Aberfeldie

Aberfeldie is a residential suburb 8 km north-west of central Melbourne. Immediately west of Moonee Ponds, Aberfeldie has the Maribyrnong River as its southern and western borders. The suburb was named after a property, Aberfeldie, at the corner of Park Crescent and Aberfeldie Street. The owner, James Robertson, took the name from Aberfeldy, Scotland.

The locality was settled as riverside estates, although in the late 1880s there were unsuccessful attempts to sell subdivided lands. The area was 2 km from the Moonee Ponds railway station, and the tram along Maribyrnong Road to the river did not begin until 1906.

The Maribyrnong River was a popular place for recreation and the Essendon River League was formed in 1906 to promote improvements and bring an end to pollution of the river. Maribyrnong Park, just outside Aberfeldie, was established by Essendon Council in 1906. On the other (north) side of Aberfeldie, in Buckley Street, the Essendon high school was built in 1913, looking out on open land except for a few houses or mansions such as James Ramsay's Clydebank (1888) in Vida Street. (James Ramsay was founder of the Kiwi shoe polish business and father of Hugh Ramsay, an Australian artist).

One of the earliest adoptions of the name Aberfeldie appears to have been the naming of the Aberfeldie Bowling Club in 1910, sited in Scott Street (Moonee Ponds), three blocks east of Robertson's Aberfeldie property. Nine years later Aberfeldie Park was named by the council, the second public reserve it acquired for the area. The Aberfeldie post office, opposite the high school, opened in 1924 and the State primary school opened the following year. Even though interwar houses were filling up the subdivisions, the council felt safe enough to build a municipal incinerator in Holmes Road in 1930. Its redeeming quality was that it was designed by Walter Burley Griffin, and it and Clydebank are Aberfeldie's two heritage listed buildings.

Aberfeldie's houses were completed in the early postwar years, and the primary school's enrolment was 1000. (In 2014 it was 311). Essendon's above average population of Catholics chose Aberfeldie for a Catholic primary school in 1958 and for the Ave Maria girls' college (1963). The college moved to Clydebank in 1988. The Polish Catholic church in Aberfeldie Street also has a primary school.

Aberfeldie has a linear park along the Maribyrnong River, the large Aberfeldie Park which is adjoined by the Incinerator Theatre, and sports facilities in another park near the school. There are local shops along Buckley Street.

Aberfeldie, formerly part of Moonee Ponds and Essendon, was gazetted as a suburb in 1998. Its census populations have been: