The street that keeps rebuilding itself

THE ARCHIVE

The Northcote Leader published from 1888 until 1955, sixty-seven years of photographing this street. The collection is held by Darebin Libraries and is free to read.

We will run one of these every month. If you have a photograph of a Darebin street corner taken more than thirty years ago, we would like to see it.

Then. The same stretch of High Street, photographed for the Leader. Date and plate number to be confirmed with Darebin Libraries.

Now. Photographed this month from as close to the original camera position as the footpath allows.

The thing that survives on High Street is not the shops. It is the addresses.

Number 202 is a European bistro that rewrites its menu every week. Number 337 is a Chinese hot pot restaurant where you cook your own dinner at the table. Number 449 is a ninety-seat cafe named after an Italian neorealist film from 1948.

None of those three things existed here a generation ago. All three numbers did.

That is the pattern the archive shows more clearly than anything else. The street has been continuously occupied and almost continuously rebuilt, and the only fixed points are the lot boundaries, the kerb, and the tram.

The 86 runs the length of it, from Westgarth up through Northcote and Thornbury to Preston and on toward Reservoir. The council sits at 350 High Street. The street is the reason the municipality has the shape it does, a long thin thing strung along a tram line, rather than a town with a centre.

Look at the two photographs above and the first thing most people notice is what has gone: the verandahs, the signwriting, the width of the roadway before parking took half of it.

The second thing, if you look longer, is the roofline. Strip away the awnings and the shopfronts and a surprising number of the buildings are the same buildings. A 1930s parapet is still a 1930s parapet with a different name painted on it.

The Leader covered all of this as it happened, week by week, without any sense that it was recording anything. Shop openings. Shop closings. Council arguments about the tram. The price of land. Sixty-seven years of that, and then in 1955 it stopped, and nobody marked it.

What it left is the best record anyone has of what this street used to look like, and the reason we can put these two photographs side by side at all.

WHERE TO LOOK

Darebin Heritage holds over a thousand articles, the Northcote Leader archive (1888-1955) and the Northcote ratebooks (1882-1900).

All free, all online, through Darebin Libraries.

HOW TO LOOK UP YOUR OWN STREET

Darebin Heritage is free, it is online, and most people in this municipality do not know it exists.

It holds more than a thousand articles on local history, alongside two collections that are unusually useful if you want to know about one specific address: the Northcote Leader archive, 1888 to 1955, and the Northcote ratebooks, 1882 to 1900.

The ratebooks are the ones that surprise people. They record who was rated for which property, year by year, through the decades when most of these streets were first subdivided and built out. If your house went up before 1900, there is a reasonable chance the first person to pay rates on it is written down.

AND WHAT IT WILL NOT TELL YOU

Archives are patchy. Photographs survive of main roads, civic buildings and anything that burned down; they rarely survive of ordinary residential streets, which is exactly what most people want to see.

Reproduction also needs permission. The collection is free to read, but publishing an image from it, whether in a paper like this one or on a wall at home, goes through Darebin Libraries first.

We have a standing arrangement for this page. If you are after one image for yourself, the library's Ask a Librarian form is the way in.

SEND US ONE

Have a photograph of a Darebin street corner taken more than thirty years ago?

We will find the same view, photograph it as it is now, and run the pair here.

Family albums are welcome. We scan and return.

betweenthecreeks@collings.com.au