A sewerage town community
COCOROC NORTH STATE SCHOOL, DECEMBER 1970. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SADLER FAMILY.
Another great story celebrating the heritage of the Metropolitan Sewerage Farm and the community behind the making of one of Australia’s most important civic works projects in the 1890s and into the 1900s. Community being the key word here.
This was a community spread across the vast Metropolitan Sewerage Farm, a site that was and still is, around the size of Phillip Island in Victoria or for an international perspective, the Island of Mykonos in Greece. It began in the 1890s in the south of the Metro Farm along the Werribee River, or what locals called the 'bottom-end' of the Farm, with workers and their families living in homes the Board of Works built and leased to them, or camping in tents. This was where the jetty was built to bring visitors to the Metro Farm and to carry produce being grown by farmers leasing land from the Board of Works. It was where shops and a licensed hotel were proposed to be built.
The top-end township or 'head of the road', meaning where the sewage first arrived in a channel at Farm Road on the Metro Farm, followed, with the Board of Works building more cottages for its workers and their families. It’s where sporting teams and facilities to support those were established, along with the Mechanic’s Institute (later known as the community hall), a post office (and general store in the early years), swimming pool, change rooms, a park and picnic area, and a church shared by three denominations. It's the area that’s commonly referred to in modern day as Cocoroc.
Workers and their families also lived around the Ranch on the Metro Farm, which was a hub of livestock activity beside the Geelong Road. Others lived in Murtcaim, the area of the Metro Farm that bordered Avalon, and others too lived in homes dotted around other major sewage works areas.
All workers living on site were offered two cows for families to milk and make butter, cheese and cream. Significantly, schools were established in each of the four main populated areas to educate the children of the workers of the Metro Farm. The population peaked at around 500 in the 1950s, which incidentally, was when women from the sewerage farm and Werribee came together to field teams to play Australian rules football.
These people together, with other workers who lived in single men’s quarters and old railway carriages, who camped in tents and lived in the New Australian camp on the Metro Farm after WW2, and those that worked on the Metro Farm but lived in Werribee, Little River, Lara and other nearby areas, make up the tightly bound, socially cohesive and supportive Metropolitan Sewerage Farm community. They are the essence of the heritage of the Metropolitan Sewerage Farm.