How to start a garden in your backyard
So what actually happened to eastern Melbourne's own version of Disneyland - Caribbean Gardens?
Matthew Sims
September 19, 2025
⏱️ The 77th edition of our newsletter is a seven-minute read.
Hi there 👋
Matthew Sims here, your reporter at the Eastern Melburnian.
As of writing this newsletter, our subscriber count just ticked over 12,800 - a big hello to all our new readers.
On Monday, the Federal Government released its first National Climate Risk Assessment report and it paints a shocking picture, from more severe heat days and bushfires to rising sea levels. We’ll be looking at this in greater depth in coming days and weeks.
In other news, I took a look through the history archives at the rollercoaster story of Caribbean Gardens and Market. I work at an office in the Caribbean Park business park, which encompasses the old site.
I have fond memories of running around this place with my family in the early to mid-2000s and returning home with cheap, pirated DVDs burnt in Bali.
However, there was a lot about the site that I did not know, including that Lake Caribbean was man-made and used to host waterskiing events. Or that it used to be an amusement park, which was spruiked as a “kind of local Disneyland”.
🤔 If you have any thoughts, opinions or ideas of what we should do next, just reply to this email and I’ll be on the other end. We’re building the Eastern Melburnian to serve this community, and it all starts here. With your help, tips, feedback and involvement we can continue to grow and improve.
🗞️ Here’s what the Eastern Melburnian has been up to
Currently, there are about four days of extreme heat per year nationally. The Federal Government’s latest National Climate Risk Assessment showed this is going to increase to 14 days per year under a 3°C warming scenario.
WHAT’S ON THIS WEEK 🎟️
SATURDAY, 20/09/25 and SUNDAY, 21/09/25 | Dinosroar Experience
EVERY DAY, 10AM to 5PM | Tesselaar Tulip Festival
EVERY DAY, 10AM to 5PM | Blossom Festival @ Cherry Hill Orchards, Wandin East
THURSDAY, 18/09/25, 7.30PM to 10PM | Greg Champion @ Oakleigh Music Hall
SATURDAY, 20/09/25, 7.30PM to 9.20PM | Jimeoin - Pandemonium
📰 THIS WEEK’S HEADLINES
Spring has sprung, and all around eastern Melbourne, you'll see green thumbs in their gardens, pruning, snipping, planting and watering.
For those of us who might like to venture into the world of plants, shrubs, trees and flowers, but don't know where to begin, it can all seem a bit overwhelming.
So, what should we be doing in spring? What's in season? And what common errors should we try to avoid?
The Eastern Melburnian spoke to Domenic Presti from Ferntree Gully’s Presti Nursery about the best plants to start growing now and how to care for your plants and veggies.
Presti said plants in season include eggplant, onion, hot chilli, capsicum, lettuce, cucumber, zucchini, strawberry, mint, thyme, coriander, basil and 15 varieties of tomato.
Presti said the main trap amateur gardeners fall into is not being aware that “vegetable growing is a lot of work”. The key was watering and fertilising them regularly and keeping an eye out for pests.
“First of all, you gotta prepare your soil with fertiliser and things like that … a couple of weeks before you plant your vegetables,” he told the Eastern Melburnian.
Presti said the changing climate had led to seasons shifting, which meant people often planted two crops of tomatoes - one at the start of spring and one around December.
“We sell tomatoes all the way up to Christmas because the way our weather is now, if you put them in early, they die off early February,” he said.
It was a slice of kitsch, tropical exotica that added a dash of colour and a frisson of excitement to suburban eastern Melbourne in the 1960s.
The year, to be precise, was 1966, and Arch Spooner had told the Women’s Weekly that his dream was to transform his family’s large plot of land at Scoresby “into a kind of local Disneyland”, replete with a lake dotted by fibreglass crocodiles, elephants and hippopotamuses.
The family had bought the land in 1945, and in the 1950s opened the Caribbean Boat Factory. Later, the 1.2-kilometre-long Lake Caribbean was constructed to test new boats.
In the mid-1960s the Spooners opened the gardens and lake to the public on Sundays. It soon became a hub for local waterskiing and locals selling goods out of their car boots.
In 1976, Caribbean Gardens and Market opened. The increased market space for vendors and traders - in the form of a 2.6-acre pavilion - could cater for up to 1,000 stalls.
The site then morphed into the first amusement park in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, featuring a miniature railway, chairlift, Japanese gardens and small zoo.
By the 2010s, the markets had become a honey pot for those wanting to load up on cheap pirated movies. In 2013, the ABC reported on a Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) study into copyright infringement, which highlighted the Caribbean Gardens and Market as among the world's most notorious markets for selling pirated DVDs.
After more than 60 years of operating every week, the market closed permanently on July 1, 2020, due to the financial impact of Covid.
Several elements of the original gardens, market and amusement park still remain, including the fibreglass picnic umbrella seats. They are, like the distant memories of the park’s heyday, a little faded.
SEEN THIS WEEK 🤓
A two-week school holiday is just around the corner, and keeping kids amused presents parents and carers with logistical and financial challenges.
We’ve prepared a list of some reasonably-priced activities (and one freebie) to keep the youngsters stimulated during the break.
Thanks for catching up with us this week at the Eastern Melburnian. We hope you enjoyed this issue, and we’d love to hear your thoughts. We’ll be back next week to shine a spotlight on the under-reported issues in our patch, so stay tuned!
Cheers,
Matthew and the Eastern Melburnian team