This website is the owners’ notes for 41-43 Raphael Street, which is currently for sale (the official ad is here). On this page is our introduction. To read our thoughts in more detail, click on the links to the appropriate pages in the index to the right.
Introduction We are so sad to be selling our house for a much bigger one a bit northwards. When we bought 15 years ago from a family who had lived here for 25 years, there was only one cafe in Abbotsford (at the Children’s Farm), but we thought it was a dream location: 150m from Melbourne’s loveliest pub in The Carringbush, next to Collingwood Station and the beautiful Gahan Reserve, a skip from 220 hectares of riverside bushland in Yarra Bend Park, a walk to the city, Richmond, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Carlton, and of course the bucolic vistas of the Abbotsford Convent and the Collingwood Children’s Farm are local. The former could be 19th century France (no coincidence, since it was settled by French nuns and once held 1,000 women and girls in one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest charitable institutions). The latter could be Daylesford, so removed from traffic is it and so bushy are its views over the Yarra.
Since then, Abbotsford has got twice as good, as the Johnston Street – Gertrude Street – Smith Street precinct has blossomed, while the Clifton Hill, Richmond, and Fitzroy shops and restaurants have stayed just as good. Furthermore, the lovely shops of Fairfield, Lygon and Rathdowne Streets, and the Fitzroy Pool with its ‘Aqua Profunda’ sign made famous by Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip are all within an easy distance. (Ride down the lovely Napier Street to Fitzroy Pool’s back entrance or park in the central reservation of Alexandra Parade opposite the front entrance. No hassles.)
But Abbotsford is not a suburb most people really travel through because its eastern boundary is the Yarra and Yarra Bend Park (including Studley Park) and its northern boundary, up over Johnston Street and past Victoria Park, is the freeway. (Most people don’t know you can duck under it on Trenery Crescent and end up, almost by magic, in Clifton Hill, e.g. at the lovely Uncle Drew Cafe: check out the 2.1 km route here). So it’s a bit of a secret, and there are aspects of Abbotsford that even people who have lived here for a couple of years are still oblivious to, for example the beautiful bushwalks 5 minutes’ walk away, and the panoply of bus services.
The purpose of this little website, hastily thrown together, is to introduce you to the pleasures of our house and its location, especially the bits we think are a little hidden from view and not necessarily part of most Melbourners’ general knowledge.
Amazingly, some Melbournites are still discovering the out of the way jewels of the area: the Abbotsford Convent and the Collingwood Children’s Farm, to which we have devoted a whole page of this website, and the people’s park made out of Collingwood Football Club’s historic home ground.