Racing Victoria’s John Wren exhibition

The Good Ol’ Age has alerted me to the fact that from 7 September 2006, the Victorian Racing Museum in Federation Square is holding an exhibition about John Wren, pictured, at one time Australia’s richest man. Born in Collingwood in 1871, he died in Fitzroy in 1953 aged 82, having lived across the river in Kew, in what is now Xavier’s junior school, Burke Hall (then Studley House), a man who would have been an avid reader of Abbotsford Blog (but not its reviews of pubs and bars, for he was a teetotaller) had he only lived to see the day. He had toured the virtuosic violinist Fritz Kreisler, set up an opera company, owned The Criterion restaurant opposite St Paul’s, built a racecourse in Richmond, supposedly given two million pounds to charity over 5 years, bet his life savings on a legendary Melbourne Cup winner, Carbine, owned the 1904 Caulfied Cup winner, Murmur, built a public pool on the Yarra at Abbotsford, preferred the Collingwood Football Club to the Melbourne Club, and promoted boxing and cycling. What else he did besides is a matter of some controversy, though he did get right up the nose of my relative, Bill Judkins (one of Keith Dunstan’s favourite wowsers). The Judster was a Methodist lay preacher who, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, saw “Wren, drink, gambling and Catholicism all combined into one terrible evil.” Short, bandy and sharp-featured, the Wrenster and the Judster were apparently frequently mistaken for one another to their mutual embarrassment. Continue reading “Racing Victoria’s John Wren exhibition”

Walkin’ in the Valley of Death: Victoria St

Pays to be careful as a pedestrian in Abbotsford. This poor bugger was knocked down dead by a van back in May and died, and at 2.25 a.m. yesterday, some bloke standing near the corner of Nicholson and Victoria Sts gets dead after being hit by a white van. It’s an event a minute on Victoria St: someone was pulled over at 2.30 a.m. on 6 June 2006 with a vial of GBH. Of course he was not a local, but a burgher of that disreputable part of town on the other side of the river, Kew. There they found the big stash. And now it seems a Hoddle St servo got visited by those kids on the security video on tonight’s news, as recently as 23 June 2006. And these guys are like serial armed robbers man. You can rely on hearing it second on this blog.

Now Abbotsford is the most burgled suburb?

According to the Herald Sun on 11 June 2006:

“ABBOTSFORD and Collingwood homes are the most burgled in Melbourne, a new study of break-in rates shows. One in four homes in the unlucky inner city suburbs were burgled in the past three years, according to the analysis of police figures by the RACV’s insurance arm.”

The last figures reported on this blog suggested we were the 6th most burgled suburb. The photo is of Arthur Hogg, 1935, from Flickr.