The Moonee Ponds Creek is a creek and major tributary of the Yarra River running through urban Melbourne, Victoria, Australia from northern to inner suburbs. In 2004 a reporter for The Age described it as "arguably the most abused tributary of the Yarra River, and part of the true underside of Melbourne". It is rural in its upper sections near Greenvale, passing across basalt plains around Woodlands Historic Park, just north of Melbourne Airport. Towards its mouth it is hemmed in by the Cenozoic caps of Essendon and Royal Park before joining the Yarra River. Through the heavily urbanised areas it flows through it is best characterised as a concrete stormwater drain. It winds its way through the suburbs of Westmeadows, Meadow Heights, Tullamarine, Broadmeadows, Gowanbrae, Glenroy, Strathmore Heights, Oak Park, Strathmore, Pascoe Vale, Pascoe Vale South, Essendon, Brunswick West, Moonee Ponds, Ascot Vale, Flemington, Parkville, North Melbourne (where its artificially widened section is named Railway Canal) before joining the Yarra River at Melbourne Docklands. History Before European settlement, the Moonee Ponds Creek was the home of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin nation. Though there are no written records it is probable that the creek takes its name from an indigenous inhabitant Moonee Moonee, who, along with Tullamareena, burnt down and escaped from the first Melbourne gaol in 1838. The Port Phillip area was first colonised by Europeans in 1835. The first land sales in the area of Strathmore on Moonee Ponds Creek were made in 1843 and 1845. The creek formed a series of marshy ponds on the floodplain, with extensive salt water marshes near its entry to the Yarra river known as Batman's lagoon. With rapid development of Melbourne due to the Victorian gold rush in the 1850s, the swamp quickly became a receptacle for waste waters from Flemington, North Melbourne and Parkville. In 1879 Batman lagoon was drained and filled to make way for the North Melbourne railway yards at its northern end. At its southern area, the filled in marshes were called Dudley Flats, where impoverished people scrounged building material from the land-fill tip to build shelters and huts during the 1930s depression. In the 1890s the lower Moonee Ponds Creek was widened for use as a canal for barges carrying coal to the North Melbourne Locomotive Depot. In 1950s and 1960s the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works realigned and concreted the creek from