel

  The building on the corner of Bay and Beach Streets is the Pier Hotel on the site of the timber Pier Hotel built by founding settler Wilbraham F E Liardet in 1840. It was described as a magnificent house – ‘Brighton on the Beach’– and was an instant success in the young colony as a fashionable resort.

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  Morley's Coal Depot

  Opposite on the south side of Bay Street is Morley’s Coal Depot which stored coal for fuelling the ships in port and the nearby Gasworks (see Working People’s Trail). This rugged 1872 bluestone building, named after the first Sandridge Mayor William Morley, is classified by The National Trust. Next to Morleys is The Local, originally the Royal Mail Hotel, one of the few surviving pubs that clustered around the Town Pier at the bottom of Bay Street. In 1876 there were an astounding 48 hotels in this small Borough. The pubs evoke the port town where sailors and workers slaked their thirst, where unions were essential, where common hardship formed an ethos of community support and mateship, and where allegiance to the Port Melbourne Football Club was supreme.

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  Mail Exchange Hotel

  Here is the Exchange Hotel. Large numbers of early immigrants were from Ireland, seeking refuge from poverty and conflict. For example, 191 orphaned Irish girls arrived in Hobsons Bay on the Lady Kennaway in 1838. On the south side of the road is the original Sandridge Post Office and Mail Exchange. The adjacent 1912 Naval Drill Hall was the first built by the Australian Navy after its formation. The 1860 Mail Exchange was one of the colony’s busiest in an era when all mail arrived by ship after long sea voyages. In fact Bay Street had its beginning in the mail track to the city created by the Liardet family.

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  Law and Order Complex

  The historic law and order complex comprises the police station, currently McCluskys lawyers, with its tiny but grim bluestone lock up in the rear. Next door is the 1860 Court House, now a café bar. If you can, check out the beautiful roof inside.

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  Market Reserve Shops

  The Market Shops comprise 191 to 219 Bay Street, built on the Borough Council’s market reserve in the 1880s. The corner building at 222 Bay Street was the former Port Theatre from 1913 to the 1950s.

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  Liardet Community Centre

  The Liardet Community Centre on the corner of Nott Street named after Port Melbourne’s community-minded founder. The building was once the Temperance Hall in the days of intense campaigning against the demon drink. The Liardet Community Centre is the meeting place of multicultural seniors groups and English classes. The City of Port Phillip has a mixed population from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Opposite at 147 Liardet Street is the former Port Melbourne fire station.

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  Nott Street Terraces

  Note the Victorian workers’ cottages on the left at Queens Terrace (144-132) and Jubilee Terrace (130-118). The Goldrush caused a spectacular increase in the population of Melbourne and it was not uncommon for large families to occupy such tiny homes in the late 1800s. In more recent times, walk-up and high rise public housing, such as that opposite the cottages, has often provided accommodation for new arrivals to this country.

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  Swallow and Ariell Steam Biscuit Manufactory

  On the corner of 53 Stokes Street is the original building of the Swallow and Ariell Steam Biscuit Manufactory, founded in 1854 to make ships biscuits. At one time most Port Melbourne families had a member working for ‘Swallows’. Few older residents would not recall the smell of fresh biscuits, once considered an essential characteristic of Port Melbourne. ‘Swallows Juniors’, which commenced in 1957, was an iconic TV show for many baby boomers. The complex eventually occupied almost the entire block but is now converted to residential apartments. It is the oldest, largest and most intact food processing complex in Victoria. The factory did not miss a single day in biscuit production for 137 years until it closed in 1991 earning a listing in the Guinness World Records. Opposite is the ‘counting house’ at 60 Stokes Street, which housed the offices of ‘Swallows’. On the corner is St Joseph’s hall and church.

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