The Campaign

The saving of the Abbotsford Convent was a remarkable community effort involving local residents, the philanthropic community, businesses and government.

The campaign was led by the Abbotsford Convent Coalition (ACC), a strong, cohesive community group of volunteers (pictured right). The ACC was formed in 1998 as a response to community concerns about proposals to rezone the site of the former Convent of the Good Shepherd for a major residential development.
Over 7 years the ACC continued to articulate and promote the communities interest in the future of this internationally significant site.

A Very Short History of a Community Victory

The Abbotsford Convent Coalition (ACC) was a community group that from late 1997 to 2005 fought to create an arts, education and tourism precinct on a unique heritage site in the Melbourne inner suburb of Abbotsford. Thanks to the ACC’s tenacity and talents, it is now an exciting location for diverse but associated uses and activities rather than the exclusive high-density residential complex originally proposed.

Local residents were the first to find unacceptable the prospect of 289 units within the historic buildings and throughout the gardens and grounds.  Plans included a 7-storey block on the car park, which would tower over the bucolic landscape of the farm, rows of multi-storey townhouses in the goat paddock within 2-5 metres of the bike path, and a 4-hole chip and putt golf course on the French meadow.

The ACC, which grew out of the original residents’ group, not only coordinated the efforts of thousands of people who objected to the proposed development, but also initiated, developed and realised an alternative vision – the Abbotsford Convent Project for Arts, Education and Tourism (ACP).  It led a complex and protracted planning process, and raised $4 million in pledges from benefactors as well as $4 million from the Victorian state government.

The campaign against the proposed development was waged on many fronts.  The ACC core group met once or twice a week for eight years to plan and review strategies and actions. The project group met weekly for several years.

Members and volunteers were involved in such things as:
• meeting with vendors of the site, proposed developers, their architects and the Urban Land Corporation, Heritage Victoria, the National Trust, and bureaucrats from the Department of Infrastructure, the Ministry for the Arts, Yarra Council and others;
• generating significant private donations (including money, an office, furniture etc); and community fund-raising;
• researching old documents, newspapers, pamphlets and books held by public service archives, libraries and historical societies;
• drawing up plans and identifying prospective tenants for the ACP;
• project managing, analysing costs, producing financial models and briefing legal firms and barristers;
• presenting the ACP to a panel hearing, and assisting the ACC legal team;
• making individual submissions to various authorities and forums;
• briefing national, state and local media;
• disseminating information every weekend on the bike path near the farm, at other times in shopping centres, at fairs, festivals, public meetings, schools, and into letter boxes;
• providing speakers to schools and universities to explain the why and how of the campaign;
• collating articles from the press, writing letters to politicians, state and local government, newspapers;  ringing talk-back radio; doing office work;  and lobbying … everybody!

By  2001 the convent project had in-principle support from the state government.  The Abbotsford Convent Foundation (ACF) was created in October 2001 as the legal entity required by government to manage the project.  It was not until 2004 that the title of the land was formally transferred, and the ACF was able to move onto the site.  In 2005 the northern part of the site was finally added to the rest of the land to be retained in public ownership.

Many organisations, institutions and individuals from all over Australia and overseas played their part in the realisation of this unparallelled community vision.  The historic and cultural significance of the site as the last remaining intact 19th century landscape close to the centre of Melbourne, the unique former convent complex and the ACC's plan for the site to be dedicated to community were the reasons that the Abbotsford Convent is now in public hands.