Fitzroy, Victoria
Fitzroy is an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, northeast of the Melbourne central business district, located within the City of Yarra local government area. Fitzroy recorded a population of 10,431 at the 2021 census.
Planned as Melbourne's first suburb in 1839, it later became one of the city's first areas to gain municipal status, in 1858, then known as Fitz Roy. It occupies Melbourne's smallest and most densely populated area outside the CBD, just 100 ha.
Fitzroy is known as a cultural hub, particularly for its live music scene and street art, and is the main home of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Its commercial heart is Brunswick Street, one of Melbourne's major retail, culinary strips. the intersection of Smith and Gurtrude street has become a nightlife hub, especially for queer venues and events.
Long associated with the working class, Fitzroy has undergone waves of urban renewal and gentrification since the 1980s and today is home to a wide variety of socio-economic groups, featuring both some of the most expensive rents in Melbourne and one of its largest public housing complexes, Atherton Gardens.
Its built environment is diverse and features some of the finest examples of Victorian era architecture in Melbourne. Much of the suburb is a historic preservation precinct, with many individual buildings and streetscapes covered by Heritage Overlays. The most recent changes to Fitzroy are mandated by the Melbourne 2030 Metropolitan Strategy, in which both Brunswick Street and nearby Smith Street are designated for redevelopment as Activity centres.
The suburb was named after Sir Charles Augustus FitzRoy, the Governor of New South Wales from 1846 to 1855. It is bordered by Alexandra Parade, Victoria Parade, Smith Street and Nicholson Street.
History
Pre-settlement history
The area that is now known as Fitzroy and Collingwood was part of the territory of the country of the Woiwurrung people of the Kulin nation. The area that is now known as Fitzroy was the land of the Wurundjeri people.Anthropologist Alfred William Howitt recorded Ngár-go as the Woiwurrung word for Fitzroy in working notes rediscovered in 2018, likely sourced from conversations with elder William Barak between 1897 and 1901. However, it is unclear whether this referred to a broader area or an individual hill. In another document, Howitt wrote that Ngár-go referred to a net bag worn by men over their shoulders.
The name Ngár-go has been revived in a 2021 project called Yalinguth.
19th century
Melbourne's first suburb, Fitzroy was effectively created on 13 February 1839, when the area between Melbourne and Alexandra Parade was subdivided into vacant lots and offered for sale. Newtown was later renamed Collingwood, and the area now called Fitzroy was made a ward of the Melbourne City Council. On 9 September 1858, Fitzroy became a municipality in its own right, separate from the City of Melbourne. In accordance with the Municipal Act, on 28 September 1858, a meeting of ratepayers was held in 'Mr Templeton's schoolroom, George street' to prepare for a local council election, with Thomas Embling, MLA for Collingwood, presiding. The council election took place two days later and the first councilors were; Thomas Rae, George Symons, Edward Langton, Henry Groom, Benjamin Bell, Edwin Bennett and Thomas Hargreave. The first council meeting, held after the declaration of election, was at the Exchange Hotel, George Street, and Symons was unanimously elected chair.Surrounded as it was by a large number of factories and industrial sites in the adjoining suburbs, Fitzroy was ideally suited to working men's housing, and from the 1860s to the 1880s, Fitzroy's working class population rose dramatically. The area's former mansions became boarding houses and slums, and the heightened poverty of the area prompted the establishment of several charitable, religious and philanthropic organisations in the area over the next few decades. A notable local entrepreneur was Macpherson Robertson, whose confectionery factories covered 30 hectares and stand as heritage landmarks today.
The Fitzroy Gasworks was erected on Reilly Street in 1861, dominating the suburb, with the Gasometer Hotel located opposite.
20th century
The population of Fitzroy in 1901 was 31,610.Before World War I, Fitzroy was a working-class neighbourhood, with a concentration of political radicals already living there. Post-war immigration into the suburb resulted in the area becoming socially diverse. Many working-class Chinese immigrants settled in Fitzroy due to its proximity to Chinatown. The establishment of the Housing Commission of Victoria in 1938 saw swathes of new residences being constructed in Melbourne's outer suburbs. With many of Fitzroy's residents moving to the new accommodation, their places were taken by post-war immigrants, mostly from Italy and Greece and the influx of Italian and Irish immigrants saw a marked shift towards Catholicism from Fitzroy's traditional Methodist and Presbyterian roots. The Housing Commission would build two public housing estates in Fitzroy in the 1960s; one in Hanover Street and one at the southern end of Brunswick Street.
From the 1960s through to the 1980s, the area became a meeting place for Aboriginal people who had left missions, Aboriginal reserves, and other government institutions and drifted to the city in a bid to trace their families. The Builders Arms Hotel was the only pub which allowed Aboriginal people to drink there. The Aboriginal Health Service opened on Gertrude Street in 1973 and provided a service largely provided by volunteers, operating as a de facto community centre there until 1992. A nearby street behind a factory was a meeting and drinking place, known to the community as Charcoal Lane. Archie Roach tells of his time in Fitzroy hanging out and getting drunk, and of reconnecting with his siblings there, in his autobiography, Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music. His song "Charcoal Lane" mentions Gertrude Street, Brunswick Street, and other locations in Fitzroy and his time wandering the streets there. Vika and Linda Bull started their careers by singing in various venues around Fitzroy in the 1980s, including the Black Cat Cafe and the Purple Pit. The area is highly significant in the history of the Australian Aboriginal rights movement.
The Fitzroy Magistrates' Court closed on 1 February 1985.
Like other inner-city suburbs of Melbourne, Fitzroy underwent a process of gentrification from the 1980s onwards. The area's manufacturing and warehouse sites were converted into apartments, and the corresponding rising rents in Fitzroy saw many of the area's residents move to Northcote and Brunswick.
In June 1994, the City of Yarra was created by combining the Cities of Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond.
21st century
Gentrification continued into the 2000s, with Gertrude Street being transformed into a string of fine dining restaurants, art galleries, bookshops and fashion stores.In 2009 the Aboriginal Health Service building at 136 Gertrude Street was converted into a social enterprise restaurant called Charcoal Lane, run by Mission Australia, which provided training for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people and became well known for its gastronomy. It closed its doors in August 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the historic building was handed back to the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service.
Geography
Fitzroy's topography is flat. It is laid out in grid plan and is characterised by a fairly tightly spaced rectangular grid of medium-sized streets, with many of its narrow streets and back lanes facilitating only one-way traffic. Its built form is a legacy of its early history when a mixture of land uses was allowed to develop close to each other, producing a great diversity of types and scales of building.Demographics
In the 2021 Australian census conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the total population of Fitzroy was recorded as 10,431 people. Only 58 of the population identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. Just over 60% of the population were born in Australia, but 41.4% of residents had both parents born overseas. The most common countries of birth were England 4.5%, Vietnam 3.3%, New Zealand 3.0%, China 2.1% and United States of America 1.5%.In the 2016 census, Fitzroy had a population of 10,445. The median age was younger than the national average, while the median weekly individual income was higher than the national average. Only 24.9% of Fitzroy's population were married, compared to 48.1% nationwide.
In 2016, 53.3% of people were born in Australia. The most common countries of birth were England 3.9%, Vietnam 3.3%, New Zealand 2.9%, China 2.7% and United States of America 1.2%. 61.0% of people only spoke English at home. Other languages spoken at home included Vietnamese 4.1%, Mandarin 2.5%, Cantonese 2.1%, Arabic 2.0% and Greek 1.6%.
Housing
Fitzroy's housing is diverse. It has some of Melbourne's earliest surviving houses and one of Melbourne's most extensive stands of terraced housing, along with a mix of converted industrial and commercial buildings, walk-up flats, modern apartments and public housing.Among the earliest homes are Royal Terrace on Nicholson Street. Overlooking the Carlton Gardens, Royal Terrace was one of the first of its kind in Melbourne. Fitzroy's "character housing" is now mostly gentrified and highly sought after real estate.
As early as 1923, the City of Fitzroy was accused of 'creating slums' by allowing inappropriate development such as three houses on a 31-foot by 100-foot block. By 1953, the state Housing Minister Thomas Hayes, said that Camp Pell in Royal Park, Parkville, Victoria, which had been a temporary military camp for United States forces during the Second World War, 'might become a permanent emergency housing settlement' and 'Fitzroy slum dwellers who had refused offers of alternative accommodation by the housing Commission because they would have to pay higher rents would probably' be moved there. Two years later the headline was 'Outcry Rages Over Fitzroy Slums', as the state government accused the Commonwealth of bringing in immigrants that the states had nowhere to house, arguing that the 'Awful, dilapidated buildings in Fitzroy, crowded beyond description with exploited New Australians were a grave danger to the health of the community.' The Atherton Gardens high-rise public housing estate, on the corner of Brunswick and Gertrude streets, is one of Melbourne's largest, built by the Housing Commission of Victoria as part of its controversial "slum clearance" urban renewal program in the 1960s. The commission was established by the Housing Act 1937 in response to slum housing in Melbourne, and operated under the Slum Reclamation and Housing Act 1938.
Due to its desirability as a place to live, Fitzroy faces increasing pressure for residential development. Recent residential projects in Fitzroy have sought to express a sense of Fitzroy's urban character in various ways and have been hotly contested in some cases.