Brunswick West, Victoria 3055

Brunswick West lies wholly inside the area of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation, the Registered Aboriginal Party since 2008.

Merri-bek is a Woi-wurrung name meaning “rocky country”, one of three names Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Elders offered the council in 2022. In the council’s own words: “We acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung People as the Traditional Owners of Merri-bek. They have a strong connection to the land, water and sky. We respect Elders past and present. We know that Aboriginal people never gave up their control of this land. This land has always been, and will always be, Aboriginal land.”

Brunswick was cut into farm allotments and sold in 1839. Whitby House, at 28 Whitby Street, was built in the early 1850s for Edward Whitby, a Melbourne importer, on land he bought in 1849, and is on the Victorian Heritage Register.

The first primary school in Brunswick West opened in 1888, west of Hoffman’s brickyard. A subdivision in the north-west, the Hopetoun Estate, failed in 1892. About ten years later a State Government Closer Settlement scheme brought some 200 people to an area named Moonee Vale, a name a post office and a postcode delivery area still carry. Most of the suburb was built after the Melville Road tram line opened in 1925–27, and Moonee Vale was the last part cut into its present lots, in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Greek and Italian migrants came in the 1950s. At the 2021 Census, Italian and Greek were still the languages most spoken at home after English.

Brunswick West was part of the City of Brunswick (a municipality from 1857, a city from 1908) until 22 June 1994, when Brunswick and Coburg were joined as the City of Moreland. Moreland became Merri-bek in 2022.

Merri-bek’s planning scheme names three neighbourhood centres in Brunswick West: Grantham and Union Streets, with the Union Square shopping centre; Melville Road, Albion Street and Victoria Street; and the corner of Moreland and Melville Roads. Albion Street at Waxman Parade is a smaller local centre.

One place in the suburb is on the Victorian Heritage Register: the Brunswick West Tramway Substation at 196A Dawson Street, which powered the West Coburg tramway and is the only substation in Victoria with its mercury arc rectifier equipment complete. The council’s heritage overlay covers hundreds more, among them the Daly Street, Whitby Street, Collier Crescent and Reaburn Crescent precincts, the Closer Settlement houses of Moonee Vale, the former Brunswick West Primary School on Victoria Street, and St David’s Uniting Church on Melville Road.