Victoria Harbour Heritage Trail

STOP 14
Moonee Moonee / Moonee Ponds Creek

Location: At the end of Docklands Drive
A home at Dudley Flats

The Moonee Ponds Creek is an important Birrarung/Yarra tributary. Before European settlement, Indigenous people used the Moonee Moonee and associated wetlands for fresh water and food. After 1835, as industry and the colony developed it became a heavily polluted industrial drain and water transport for goods down to the Birrarung/Yarra for delivery to markets. In the nineteenth century areas to the west of the Central Business District were deemed less desirable and industries and trades, often noxious, and needing access to flowing water, gravitated to the creek (for example, tanning works and abattoirs). By the 1880s the nearby swamp had been drained and filled, but it was, in effect, an open sewer resulting from the waste overflow from the surrounding residential and industrial works.

In the 1920s the Railways Department constructed railway infrastructure on the reclaimed land to the north, including tracks, freight terminal and a railway maintenance yard. The southern section became both an area of civic embarrassment and a place of free refuge for the impoverished and the excentric and dubbed ‘Dudley Flats’. Shacks were constructed from building materials scavenged from the Harbour Trust tip. In 1942, The Age announced the Melbourne Harbour Trust had instructed the demolition of nine of the fifteen huts at Dudley Flats, West Melbourne, held under permissive occupancy by the Trust for future port development.

In the 1890s the lower Moonee Ponds Creek was widened for use as a canal for barges carrying coal to the North Melbourne Locomotive Depot. In the 1950s the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works realigned and concreted the creek from Strathmore to Flemington Road, in a further attempt to stop periodic flooding. In recent years some improvement work has focused on enhancing habitat and stabilising, reshaping, and replanting the banks of the creek. In 2023 work commenced to remove some of the concrete panelling along the side of the creek, the first step to restore the waterway to its original state.

The Moonee Ponds Creek formed part of the extended port infrastructure constructed to the west of Victoria Dock. A trail exists from the end of NewQuay beneath the Bolte Bridge (adjacent to the Ron Barassi Senior Oval) heading west along the lower reaches of the Moonee Ponds Creek. However, in November 2020, access to the trail was closed to the public to enable the construction of Sound Stage 6 at Docklands Studios. The Melbourne Maritime Heritage Network, City of Melbourne, and the Friends of Moonee Ponds Creek have jointly advocated that Development Victoria reinstates this portion of the Moonee Ponds Creek Trail next to Docklands Studios.

Today, much of the area along the edge of the harbour waterway at New Quay Promenade to the Moonee Ponds Creek is currently a crumbling, tangled stretch of demolished wharf debris. Responsibility for restoring this collapsed wharf is the responsibility of the major real estate tower developer of New Quay. When the wharf is restored in due course, a narrow strip of vacant land will become a waterfront linear park.

FURTHER READING

IMAGE CREDIT
A home at Dudley Flats, Bernett Collection, State Library Victoria