More than a kindergarten

An interesting sidelight on the changing demographic of Melbourne in the years after the Second World War was the decision to relocate the existing City Free Kindergarten in Exhibition St (on the corner of Little Lonsdale St) to Powlett Reserve in East Melbourne.

The district around the existing kinder was described as “becoming more and more a factory area” while 75 per cent of the children then attending came from East Melbourne and Jolimont. East Melbourne at the same time was described as “heavily populated”.

The new kindergarten was officially opened on November 21, 1951.

Although it was a new kinder one small part of the old was rescued and transported to the new site. This was the cubby house, or Wendy house as it was then known. A short article in one of the daily papers told of the children giving it a fresh coat of paint after its move, and a blurry photograph shows a three-year old child on the roof. Possibly safety considerations have changed over the years.

Eileen Davern, play-leader at the kinder for years, talked about East Melbourne’s population in those early days. Many residents were migrants coming from northern and eastern Europe and the Baltic States.

Many of them lived in cramped and poorly managed rooming-houses. One family of four lived in a single room, with a shared bathroom and had the use of a stove in a communal kitchen. Another family shared a house where the method of entry was by putting your hand through a broken window and turning the door handle from the inside. Then you would be overcome by the combined smell of boiled cabbage and the one shared toilet.

Eileen talked also of a Hungarian family who came out at the time of the '56 Olympics. She said she never saw the dad smile, and never heard him talk. “His face was just blank”. His wife, in Eileen’s words, “went to pieces.”

The kindergarten became a social hub. The teachers worked hard to learn more about the mothers and introduced them to one another if they thought there was a common interest. They held morning teas, often with a guest speaker, or lunches based on the food of a particular country.

As the years passed and East Melbourne’s fortunes improved the teachers got to know the community and learned how much every house was sold for. “We’d get a phone call, ‘Hello, hello, is that the seeing-eye centre of East Melbourne?’ We’d say, ‘Yes, it is.’” And the local real estate news would be passed on.

The kinder lost its state and council funding in the early 1990s and closed. Now the East Melbourne Childcare Co-operative carries on the good work. •