North Carlton's rows of elegant Victorian terrace housing and wide streets, which define most of the physical character of the suburb, provide a thin veil of Victorian respectability over a less salubrious layer of the district's early history. With few residents during the gold rush, North Carlton was colloquially referred to as Collingwood, in reference to the small settlement to its east. Its relative isolation from Melbourne made it an ideal location for one of Melbourne's earliest penal institutions -- the Collingwood Stockade. The sounds of children merrily playing at Lee Street Primary School today is in stark contrast to the sounds from this same site one hundred and fifty years ago, when prisoners were mustered for labour on the bluestone quarries of the stockade.

Victoria of the 1850s was prosperous and diverse, but it could also be a dangerous and unlawful place. Within days of separation from New South Wales, gold was discovered in Victoria, and with this came an influx of immigrants from around the world. The population of Victoria increased from 77,000 in 1851 to more than 500,000 a decade later. Of more interest, and quite often forgotten, is the shift that occurred at this time from purely Anglo-Celtic immigration, to a broader array of arrivals including Chinese, French, Germans and Americans, some arriving from the Californian goldfields. Many convicts and ex-convicts from New South Wales, Norfolk Island and Van Diemen's Land also headed to Victoria in an attempt to find wealth. With an increasing population, crime became more prevalent and maintaining law and order more difficult.

New facilities were needed during the gold rush to relieve the overcrowding of Victoria's gaols. Stockades, a type of makeshift prison, were built in metropolitan Melbourne at Pentridge (1850), Richmond (1852), Collingwood (1853) and the 'Marine Stockade' at Williamstown (1853). They supplemented other stockades constructed closer to the goldfields, and prison hulks moored off Williamstown. Dangerous prisoners were confined to the hulks, which provided better security, and the prisoners with shorter sentences, or having served part of their sentence on the hulks, were accommodated at the stockades.¹

The entry at bottom right is a memo to the Superintendent of the Collingwood Stockade dated 4 December 1854 regarding reinforcements of warders being sent to stockade.
PROV, VPRS 688/P0 Letter and Memoranda Book, Inspector-General's Office to the Superintendent, Collingwood Stockade, Unit 1, entries for December 1854

The word 'stockade' has been associated, particularly in recent years, with the Eureka Stockade conflict at Ballarat. Although the main similarity between the two sites is their use of a stockade, that is, a fence of timber stakes to enclose each respective site, the Collingwood Stockade did play a small part in quelling the civil disturbances in the Colony in December 1854. With the growing unrest on the goldfields, the Inspector General of Penal Establishments, John Price, arranged for Collingwood Stockade to be a depot for the assemblage of one hundred warders in readiness to 'march anywhere at anytime'. But this army of men would see no action on the Ballarat goldfields. Instead, during the Eureka conflict, they were deployed to assemble at the Melbourne Gaol to maintain law and order in the city. This left the stockades and hulks understaffed and resulted in an attempted rush for freedom by prisoners at Pentridge Stockade.²

There was a financial motive behind establishing the stockades. In contrast to more conventional types of gaols, prisoners in stockades provided labour while serving their sentences, as it was hoped this would help recover some of the cost to the government of the large-scale penal establishments it was forced to maintain. In the case of Collingwood Stockade, the proceeds from its prison labour almost funded the entire running of the gaol.³ Prisoners at the stockade were generally involved in quarrying and cutting bluestone for roads and kerbing. Basalt was found to a depth of ten metres in the vicinity of the stockade, and this meant that hundreds of men could be employed for many years quarrying the stone. The demand became so great for its bluestone that by November 1854 the Collingwood Stockade had been extended to accommodate three hundred men, in order to increase the output from its quarries. This increase in demand was a result of an agreement made between the City of Melbourne, the owners of the quarries, and the Penal Department, that labour, as well as the cost of cartage of the stone to Melbourne, would be charged at twenty-five per cent less than free labour.⁴