Lee Street

The Collingwood Stockade, 1853-1866

The land on which the Carlton North Primary School now stands was first used by Europeans as the site for a prison. The origins of the Collingwood Stockade, as it was called, can be traced to the separation of the Port Phillip district from New South Wales in 1850, and its reconstitution in the following year as the autonomous colony of Victoria. The booming new colony confronted a prison crisis. No longer could it rely on the N.S.W. penal system to house its felons. And, with the massive surge of population that flowed from the discovery of gold in 1851, Victoria's meagre prison system was further over-stretched.

The old Melbourne Gaol was full to bursting. So, too, was the supposedly temporary penal stockade that had been opened late in 1850 at the outlying Melbourne hamlet of Pentridge. The Pentridge prison stockade was extended, old ship hulks were fitted out as floating prisons in the harbour, and three additional stockades were opened: at Collingwood, Richmond, and Williamstown. Prisoners with long sentences and the worst reputations were sent to the hulks. The stockades were reserved for 'persons not utterly steeped in crime.

The Collingwood Stockade, like Pentridge, was intended to be a temporary holding-place for prisoners. Whereas the Richmond and Williamstown stockades only operated between 1852-5, the Collingwood Stockade endured for 13 years. Its first prisoners arrived on 3 February 1853. The prison stockade closed on 5 March 1866, when its last prisoners were transferred to the newly built central gaol at Pentridge.

The stockade had originally been expected to house about 60 prisoners, but in 1854 its capacity was increased in order to accommodate up to 300 people. Some 70 prisoners occupied the stockade when it was closed in 1866. Chinese prisoners had quickly come to form a significant proportion of the stockade's inmates. It has been suggested that during the 1860s the Collingwood Stockade became used exclusively as a depot for Chinese and other non Anglo-Saxon prisoners.

The site of the Collingwood Stockade was chosen by the government in January 1853, for the same reason as Pentridge had been: its bluestone deposits, which provided a ready source of hard labour for convict chain gangs. Officials favoured the site because of 'its proximity to Melbourne, the advantage of easily worked Quarry Ground and the nearness to the main depot at Pentridge'. The bluestone deposits were judged to be thick and 'of good quality both for building and road purposes.'

Six acres were initially chosen, running south from the quarries on the site of present-day Curtain Square. The area had previously been known as the 'Corporation Stockade'. It seems that when the government formally proclaimed the land in the Government Gazette on 23 February 1853, transferring it to the control of the Penal Department, they took over disused quarries and buildings that belonged to the municipality of Melbourne:

Proclamation

Late in 1853, the site was still being referred to both as the Corporation Stockade and &emdash; in reference to the appellation 'Collingwood' which was applied loosely to suburban settlement beyond boundaries of the municipality of Melbourne &emdash; as 'the Collingwood Stockade'. Alfred Selwyn's map of 'Melbourne and its Suburbs' identifies the site simply as 'Stockade Reserve'.

The land remained unsurveyed until the end of the year, when concerns that the bluestone quarries within the six-acre government reserve were already 'very nearly exhausted' prompted the government to evaluate nearby sites for a possible new prison stockade and enlarged reserve. The resulting plan of provides us with the first reliable visual cue to the nature of European settlement in the local area:

Plan of Quarries, 1853

In 1854 the penal authorities, concerned that continuing quarrying operations by the municipality of Melbourne were encroaching upon their stockade buildings, belatedly sought to mark out the borders of the reservation. The Inspector General of Penal Establishments wrote to the Colonial Secretary in December 1854, urging that

Extract of a letter from the Inspector General

As the Corporation quarries are now being extended to within a very short distance of the buildings at the Collingwood Stockade, I deem it very desirable that the six acres proclaimed as a House of Correction should be correctly marked out to ascertain whether or not they are encroaching. I do myself the honour therefore to request that the Surveyor General may be instructed to forward a surveyor to the locality in question to point out to the Superintendent (who will have them correctly marked) the boundaries of the reserve and that I may be furnished with a tracing of same.

To the Inspector General's embarrassment, the additional survey work demonstrated that it was his own department that was encroaching, and that 'the whole of the buildings forming the present Corporation Stockade are not included in the six acres of land proclaimed as a House of Correction on the 21st February 1853.' In order to secure the stockade, and guarantee an ongoing supply of bluestone in the face of municipal quarrying, a new proclamation was published in the Government Gazette on 20 March 1855, establishing a much-enlarged reservation of 42 acres (its borders roughly approximating to present-day Fenwick Street in the north, Princes Street in the south, Rathdowne Street on the west, and Canning Street on the east).

James Kearney's 1855 map of 'Melbourne and its Suburbs' identified the enlarged reservation, and the quarries and stockade buildings within it:

Kearney's Map

The original buildings of the Collingwood Stockade stood alongside the quarries on about half a hectare of land (bounded by present-day Lee, O'Grady, Canning, and Rathdowne Streets). They comprised a cluster of rough timber buildings. Several were dormitories, the prisoners sleeping in wooden berths (which were replaced in the late 1850s by tiered canvass hammocks). Another was used as the prisoners' Mess. Ten timber solitary-confinement cells were built in 1853. The whole complex was surrounded by a 3-metre high palisade fence. Within weeks of the stockade opening, however, on 19 March two prisoners escaped from the prison.

No plans of the stockade during the late 1850s and early 1860s have as yet been located. Unless and until they are, a precise understanding of the stockade's evolving layout is not possible. A excellent 1869 plan [link] of the stockade survives, but it is not entirely clear which of the buildings shown on it were constructed for the new asylum. We know that an additional penal dormitory was built for the stockade in 1857, and that in 1859 a residence for the prison governor was constructed from local bluestone. Local bluestone was used, as well, in the late 1850s to build ten solitary-confinement cells, officers' quarters, and a new perimeter wall.

Most if not all these structures were reused by the asylum, and some were recycled again in the 1870s for use by the school. The cottage that had been occupied by the stockade's chief warder (a man described by the Age newspaper in 1857 as accustomed to amusing 'himself by obliterating the natural features of the prisoners' ), was used by the school until it was demolished in 1877 to make way for the present main school building.

Several of the stockade's penal buildings survived well into the twentieth century. The bluestone governor's residence and (possibly) the officers' quarters were not demolished until 1913, both of them making way for the present Junior School. Traces of the bluestone cells, which were supposedly uncovered by labourers in 1913 when the site for the Junior School was being prepared, are believed still to survive below ground. However an undated (c.1874) plan in the Education Department building files suggests that the cell block lies below O'Grady Street and the houses fronting it.