Plot-holders have been protesting the closures at Collingwood Children's Farm (Image: Supplied, Facebook)

“I’ve lived in Abbotsford for 40 years… my dad used to farm here, I filled his gumboots, my children do now…”

“Six years farming here… before, I had come off the path; now, I’m back on a path…”

In the biting wind coming off the bend of the Yarra, a hundred or so gardeners, supporters and old lags — and a few curious joggers — were gathered last Saturday morning outside the community garden of the Collingwood Children’s Farm to talk about growing stuff on small plots in the midst of a big city.

In front of the three-quarter-acre of plots, complete with winter growths and small mezzanines, they spoke of trading vegetables, of looking after each others’ plots when people got ill, of different specialisations — “When I took over the current plot, I had more asparagus than I would ever want to eat!” — and of plots that have been farmed for decades being passed on when old “plotters” died.

But they won’t be passed on any more, if the leadership at Melbourne’s famous Collingwood Children’s Farm has its way. The farm’s management want the plot-holders out and a new vision of urban agriculture imposed. And in the struggle between the plot-holders and the farm’s management, there hangs a tale of our time. 

In early June, in the middle of Melbourne’s fortnight lockdown, the gates to the plots (they’re a little separate to the farm proper) were locked, excluding the plotters, and it was announced that the site would be cleared. using heavy machinery, without any further consultation with the plotters.

A new garden, with an emphasis on communal activity, would then be created with “input” from “previous stakeholders”. The reason given? A recently commissioned safety report had declared that alleged site hazards — including the risk of snakes from the Yarra, sharp tops of star pickets and twisty paths — apparently made the site beyond remedy.

Widespread anger

When the story broke in The Age on June 4, there was widespread anger across inner Melbourne — and scepticism about the safety claims. 

The Children’s Farm is a Melbourne institution, founded in 1979 after the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, housed at the Abbotsford Convent, vacated the place after 112 years of continuous occupation. Social workers at the Collingwood Housing Commission flats suggested creating an urban farm for children with little contact with nature or animal life.

A year after it was established under Collingwood council, a multicultural group of residents (Greek and Turkish, among other nationalities) asked if they could create gardening plots to grow vegetables there — akin to UK-style allotments, but somewhat larger. It has now grown to about 70 working plots.

For a few decades or so, the farm and the plots muddled through well enough, despite the odd period of financial difficulty. Twenty-five years ago, an attempt to build apartment towers on Yarra Bend had to be fought off. The whole community banded together in the struggle and the farm survived. 

But in the 2000s, as a wave of neoliberal governance swept over community institutions, the farm was reorganised as separate to (what is now) Yarra City Council, with a management committee and staff and a mission to pay at least some of its way. It became a site for weddings, photo shoots, conferences and workplace days-out, as well as the usual enormous amount of outreach to schools, community groups, medical communities and the like. 

But as the farm turned pro, the plots stayed slow — gloriously ad hoc and ramshackle, places distinctively shaped by their idiosyncracies. “Older hands say relations [between the farm and the plots] started to deteriorate about 10 years ago,” says Tim Handfield, who has had a plot for seven years. Members of management made no secret of their disdain for the plots, which detracted from the farm’s sleeker new image. The model of a “social enterprise” came in, and with it the jargon — best practice, KPIs, customer-oriented and, ironically, “stakeholders”, which in the farm’s voluminous management documents, is constantly wielded by people who do no actual gardening.

Full-frontal assault

In 2016, there was the first full-frontal assault on the gardeners, with a schmick landscape management plan that proposed to cover 70% of the plots with what the consultants called a “billabong”, the intention being to create a faux-wilderness area with an eye to wedding shoots. That never happened, but it put the community gardeners on notice.

In 2020, a report commissioned from urban horticulturalist Dr Chris Williams, while respectful of the plots’ history, urged the sweeping away of old practices; in The Age, Williams described the community garden plots as “isolated and dysfunctional”.

In 2020, of the last two original gardeners, one died and the other went into 24-hour care. While they were celebrated in the farm’s annual report, plot-holders say one of their plots — worked on and added to over decades — was taken over, demolished and handed to community groups, with no notice to the gardener’s family. Opinions differ as to how other community plots fared: “They did one harvest and never returned,” Handfield says, while acting farm manager Steve Costello says they “were interrupted by COVID”. (Farm CEO Conor Hickey has gone on vacation.) But it’s agreed they weren’t flourishing.

Soon after, the site safety report was commissioned and received, and the site closed. In an email (which Crikey has seen), and with no meeting, the 70 plot-holders were told their sites — in some cases built up over decades by many different hands, passed from families to friends and strangers — would be cleared, and there would be a time when they could pick up their tools and produce.

Crikey has seen the site safety report by corporate workplace consultants Productivity Matters. It is punctilious and professional in terms of occupational health and safety, and the way it has been applied by the Committee of Management is completely absurd. It summons up both standard risks (uneven paths, spiky star pickets) and outlandish ones (the possibility of snakes), and mashes them altogether. 

Thus, in the 1-5 risk assessment (1 = minor injury, 5 = death), the star pickets (i.e. the tall metal poles used for fencing) are combined with uneven pathways to suggest a risk that someone would slip on high ground, fall and impale themselves on the picket. The risk? Death plus serious injury, so 5 plus 3. Snakes? That’s a 5 — death — even though there is no record of snakebite on the site. “I’d love to see a snake,” said one veteran gardener at the Saturday meeting. “I’ve never seen one.” 

Internal lawfare

The use of the report thus seems to be a case of internal lawfare, offering a way to wind up the community garden plots once and for all. Since then, 10 of the community gardeners have had their farm membership cancelled (“a computer glitch,” Costello says), meetings with the committee cancelled on them, and the sudden announcement made that nothing could move forward until a third-party negotiator was appointed.

Committee member Sue Zhang says that this is to ensure impartiality, although the committee will be appointing the negotiator. Yarra Socialist councillor Steve Jolly brokered an arrangement with the CFMEU to do the necessary repairs free of charge; the management has failed to respond. Once planed flat, the plan is that the plot-holders will be invited to participate in the future of the site, along with “the community” and, inevitably, “the stakeholders”.

Staff at the farm complain that the protest over clearing the site ignores workplace safety concerns. That’s a reasonable complaint. But the proper remedy would appear to be workplace bans on staff being required to service that site area, not the destruction of something wonderful for the benefit of staff.

Which is where the farm management has got this so terribly, terribly wrong, and made this an emblematic clash of our times. This is the idea of an abstract community, one assembled by a bureaucratic process, superseding an actual community of gardeners, one bringing together and drawing upon the skill and passion of thousands of people over decades. This is organic community rising from the real history and composition of the place, the Mediterranean-Australians who brought the tradition of village gardening with them and spread it to those who wanted to take it up, the old inner city-residents, the new arrivals who came as students and bohos in the 1970s and ’80s and stayed.

The destruction of the garden is not only an attack on that Greek, Turkish, Italian and Macedonian heritage — which made the inner city, and is fading from it — it breaks the continuity the garden established with the tending the sisters did for 110 years, while the site was a convent. The sisters saw the hand of God in what they were doing, just as many of the gardeners may have felt and may, indeed, still feel.

But you don’t have to see that hand in order to see that this continuity, this ad-hoc, unplanned, feel-your-way engagement with the earth, is what matters and is as important in the life of a city as the social service/charity model of outreach and education.

“We’re committed to the Williams report vision for the farm,” Tim Handfield says. “But management seems to see the plots as undermining that vision — we don’t see that at all — and we’re committed to the vision of the plots as well.”

Committee members have been surprised by the reaction to the announcement. They shouldn’t be. As Steve Jolly told Saturday’s meeting: “This is the place that defeated the towers, saved Richmond Secondary College [and] the Fitzroy pool, stopped the East West link. It’s disappointing to see the Children’s Farm do this to people, but we’ll fight on — and occupy the site if we have to.”

With federal member Adam Bandt raising the matter in federal Parliament, the plot-holders across the airwaves, and widespread community disquiet, it has barely begun — even if state member Richard Wynne has been conspicuously silent on the matter.

This is the fight of the future. It’s no longer against crazy freeways or wholesale neighbourhood demolitions; it’s against the social planners — either well-meaning, obsessed with their own power, or both — with their arid conception of “social engagement” and their addiction to the tabula rasa, to planing life flat to start again the great failed idea of the 20th century, the false path. It’s that versus the messy, untidy, rich, various, grounded, earthy, spontaneous pursuit of life — the uneven way. Don’t try and trick us out of the garden with snakes. That never ends well. And if you do try, then what have you become?