Collingwood Children's Farm
A working children's farm on the banks of the Birrarung, four kilometres from the CBD, still run largely the way it started in 1979.
Overview
Collingwood Children's Farm, located across the road from Abbotsford Convent, is a Melbourne favourite hangout, with a heartwarming story of how it came to be. A community committee leased the land from Collingwood City Council in 1979 with a simple idea: give city kids without backyards somewhere to learn how to care for animals and get outside. Local schools pitched in on the fencing and gardening, and members of the Greek Elderly Citizens and Turkish Welfare Group helped clear the weeds and dig out the first community plots. The farm has stayed close to that founding brief ever since — community engagement and a connection to nature come before anything else.
The land carries an older history too. Before the farm, this stretch belonged to the Abbotsford Convent, run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd from the 1860s as a reformatory, orphanage and industrial school that housed close to a thousand people at once. The paddocks along the river were used for grazing cattle from the 1880s, and the farm's barn dates back to the early 1900s.
Steve Costello
Today the farm is laid out as a set of permaculture-designed zones rather than a random scatter of paddocks. Water from the duck pond runs through a reed-filtered drain and underground pipes down to the orchard, fertilising the fruit trees, while the chooks and ducks clean up whatever fruit falls before it can carry pests into the next season. It's still largely self-funded, run on entry fees, donations and volunteer labour rather than government money. It hosts school tours, camping groups, a Young Farmers Program and weddings alongside the daily business of feeding and caring for the animals.
The Farm Cafe sits on site serving breakfast and lunch, and it's accessible straight off the Main Yarra Trail as well as from inside the farm, so a coffee stop doesn't require paying to get in.
Steve Costello
Images: Steve Costello.
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