Gladstone Park

Gladstone Park is a residential suburb formerly comprising the eastern part of Tullamarine. It has the Moonee Ponds Creek to its north and east and is 15 km north of central Melbourne. The name came from a grazing property owned by Thomas Gladstone between 1869 and 1883.

The area was subdivided for farms in 1842, and the Gladstone Park property was the best watered and the only one to be sold. It was farmed until sold in 1887 to a land speculator, but his speculation was unsuccessful and the property returned to the Gladstone family. It continued to be farmed until coming into the hands of the Gladstone Park Syndicate in 1954. The Syndicate was part of Stanley Korman's Standhill conglomerate.

Stanhill produced an elaborate subdivision plan but met with financial difficulties. The Commonwealth Government's credit squeeze in 1961 caused the company to default and Costain and A.V. Jennings became the joint developer/builder of Gladstone Park. In 1966 they began the ten-year project of building 3000 houses in Gladstone Park. In 1970 the area's first primary school was opened.

Gladstone Park has a street configuration which is designed to discourage through traffic in most residential streets. There is a second State primary school (1976), a State secondary college (1975) and a Catholic school (1975). Gladstone Park drive-in shopping centre has nearly 19,000 square metres of gross lettable area, and five neighbourhood reserves are distributed towards the edges of the residential area. There is a council library in the secondary college, and there are Catholic and Uniting churches and a bowling club. Part of the skirting Moonee Ponds valley, however, is the site of the Western Ring Road which was constructed during the mid-1990s.

Gladstone Park's census populations have been:

census date population
2001 9568
2006 8669
2011 8329

Among the languages spoken at home by residents at the 2011 census there were:

language % of residents
  Gladstone Park Victoria
Italian 6.9 2.3
Arabic 8 1.3
Greek 4.1 2.2

Further Reading

Andrew Lemon, Broadmeadows: a forgotten history, City of Broadmeadows and Hargren, 1982