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January 28, 2026 — 5:00am
A blaze in overgrown grass on an inner-Melbourne median strip has shown the potentially dangerous consequences of a council’s refusal to maintain state-managed roads unless the state coughs up for the cost.
Fire Rescue Victoria was called to Hoddle Street, Collingwood, about 5pm on Saturday to tackle a five-metre by 15-metre median-strip blaze burning in the grass and into trees along the busy eight-lane arterial road. Authorities believe the fire was sparked by a cigarette butt.
Hoddle Street is one of a number of state-managed roads in the City of Yarra that have become overgrown and dried out amid intense heat this summer, leaving significant fire risks in high-density, high-traffic areas and affecting driver sight lines.
At least one other major roadside scrub fire broke out on Tuesday on a state road, on the Monash Freeway near Mulgrave. It is believed to have been ignited by a car, according to authorities.
Yarra Mayor Stephen Jolly said overgrown median strips and verges had long been a bugbear of locals, but the weekend fire had shifted the situation from “ugly and embarrassing” for the state government to dangerous.
“Who would ever imagine that you’d have a bushfire in Collingwood?” he said.
Opposition roads spokesman Danny O’Brien said the weekend blaze should be a wake-up call, noting that overgrown roadsides were a factor in recent bushfires at Longwood and Yarroweyah in regional Victoria. The catastrophic Longwood blaze was sparked along the Hume Freeway, where grass had grown higher than safety barriers despite state guidelines that it be under 10 centimetres.
“No one should think this can’t happen in the city either, because it can and could be even more disastrous,” O’Brien said.
The state opposition has highlighted overgrown state roads in recent years with various stunts, including Ringwood Liberal MP Nick McGowan taking a mower to freeway median strips himself.
“Whether it’s potholes, graffiti or roadside with grass and vegetation out of control, the Labor government has been neglecting our roads for too long,” O’Brien said.
Fire Rescue Victoria, which handles fires in Melbourne, would not comment on whether it had raised the fire risk from overgrown urban roadsides with the Department of Transport and Planning, but issued a statement saying bush and grass fires could happen in urban and regional areas and keeping grass shorter than 10 centimetres helped reduce the risk.
A decline in road maintenance in the City of Yarra in particular comes after the council stopped its monthly maintenance work on state roads in late 2023, in response to the state providing only $88,000 for a service costing more than $1 million annually.
The council stopped mowing in protest to extract more funding, but the state has not budged.
A council spokeswoman confirmed the council only sweeps the roads twice a year, “in line with what the state government is paying us to do”.
A Department of Transport and Planning spokesman said crews maintained about 45,000 kilometres of roadside vegetation around Melbourne annually as part of a prioritised maintenance program, but did not say how much – if any – mowing had occurred in Yarra since the council stopped monthly mows two years ago.
“We work closely with councils and emergency services to plan mowing and vegetation management programs and prioritise the highest-risk areas,” the spokesman said.
But a Yarra spokeswoman said it had received 90 complaints in 2025 about the condition of state-owned roads, which it had forwarded to the department with no response.
The department’s spokesman said roads such as Hoddle Street and Alexandra Parade were inspected twice weekly for hazards. After being approached by The Age, the department said both strips were set to be cut this week.
Annual reports from the department do not have a breakdown of maintenance schedules, although the latest says it mowed 53,743 kilometres of state roads in 2024-2025. Across a network of 23,500 kilometres of state roads, that averages out to about two mowing cycles a year for the entire state.
Councils across Melbourne have begun redirecting locals to complain not to them, but to MPs about the condition of roads, citing increasing so-called “cost shifting”, whereby the state government offloads responsibility for key services to rate-capped councils without adequate compensation.
Yarra Mayor Jolly said his council was in a “game of chicken” with the state on the issue, but that locals did not want the council to cave in and redirect ratepayer funds from other services.
“I don’t think that’s the mood at the moment. What I’m hearing is people want us to fire up and embarrass the government,” he said. “You can’t ask people in the inner city to vote for the Labor Party later in the year and then just do this to their streets, to the streets that you own.”
Jolly said some Richmond residents were so fed up they were planning a working bee next month to mow the grass themselves and dump bags of clippings with state authorities.
“We’re not asking for anything radical here. It’s just simply to do their [the state’s] job,” he said.
Roads Minister Melissa Horne’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
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