Jacana, Victoria

Jacana is a small suburb in Melbourne, Australia, situated north of the Western Ring Road, south of Johnstone Street and between the Broadmeadows railway line and Moonee Ponds Creek. The suburb has its own railway station.

1 History
2 Demographics
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

The name Jacana was applied to an area of Broadmeadows in the 1950s by the Housing Commission of Victoria (HCV). The name comes from Jacana street, to the east of the Broadmeadows railway line (therefore, technically not in Jacana itself). Both the street and the suburb are slightly to the north of the Jacana railway station, which was built to service the suburb in 1959. However, Jacana as a built landscape did not spring fully-formed under the aegis of the HCV.

The streets in the southern section of Jacana were laid out in 1923 when 861 lots were offered for sale on land which had formerly been owned by Duncan Kennedy, a farmer in the area from the mid-1840s. The Housing Commission retitled some of the streets (for instance, the jokingly-named Emu Parade and Sunset Boulevarde) and built most of the housing stock in this section of Jacana in the 1950s-60s. Only a few houses in Jacana - notably those in Pascoe Vale road - predate the Housing Commission's arrival in Broadmeadows. In the late 50s a picture of the 'daily needs' shopping centre in Emu Parade appeared in the Housing Commission's Annual Report of 1958-9, presumably because it represented the progressive and ever-expanding nature of HCV operations. The Commission later laid out and built the northern section of Jacana in the early 1970s, the southernmost section of its showcase Meadow Fair estate.

Construction of this newer area of Jacana took place in the Whitlam era, which ended with the opening of the Broadmeadows Sporting Club, situated on the Jacana side of the Moonee Ponds Creek Valley. The club was opened by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on 10 November 1975—the day before his dismissal by the Governor General. During the 1970s a major portion of what is now Jacana reserve was a rubbish dump created to fill a valley containing a small tributary of Moonee Ponds Creek. This area now features two sports ovals.

Jacana, as well as the nearby new suburb of Gowanbrae, has recently been the subject of paintings by the Melbourne artist Mia Schoen.

As is to be expected from a former Housing Commission development in this region, Jacana is a lower-middle or working class area which, because of its planned heritage, enjoys better amenities than many privately-developed or unplanned suburbs. It contains the aforementioned shops and Sports Club (which includes a bowling green), small playgrounds, a school, and extensive parkland. The north-eastern section of the suburb is the site of Broadmeadows' chief medical facility. A bus route between Broadmeadows and Glenroy services the suburb six days of the week.

[edit] Demographics

2001 statistics for the Jacana reveal a suburb in which 60.4% of the population is Australian-born - the remainder from a variety of sources, only the United Kingdom (3.1%) and Italy (2.6%) exceeding 2%. In 2001 almost 10% of Jacanaians were unemployed, and 48.5% were not in the labour force (over 30% of the population is under 18 or over 65). Of those employed, almost a quarter worked in manufacturing, and just over 15% worked in retail.

The majority of Jacana housing, as stated above, was erected by the Housing Commission of Victoria either in the later 1950s/ early 60s, or in the early 1970s. It is mainly of brick construction with pre-cast concrete elements as per the HCV method of the 1950s-60s. There are no flats. 91.3% of Jacana residents live in separate houses. 48.3 % own their own home, and 26.2% are purchasing their home, a total of 74.5%. The average housing price in Jacana in 2001 was $131, 750; today it is over $200, 000 in line with the housing boom earlier in the decade. While this is a major increase over a short period of time, the area is still far below the average for Melbourne.

[edit] References

City of Hume, Jacana Suburb Profile 2001
E. Hamilton-Smith; C. Balmer Broadmeadows - A Growing City Vol. 1 Youth Services Planning Division, East Melbourne 1972
Housing Commission of Victoria Annual Report 1958-9 Melbourne, 1959
Lemon, Andrew [1982] (1999). Broadmeadows: A forgotten history. Broadmeadows: City of Broadmeadows/Hargreen. ISBN 0-949905-10-0. (257 pages)

[edit] External links

Coordinates: -37.68° 144.912°

Maps and aerial photos
- Street map from Street Directory, MSN Maps and Multimap.
- Satellite image from Google Maps, WikiMapia and Terraserver.

Suburbs of the City of Hume
Attwood \| Broadmeadows \| Bulla \| Campbellfield \| Clarkefield \| Coolaroo \| Craigieburn \| Dallas \| Gladstone Park \| Greenvale \| Jacana \| Keilor \| Meadow Heights \| Melbourne Airport \| Mickleham \| Oaklands Junction \| Roxburgh Park \| Somerton \| Sunbury \| Tullamarine \| Westmeadows \| Wildwood \| Yuroke