We are so sad to be leaving for Northcote where we want to take our time buying and doing up a house in the Northcote High School zone.  When we bought 15 years ago from a family who had lived here for 25 years, when there only one cafe in Abbotsford (at the Children’s Farm), we thought it was a dream location (150m from Melbourne’s loveliest pub in The Carringbush, next to Collingwood Station and the beautiful Gahan’s Reserve, a skip from hectares of riverside bushland in Yarra Bend Park, and of course the bucolic vistas of the Abbotsford Convent and the Collingwood Children’s Farm.  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 busy 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 were all within an easy distance.

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, especially the beautiful bushwalks 5 minutes’ walk away, and the panoply of bus services.

Amazingly, some Melbournites are still discovering the out of the way jewels of the area: the Abbotsford Convent and the Collingwood Children’s Farm, and the people’s park made out of Collingwood Football Club’s historic home ground where there are flourishing Auskick and Milo Cricket outfits on Saturday mornings (a huge complement of girls play, Abbotsford being the progressive place that it is).  (Whilst on the subject of sport, there’s a serious cricket club at Ramsden Street and many local kids play at Edinburgh Cricket Club in Ediburgh Gardens.  I doubt that venues to stand around watching your kids learn sport get much better in Melbourne than the Edinburgh / Victoria Park combo.  Swimming lessons are at the indoor pool just up Hoddle Street, with an excellent gym, all run by Yarra Council.  There’s horse riding for local kids only at the Children’s Farm)

 

Parks and the bush

Gahan Reserve (aka the ‘little park’ at 41-43 Raphael St, not that it’s very little) is a 200 m walk. It is graced by the beautiful tower of the Collingwood Town Hall, large palm trees, a stand of plane trees, a much-loved playground with a flying fox, barbecues, basket ball hoop, and picnic tables. Hang out there on a Sunday afternoon and you will quickly get to know the locals. It has a village square feel, bordered on three sides by completely preserved Victorian cottage streetscapes. It also houses the maternal child health service.

The photos of the Yarra and environs on the web advertising for 41-43 Raphael Street are of the walking trails along the opposite bank of the Yarra from the Collingwood Children’s Farm (hastily snapped on my Iphone while out jogging).

These walking tracks are accessed from what our kids call ‘the big park’ at the end of Gipps Street just beyond the wonderful Salvation Army super-op-shop, 450 m away, and across the bridge over the Yarra. Crossing this bridge is like being in the countryside all of a sudden. In fact, it is Yarra Bend Park (photos here), the largest tract of natural bushland in Melbourne’s inner city: 220 ha through which 12 loopy km of the Yarra flows.  You can see why from this aerial image which shows a black line running through Gahan Reserve and Victoria Park.  In the middle of the photo on the left bank of the river is the Children’s Farm and Convent precinct.  The right-most of the three fingers is Galatea Point. The top right is the golf course.

Yarra Bend Park has its own Parks Victoria rangers station. No other Australian city has this idyll 4 km from the CBD. It’s 2/3 the size of Central Park, twice as beautiful, and though it’s in Kew, the best bits are got to from Abbotsford.

It is home to the Studley Park Boat House (1.9 km away, where you can get married like my sister, hire a row boat, feed the ducks, and eat well), the Fairfield Boat House (3.6 km away: great live music in the nearby amphitheatre), the Yarra Bend Golf Course (and mini golf) with its endearing stone cafe,

the Boulevard Restaurant, the Deep Rock Swimming and Lifesaving Club, Dight’s Falls (and its associated 4.5 km walking trail), Galatea Point (map here), and what must be Australia’s most urban vineyard, Studley Park Vineyard.

It is also home to 20,000 flying foxes (and an associated wetlands boardwalk) which flap across the dusk sky over Raphael Street in their thousands every night, and cool birds like Eastern Rosellas, owls, yellow-tailed black cockatoos, and flame robins.

Before the bridge to the big park, on the near bank of the Yarra, is the away-from-the-city section of the Yarra Bike Path. You can wander along there through the Children’s Farm and up to Fairfield, via the more frequented side of Dight’s Falls.

Once you’re across the bridge in the big park, you can continue straight ahead to the Yarra Boulevard at the top of the park, the best bike riding in Melbourne (map here): 6 km of intersection-free riverside road partly with a separated bike path and almost no vehicular traffic.  Many Melbournians are ignorant of its very existence. The inner city’s best 12 km cycling circuit is 2 minutes’ ride away, in other words: great for training mid-week for Beach Road but also a good reason just to forget about Beach Road altogether.  This is also where you join the Yarra bike path to the city via Hawthorn in one direction and Alphington, Fairfield, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Westerfolds Park, Monstalvat and Eltham in the other. And the Merri Creek Bike Path to CERES and beyond to Coburg is accessed just a little way up the Yarra trail in the Eltham direction, at Dight’s Falls (see the map). From the Merri trail, you can access the Capital City Trail at Rushall Station (3.2 km away) and ride to the Zoo. Once you work out the trails (so much easier these days with maps on your phone), you can ride all over the city without using roads.

The ‘big park’ and its fortress-like play equipment is a two minute jog away. It is beautiful and little-known, great for kids, walkers, mountain bikers, cyclists, joggers, and dogs alike. It’s a great place to lie on the grass and read a book, and there are picturesque picnic tables. It is actually F.A. Andrews Reserve, a part of Yarra Bend Park, and it is a brilliant alternative to the little park for children’s birthday parties (you drive there in that scenario).

If you follow the Yarra to the left, you can walk along the far bank of the Yarra and feel like you’re in the bush, looking onto the Convent and the Children’s Farm, then carry on, like an explorer, and either (a) cross over the river on the Studley Park Road bridge and walk along the other bank past the Children’s Farm and café back to Gipps Street, or (b) continue on to the side of Dight’s Falls which is rarely visited and beyond — this is the scenic route to the Studley Park Boat House — and then home along Studley Park Road which becomes Johnston Street. This is ‘the bush walk’ in 41-43 Raphael Street parlance, and if our 90 year old neighbour can do it most days, so can you.

Bring your visitors from Sydney (or Fitzroy for that matter) on this walk and they’ll be gobsmacked.  Mountain bikers like it too.

If, from the big park, you follow the Yarra to the right, you walk through bushland trails along high escarpments over a part of the Yarra which most Melburnians have never seen, opposite the Carlton & United Breweries (which makes nearly half a billion litres of beer a year and does tours), past Studley Park Vineyard and you end up at Ikea. Back home then on Victoria Street (by tram if you’re flagging) with a little squiz in at The Orient Express or a bowl of Pho if the mood takes you.

Transport Living in the inner city, commuting to the inner city in peak hour is a chore and it’s getting worse.  Transport choice may be a bit dull, and even a bit hard to get your head around, but it is and will increasingly be a modern luxury.

We both work in the city.  My partner walks in at least one direction every day.  I ride directly or via the Yarra bike path except when I’m feeling lazy or it’s wet in which case I take the bus or the train.  The route to my bit of the city takes you through Exhibition Gardens, a daily delight.

On a nice day I have been known to pull out my laptop and mobile and work on a bench in Exhibition Gardens on my way to work.

My partner’s takes her through the Fitzroy Gardens and the Treasury Gardens.

I once managed to ride door to door in under 10 minutes, but it usually takes 15 minutes to get to Queen and Lonsdale Streets. I don’t need to shower or change on arrival.  Indeed for many years, before I gave them up, I rode in my suit.  If we forget something at work we need in the evening, we just drive in and get it: a 20 minute return trip.

We get the kids to Clifton Hill Primary School on the train — 2 stops, 4 minutes plus a beautiful walk through the Darling Gardens next to the Collingwood Leisure Centre with its indoor pool and gym.  Then I either ride into town or take the 86 tram. The same works for Spensley Street Primary School.  In fact, the kids are just about ready to ride to school along the Yarra bike path and then down Ramsden Street.

(Speaking of schools: local kids go to Yarra Primary, North Richmond Primary (amazing bilingual immersion), and Clifton Hill Primary as well as Abbotsford Primary.  Collingwood College, with its Stephanie Alexander kitchen garden, and its Steiner stream, is only 550 m away.  Abbotsford has what is without doubt Melbourne’s best pre-school, the University of Melbourne’s Early Learning Centre, in the same street as the Children’s Farm and the Convent.  After a close connection with the University, being a resident of Abbotsford is the next best thing for getting in and there is a special relationship between it and what may be Melbourne’s best primary school, Clifton Hill Primary School (sometimes referred to as ‘Gold Street’) which is just up Hoddle Street.  The Steiner school was mentioned above.)

Collingwood Station (timetables here) is just a few paces away.  For the purposes of this ode, my son and I timed it, and worked out that, walking briskly, one can get from the couch to a seat on a moving train to town in under two minutes.  And it’s a double value station: it takes trains on the South Morang (formerly Epping) and Hurstbridge lines which join at Clifton Hill, as well as the very occasional steam train special which is a much looked forward to thrill in our family.

Once you’re on the moving train, you’ll be at Flinders Street in 8 minutes, after four stops the last of which is the MCG’s stop, Jolimont.  In the other direction, the South Morang line takes you north through Northcote and Thornbury and the suburbs north of that.  The Hurstbridge line takes you through other bits of Northcote, east to Alphington and Ivanhoe, out to Eltham and beyond to Hurstbridge. Richmond Station services 8 other lines and is just a bit over 2km down Hoddle Street (take the 246 bus down, or ride a bike); no need to go into town to catch just about any train, though Parliament Station is only a few hundred metres further.

Also in the Collingwood Station precinct is the Town Hall, Collingwood Library, the police station, a stunning 1866 bluestone vicarage, and Gahan’s Reserve.

Proximity to public transport and car sharing is absolutely insane.  Here’s a local area public transport map.  But if you’re not clued into all the transport options (it took me years to notice all the buses, which I had never previously used in Melbourne), all you need these days is the free City Mapper app which is a revolution for public transport users in those cities of the world lucky enough to have it.

You can have a car or two as well of course: it’s always possible to park right outside the house or next door because it’s a permit zone.  You can get the hell out of here in the blink of an eye: you’re on Hoddle Street (70 kph!) in one minute, the M1 entrance is just 3 km south down Punt Rd / Hoddle St, and the Eastern Freeway entrance is just 1400 metres north up Hoddle St.  It only takes us 45 minutes to get to Sherbrooke Forest on a weekend morning, for example.

Four carshare providers operate in the area: Flexicar, GoGet, GreenShareCar and Car Next Door.  We used GoGet, as did some other people.  There is ample supply of cars so you don’t need to plan too much and you only have to walk 50m to get one (e.g. at the Town Hall, or in Gipps Street). You definitely don’t need to buy two cars (or any car in fact: you’re so close to everything, it’s probably cheaper to Uber).

Consider your options for getting between here and town:

• Walk or cycle the streets and parks. More residents of Yarra ride to work than any other municipality, per capita.  There are always yellow Obikes with helmets you can grab within 50m (especially at Collingwood Station), if you feel like riding but don’t have your bike with you (a ride costs about $2).  And undercover locked bike storage is sorted at 41-43 Raphael Street as well as at Collingwood Station.
• Cycle along the Yarra bikepath (<2 minute ride away; a really good fast 30 minute ride if you do the whole thing, much less if you cut down to the river in Richmond instead of going back via Hawthorn).  It’s a stunning way to get to work and to get regular exercise.
• Take any of the buses which come from the eastern suburbs (e.g. Warrandyte, Doncaster) off the Eastern Freeway (302, 303, 304, 305, 309, 318, 905, 906, 907, 908) and go down Lonsdale Street: a 20 minute airconditioned trip, door to door.  If you have to wait more than 90 seconds for a bus in peak hour you’ll be feeling ripped off.
• Train: 4 stops, 8 mins.

• Take the 12 or 109 trams along beautiful Alexandra Parade from Victoria and Hoddle Streets (5 mins walk). They go through Collins St past the casino to Port Melbourne (this is also the route to the private schools of Kew and Hawthorn, Ikea, and to Box Hill, Camberwell and Burwood).
• Walk to the corner of Gertrude St and Smith Sts (12 mins) and take the 86 tram to Bourke and then Spencer Streets (10 mins to the city), Etihad Stadium and the docklands, (the 5th stop is Parliament Station and this is also your route to Clifton Hill, Northcote, and Thornbury).
• Take a cab or an Uber: $9 – $15 (cheaper than public transport if there’s a couple of you) to / from Queen and Lonsdale Streets.

MCG? We sometimes walk. Otherwise take the train 3 stops to Jolimont.

Carlton and Melbourne Uni? It’s a beautiful walk to the Uni (3.4 km, a bit more than 30 minutes’ brisk walk).  Or walk 850 m (7 minutes) to Johnston Street and take the 200 bus, which will also get you to Smith St, Brunswick Street, Rathdowne Street and Lygon Street.  (The 966 night bus does the same job in the wee hours of the morning.)

St Kilda? Take the no. 12 (St. Kilda) tram from the corner of Hoddle and Victoria Streets (5 minutes’ walk) or the 78 tram from the corner of Church and Victoria Streets (1.1 km, 10 mins) down Church / Chapel St through Richmond and South Yarra.  Or take the 246 bus down Hoddle Street: 350 m. (You’ll come to love buses even if you don’t know you do yet, even if you presently intend to drive everywhere, because there are so many of them.

The Children’s Farm and Abbotsford Convent . Photos: https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=%22Abbotsford%20Convent%22&sort=relevance.

Eating and drinking  The eating and drinking options are just too numerous and too wonderful to enumerate.  Some of Melbourne’s best restaurants are a walk away (Indeed, we walk to Carlton several for dinner times a year, but that’s not what I meant: think Gerald’s Bar, and Epocha, 2.5 km away (30 minute walk).

More likely walks are to Cutler + Co, and its next-door wine bar Marion on Gertrude Street, Saint Crispin on Smith Street, the wonderful Mexican Hotel Jesus, Madras Brothers and Andrew McConnell’s new Hongkonese venture at the Builder’s Arms Hotel, Ricky & Pinky.

There’s a glorious Victorian pub on one corner of Raphael street, and a cafe with great homemade food across the road on the corner of Gipps Street, Red Bird Cafe.

Still super-local in terms of cafes within a couple of hundred metres, there’s the very chi-chi one at the extraordinary furniture and homewares emporium of Weylandts, Mavis the Grocer, Au79 (the latest hottest thing: a massive enterprise), Three Bags Full (the hottest thing a year or two ago and still undoubtedly one of Melbourne’s best cafes), the very lovely Streat, and Coffee Peddlr just beyond the Carringbush. (You can get best quality fresh sourdough from Au79, Three Bags Full and the Convent Bakery.)

I like a cafe where you’re not surrounded by cars, a rarity in Melbourne if you think about it.  In Abbotsford, you are absolutely spoilt for choice: the Children’s Farm’s and Convent’s cafes, a swag of cafes by the river in the new developments near Ikea which you can walk to (e.g. Four Larks), the Studley Park Boathouse a lovely walk away and the Fairfield Boat House (a pleasant cycle on the bikepath).

Between Hoddle Street and Smith Street there is a panoply of great, out of the way, cafes: South of Johnston, great on a winter’s morning coz of its roaring fire, and Proud Mary. Then there are the Moon and Comptoir (a bottleshop and winebar started by Rockpool veterans, so you don’t have to walk the extra 100m to Blackhearts & Sparrows). Perhaps most astonishing, should you stumble upon them of an evening as I have in both cases on little walks, is Rupert on Rupert, and Project 49.

 

For some reason my walks did not tend to take me to Richmond. But somewhere like Richmond Hill Café & Larder with its wondrous cheese room on Bridge Road is just 1.6 km south, a 15 minute walk. Indeed, the Corner Hotel on Swan Street is only 2.5 km away.

I like a period pub without pokies, to go out for meals with the kids, or meet up with local friends.  I am pretty sure that nowhere else in Melbourne will you find as many fantastic pubs within a 1 km walk.  My favourite Melbourne pub is 150m down the road on the next corner in Raphael St: the historic Carringbush Hotel.  It has always had a great restaurant (back in its Good Food Guide days the publican used to quip laconically that the chef was always trying to get pickled larks’ tongues onto the menu), a brilliant pub food family eating area (they do half parmas for $12), a beer garden, many open fires and a fully functioning perfectly traditional front bar frequented by eclectic people: high vis workmen, hospitality types, journalists, professionals.  It has a meeting room / private dining room.  Damn it, until a few months ago, it had a swag of residents in the rooms upstairs: old school.  It’s perfect in every way and we have eaten scores of meals there.  When we move, we’ll be coming back for some years before we let go of it.  Squizzy Taylor, John Wren, and generations of Collingwood footballers and fans frequented it.  Even Chopper Read liked a quiet drink there for a while once he was behaving himself.  It was bought recently by a restauranteur and word is the restaurant’s going to be something special soon.  It has a bottle shop, which is very handy.

Equally good now though is Stomping Ground, an old factory turned into a sublime craft brewery and indoor-outdoor beer hall with great food, 350 m away.  Just up Gipps St from there is the unique and fantastic New Orleans pub and absinthe bar, Le Bon Ton.  That’s 550 m away.  Six hundred metres away is the wonderful Park Hotel: good value food and a great beer garden. ‘The Sullivans’ was filmed in the also-unique Retreat Hotel opposite, where there is a great long-standing Sunday afternoon jazz gig and great food.  And a few minutes’ walk to Johnston Street takes you to the enormous Yarra Hotel with its live music scene, Dr Morse and the Lulie St Tavern (soon to serve Rita’s pizzas through a hoel in the adjoining walls).  Other favourite pubs are The Union Club (1.0 km), which is close to The Napier, and The Labor in Vain.  And how I managed to leave Smith Street’s 1854 bluestone Grace Darling to last, I do not know.  Or Smith Street’s the Robbie Burns (more Spanish than its name suggests) for that matter.  Or Smith St’s amazing Craft + Co: another brewery with great food.  Oh, and then there’s Victoria St’s pubs: The National (where dogs are welcomed in the beer garden), the Terminus, the Aviary with its beautiful beer garden and very un-Asian food in the heart of the South-East Asian precinct (see also the much overlooked and in fact absolutely top class Victoria Street pizzeria Elounge), and the Vic.

In fact, pizza should get its own paragraph. There’s a cheap pizza shop 200 m away on Hoddle Street. We zip up to Ladro on Gertrude Street for takeaway and eat-ins. It’s Melbourne’s best, after 400 Gradi. The aforementioned Rita’s is also great, and so are the Convent Bakery’s pizza (beautiful eaten on the Convent’s stunning lawns), Lazerpig, and Queen Margaret (Clifton Hill’s restaurants are a 5 minute drive up Hoddle Street).

Shopping Obviously you’re a 5 minute walk from the heart of Victoria Street’s South East Asian precinct (there are as many Korean, Japanese, and Thai restaurants as Vietnamse these days).  It also has two always open super-busy fishmongers where the fish and prawns are half the price they are in shopping centres (we always just walk down and buy seafood immediately before we cook it, and we’re somewhat pescatarian), inexpensive butchers, and every Asian ingredient known to man.  We wander down to bring back Bánh mì (Franco-Vietnamese pork rolls) for lunch most weekends: so good.  Speaking of fishmongers, two of Melbourne’s best are close by: Canal’s in Clifton Hill and Ocean Made is 750 m away, just off Langridge Street.

For milk, a cash machine, bread and late night Magnums, we walk 400 metres to the nearst servo on Hoddle Street, which also boasts a McDonald’s.  Bunnings, with a good garden section, is an 8 minute walk (750m), but Melbourne’s loveliest and oldest hardware store, Martin’s on Victoria Street, run by two gorgeous brothers who are third generation proprietors, is a 7 minute walk.  That it flourishes with Bunnings right by it is testament to its wonderfulness (if you like small old fashioned hardware shops, of course).  Ikea is a 7 minute drive, as also is Dan Murphy’s.

We like to drive to Victoria Market (free parking if you’re early enough) on weekends.  It takes 15 mins if you beat the traffic.  Occasionally we take the train up to Preston Market which is in a way even better: 15 minute trip to the station right at the market, and no parking hassles.  And there is also the Gleadell Street Market in Richmond, just 1.9 km away, a lovely walk with your shopping trolley on a nice morning.  It was founded in 1839 and is attended by 5,000 people of a Saturday morning, the only day it runs, being a normal street the rest of the time.  I don’t know of another completely traditional street market like this in the rest of Melbourne; it’s very special. And you could do you whole week’s shopping and have breakfast there.

Every fortnight one of the Collingwood Children’s Farm farmers market or the Abbotsford Convent’s Slow Food Melbourne Farmers Market is on and there is no better shopping in Melbourne than a stroll there, breakfast at the Farm or Convent cafes and an outdoor shop. These are easily the best inner-city farmers’ markets in Melbourne.

In terms of supermarkets, oddly enough we often drive to Lygon Court in Carlton to shop on the weekend: something about the co-location of free parking, a good supermarket, Readings, the Nova, and, most importantly, Brunetti’s.  Surprisingly it’s only about a 10 minute drive on a weekend morning, which is also true of the trip shooting along Studley Park Road (by far the best way to go travelling anywhere East) to Leo’s at Kew Junction (co-located with Laurent …).

But you could also shop in one of the two supermarkets on Smith St (I think the Woolworths has a raffish charm with its period facade, free rooftop parking and eclectic clientele from international law professors to rock stars, but Coles is huger and newer) both of which happen to be dangerously co-located with Huxtaburger, and Gelato Messina (15 minute walk).  Sorry for the excess of hyperbole, but they are without doubt, respectively, Victoria’s best burger and ice cream shops. Messina, also in Bondi, has flavours like Messy Lizzy: strawberry ice-cream, whipped cream, and smashed marsala soaked Italian sponge. There’s an even newer, possibly hipper, gelataria on Smith Street: Piccolina. Then there is:

• An IGA which you can always get a park right outside on the street, 700m away on Johnston St via Park St and its park.  I always check out the lovely art gallery next door.
• Victoria Gardens with its Ikea, Woolies, Kmart, and Toscano’s on Victoria Street (2 km, 6 mins drive if you don’t try to drive along Victoria Street and take the ‘long-cut’ instead).  It’s one of the few shopping centres I don’t mind.
• The Hive on the corner of Nicholson and Victoria Streets (650 m), (where you can shop Aldi, Woolworths and Minh Phat in one go, as well as an incredibly good Vietnamese run fruit, veg and indoor plant shop, Saigon Village).

Finally if you want a 6km traffic- and intersection-free riverside drive in the countryside as the prelude to your shopping because you’ve been too busy to walk beside the Yarra: Biviano & Sons and A1 Bakery in High Street, Fairfield (a 15 minute drive).  Sadly I only worked this out a few months ago, but it’s just the best thing to do.