Jacana, Victoria

Jacana Melbourne, Victoria
Jacana Railway Station
Jacana
Coordinates	37°40′48″S 144°54′43″E / 37.68°S 144.912°E / -37.68; 144.912Coordinates: 37°40′48″S 144°54′43″E / 37.68°S 144.912°E / -37.68; 144.912
Population	1,940 (2011 census)
• Density	1,620/km2 (4,190/sq mi)
Established	1920s
Postcode(s)	3047
Area	1.2 km2 (0.5 sq mi)
Location	16 km (10 mi) from Melbourne
LGA(s)	City of Hume
State electorate(s)	Broadmeadows
Federal Division(s)	Calwell
Suburbs around Jacana: Westmeadows Westmeadows Broadmeadows Gladstone Park Jacana Glenroy Gowanbrae Glenroy

Jacana is a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 16 km north from Melbourne's central business district. Its local government area is the City of Hume. At the 2011 Census, Jacana had a population of 1,940.

Jacana is located north of the Western Ring Road, south of Johnstone Street and between the Craigieburn railway line and Moonee Ponds Creek.

The name Jacana was applied to an area between Broadmeadows and Glenroy in the 1950s by the Housing Commission of Victoria (HCV). The name comes from Jacana Street, to the east of the Craigieburn railway line (therefore, technically not in Jacana itself). Both the street and the suburb are slightly to the north of the Jacana railway station, which was built to service the suburb in 1959. However, Jacana as a built landscape did not spring fully formed under the aegis of the HCV.

The streets in the southern section of Jacana were laid out in 1923 when 861 lots were offered for sale on land which had formerly been owned by Duncan Kennedy, a farmer in the area from the mid-1840s. The Housing Commission retitled some of the streets (for instance, the jokingly named Emu Parade and Sunset Boulevard) and built most of the housing stock in this section of Jacana in the 1950s. Only a few houses in Jacana—notably those in Pascoe Vale Road—predate the Housing Commission's arrival in Broadmeadows. In the late 50s a picture of the 'daily needs' shopping centre in Emu Parade appeared in the Housing Commission's Annual Report of 1958-9, presumably because it represented the progressive and ever-expanding nature of HCV operations. As the population increased, Jacana Post Office opened on 15 May 1961. The Commission later laid out and built the northern section of Jacana in the early 1970s, the southernmost section of its showcase Meadow Fair estate. A small portion of the southern section of Jacana came under threat in the mid-1960s, when a new branch line was proposed to extend from the Broadmeadows railway line close to the site of Jacana Station, to the new Melbourne Airport. This line was not built.