Gardiners Creek

Carmel, the charming new owner of 'Pandora's Book Cafe' in Gembrook, grew up on a farm outside Wangaratta, where she learned to cook good wholesome food. She left for the 'big smoke', as many young country people do, when she was 18, then went back home to Wang for a decade, if I recall correctly, before recently moving south again.

I was in 'Pandora's' on Saturday when I spotted a book as I browsed, waiting for my soup. The 'History of Camberwell', or close to that, was the title, by Geoffrey Blainey. I read the first few pages, it triggering a myriad of memories while I indulged the tomato and bacon soup with crispy buttered toast.

I spent a fair bit of time playing in Gardiners Creek as a child. Not as much as my my mother did; she grew up in Ashburton, 9 Donald St, a couple of stone throws east of the creek. When her parents moved there in the 1920's, their house was the first in the street and in the immediate vicinity. They were surrounded by paddocks. Elvie was their third child and only daughter, born in 1928.

Mum tells me the west side of the creek was swampy flatland that flooded when the creek, normally a gentle trickle, rose and spilled over it's deep banks. As the water subsided in the weeks following, various ponds remained, 20 or 30 feet long, scattered all along the flat. This was the 1930's, Elv's childhood. There were always tadpoles in these ponds. The creek and ponds provided a natural playground for kids and a haven for waterbirds like ducks, ibis, cranes and coots. In the trees and scrub there were crows, magpies, peewees, currawongs, robins and bluewrens.

This swampland had become sportsfields by the late 1950's and early '60's when I used to play in the creek, usually with Meredith, mum having dropped us off at her mum's on Saturdays and during school holidays on her way to her shop in Sth.Yarra. Jod, a bit older, was left at home in Mt.Waverley, roaming the bush and countryside looking for bird's eggs with his mates.

In our play in the creek we made dams and diverted water into holes we'd dug, making 'milk', the creek bed being a white clay that easily made the water look milky. We'd go back to nanna's house for lunch followed by an explore in her garden, or finding worms for the chooks, before the lure of the creek called us back. If the water was high we weren't allowed in, with strict orders to stand well back away from the footbridge to watch the torrent. The footbridge washed away a number of times in mum's day.

All these years later, sitting in 'Pandora's Book Cafe' reading Blainey's book, I learned where Gardiners Creek got its name. Not long after the aborigines that hunted possums, kangaroo and wallaby in the grasslands and black and teal ducks in the swamps first saw the white sails of a schooner in the river and tents along the bank, John Gardiner, a pastoralist from Tasmania brought a thousand sheep across Bass Strait. A storm caused the loss overboard of 130 sheep and drove the ship ashore well short. Gardiner walked overland to 'Bearbrass', around Western Port Bay.

He explored up river and found the grazing land so impressive he teamed up with his ship's captain to drive a mob of sheep overland from southern NSW, no longer wanting to risk Bass Strait. He was probably the first white man to build a residence in the area, somewhere near where Scotch College stands today. Around 1840, there were 4000 people in the new colony. There was a real estate boom as land was sold off around what is now inner Melbourne. Auctions were flooded with bids, prices went up and up, such was buyer confidence, before the hammer closed the sale to the bravest speculator.

My parents were married in the Gardiner Church of Christ in 1948. My father played footy for their football team in the eastern suburbs churches comp. I used to change from the train to the tram at Gardiner station when I attended Camberwell Grammar. Both sets of grandparents lived in the area all their married lives. My parents grew up there. Somehow it was nice to find out the origin of the name Gardiner. I asked mum did she know. She didn't and was glad to hear.

I checked the Melways to see the start and finish of Gardiners Creek. Upstream from where I used to play as a kid it meanders through Ashburton and Burwood and seems to start near the intersection of Middleborough and Canterbury Rds, in Wembley Park Boxhill. Maybe its creation is a rising spring or confluence of a number of small ones. It's something I'll explore one day when I'm in Melbourne. Downstream from Darling/Asburton it runs into the Yarra at Heyington.

In the 170 years since John Gardiner brought his sheep to graze on the banks of what was to become Gardiners Creek, the 4000 population of 'Bearbrass' has become nearly 4 million, of a Melbourne stretching from Pakenham to Melton and beyond. Strewth!

Give Carmel's soup a go, and have a browse of the books. You won't be sorry.