North Melbourne locomotive football team, premiers 1906.
VPRS 12800/P1, H 2642.

5. Football and Gas

The local landmarks of the area around Shiel Street included the site of the old gasworks and the Arden Street oval, home of the North Melbourne Football Club. The Metropolitan Gas Company supplied gas to the area and surrounding country.

The North Melbourne rate journal of 1874 lists Albert Mattingley living in a property on Shiel Street. The Mattingley family established the Errol Street School. In 1915 Albert Mattingley, in his recollections of early North Melbourne, described what was once Batman’s swamp:

‘On the waters of the large marsh or swamp lying between North Melbourne and the Saltwater River graceful swans, pelicans, geese, black, brown and grey duck, teal, cormorants, waterhen, sea-gulls and other aquatic birds disported themselves; while curlews, spur-winged plover cranes, snipe, sandpipers and dottrels … waded in its shallows … Eels, trout, a small species of perch about 2 inches long, and almost innumerable green frogs inhabited its waters, and the last-named on warm nights held a regular serenade that could be heard over the greater part of the town.’

PROV is located on Sheil Street the building goes through to Macaulay Road. When students visit PROV they can easily observe the enormous changes to the landscape that have happened since Mattingley wrote his idyllic description above.

Students could go for a short walk and observe evidence of the enormous changes that have happened in the area, such as the construction of high-rise Housing Commission blocks.

Back to: Town of North Melbourne Home

Back to top