We just can’t tell you how special these two places are and what an advantage it is to live just a stroll away. Entry to the Convent is free and there are many opportunities to enter the Farm for free too (the Farm Cafe is always free). Local families take out an annual membership for a modest fee. During the day on weekdays, each precinct is a lovely place to jog through or just visit, with hardly anyone there. It’s like teleporting yourself into a kind of magical historical countryside (with cutting edge cafes). At this time, the farmers at the farm — Melbourne’s oldest continually cultivated farm — do their farming and school groups occasionally visit.
One of the buildings in the Convent is in fact now what must be Melbourne’s most beautifully located school, which should never be overlooked, a Steiner primary and secondary school with a drop-dead great fete.
On the weekends the places are buzzing, never moreso than when one of the markets is on. There is the Friday evening Supper Market, and every fortnight there is a Farmer’s Market at the Farm or a Slow Food Market at the Convent.
There is Melbourne’s best open air cinema: Shadow Electric.
Which has a great bar.
There is also a big colony of artists‘ studios and wellness practitioners — yoga, massage, psychologists, etc.
There are great places to eat at the Convent. Most people know the Convent Bakery which makes bread in 100 year old wood fired ovens once used by the nuns’ girls, and the remarkable Lentil as Anything, a very civilised place started by the charismatic Shanaka Fernando who used to live opposite.
But one of Abbotsford’s secrets (and reasonably happy to be kept that way), is Cam’s which gives onto the quadrangle of the Convent’s main building, and there is also a gorgeous little Japanese place, Kappaya.
This was my view over coffee at Cam’s one day:
The Children’s Farm is fabulous for kids’ parties, and the Farm Cafe is such a good reason to go for a good walk or a long ride which ends up there. It has a community garden which locals can rent for (typically) vegie gardening.
It has horses.
And another glorious cafe, On This Day:
Yes, this is really just another one of Abbotsford’s cafes:
