November 2003

A Cook’s Tour of community gardens

The Gronn Place Housing Estate community garden in West Brunswick is an example of multicultural cooperation between people of differing backgrounds.

Estate residents come from places as far-flung as North Africa, Turkey, Lebanon and the Cook Islands.

The garden has become a source of personal satisfaction and achievement for adults and children on the estate.

Housing Minster Candy Broad visited the Gronn Place community garden with Pherina Tuati, chair of the Moonah Adult Committee and originally from the Cook Islands.

The Cook Island community grows root vegetables such as taro and kumara, a sweet potato, which are part of their traditional diet.

It has also planted banana trees.

While there is little prospect of the trees bearing fruit, the leaves are put to good use for ceremonial cooking in an umu, an earth oven.

Traditional cooking of meat, fish and vegetables—they are wrapped in banana leaves, placed on top of hot stones, covered with earth and left to bake for several hours—produces food that is steamed and flavoured in its own juices.

The Gronn Place garden is one of 15 producing herbs, fruits and vegetables flourishing on public housing estates around Melbourne under the guidance of the Office of Housing’s Community Gardens project manager, Basil Natoli.

The community gardens are also springing up at schools where many students are from the public housing estates.

Plans are also in-hand to expand the program into regional areas with the first underway at the Flinders Park Secondary College in Geelong.