Masonic Buildings - Did Anyone Notice that Freemasonry is no more in Boroondara ?

Five Masonic Centres were sold and consolidated in to one at Box Hill recently. I’ve just touched on it in an article below but such an event needs its own heading, even if just a sad footnote in our history. The five centres sacrificed to realise the Inner East (New Box Hill) Masonic Centre were Camberwell, Canterbury, Box Hill, Blackburn and Kew.

With these sales, did anyone notice that Freemasonry in its own building has gone from the City of Boroondara (forever) ?

If you’re an overseas reader “The City of Boroondara” is a collection of suburbs under a single local council within the city of Melbourne. There are 31 such local councils in Melbourne. (Yes, we have three tiers of government, Federal, State and then Local – think of local councils like counties).

Boroondara is a collection of inner eastern suburbs totalling 60 square kilometres with a 2011 census density of 2,650 people per km² containing many of Melbourne most expensive suburbs. Like a frog in slowly boiling water, no one seems to notice or care we just sold off every Masonic Building there. Passionate about both Speculative and Physical Masonry – yet I’ve only just realised myself ! And I’ve just realised, if we had not saved the Collingwood Masonic Centre – there would also be no Masonic building left in the City of Yarra either (a geographically smaller area which had 4 centres. Yarra is 20km2 with a density of 3,704.5 people/km²).

That would have been 80 km2 in inner Melbourne without a centre if we’d not saved Collingwood..