Looking for Bell Park

Guido Tresoldi

Finally it happened to me.

I have been reading tweets from Sokkahtwitter that get into the vortex of wanting to find more and more about some soccer history fact. And now it was my turn.

It started with a twitter exchange between Paul Nicholls and Mark Boric about a match between St. Kilda and Preston and it referred about being played on the 'latter's ground'.

As a resident of Darebin, which includes Preston, my interest was piqued. Where could this ground have been? Mark stated that early references to the Preston ground are usually as little as just "Bell" so you have to assume it was off Bell Street somewhere.

This put me on more Trove searching about this ground and indeed there was a match report in The Age of 2 May 1927 which stated that South Melbourne defeated Preston 2-0 and that there was 'bad feeling at the game'. It also stated that this match was played at Bell Park.

Searching more I found when Bell Park was created. The Age reports on the 29th of March 1926 that the "East Preston Ratepayers Association has set itself the task of raising money to improve its section of the municipality. A nine block of land has been secured as a reserve known as Bell Park"

Frustratingly this article gives no indication of where this park will be located.

So I looked next at the Darebin Historical society page. This society stopped operating some time ago and it has been taken over by Darebin Libraries. And here I hit the snag that many before me encountered. The amnesia that has occurred in sport history about soccer. How it has disappeared completely, like it never happened.

Looking at the 'Darebin Heritage' page, under 'Sport & Leisure' we have "football" (which is Australian Rules) cricket, athletics, bowls, golf and water sports but no soccer. There is nothing malicious in this. I don't believe that soccer was deliberately excluded. I think that as it happened in many other places it faded from memory. For some reasons no one kept the flame alive. Like all those trophies we hear being thrown out on "If you know your history" on FNR radio, soccer disappeared. In the post war era this area has had a huge interest in soccer being one of the populations with the highest number of non English speaking migrants in Australia, but I would venture that many of them would be aware of the history of the game before the second world war.

So where next? I thought about aerial photography, but the earliest ones in Melbourne started in the late 1940s. The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works extensive 160 feet to 1 inch maps are from 1950, which may be too late. But what about street directories? Would that give me the location of this park? Before Melways (which started in 1966) there were 2 street directories for Melbourne: Morgan's and Collins. These are freely available on the Victorian State Library site.

Looking at the 1926 and 1927 maps gave me no indication. The details of these street directories were nowhere near what we have with the Melways or Google Maps now.

So I went to the 1945 aerial map. Bell Park may have been obliterated by then. But it was worth a shot. I imagined that as Mark suggested, with the name 'Bell' the ground could have been on Bell St. So I looked along the street on the aerial map, and one area jumped at me. A rectangular piece of what it looked bare ground. What made it peculiar was that it was sorrounded by houses, which could have perhaps indicated it could have been a sport field in the past.

Going back to the street directories again gave me no joy. The area in question had no indication.

This became the site of the Preston and Northcote Community Hospital (PANCH) which was constructed between 1951 and 1961. The Darebin Heritage site state that the land was once a dairy farm, but then the whole of Preston was, and we can see from the aerial photograph that it was well in a housing area by the mid 1940s. This is also shown by photographs taken during constructions where the site is bounded by houses. Something very reminiscent of a rectangular sport ground.

The hospital was closed down in 1998 and the site has been refurbished as Bell City, with a resort-style hotel, office spaces and corporate venues.

Was this the site of Bell Park? We'll probably never know. The location of those passionate games played by Preston in the mid 1920s may not never be found. But this is indicative of how soccer is perceived in Australia. A foreign game, an imported game, a game which is repeatedly described as a 'new thing' forgetting its past. While the memories of games played in the working class northern suburbs of Melbourne echo like forgotten ghosts in the renovated houses and hipster cafes of the present.