Hundreds of people carrying bags full of olives stood in a line at a community garden in Brunswick East in Melbourne’s north.
They were there at Ceres to turn their harvests – collected from back yards, front yards and community olive trees – into oil.
The annual Olives to Oil festival collects the fruit across two weekends before turning it into oil and giving it back to participants.
This year there has been a bumper harvest. So far the community has collected 20 tonnes of olives and they’re expecting to press more than 2,000 litres of oil from them. Another collection will be run in two weeks at the Hobsons Bay festival.
“We were expecting that this would be a big year because we could see the trees around town were quite bountiful,” says Merrin Layden, the manager of the not-for-profit 3000Acres, which runs the festival.
“But it’s double what we thought we might get – the biggest previous year was 6.6 tonnes.”
Eight years ago Eltham resident Fiona Wilson purchased a tiny olive tree from the nursery at Ceres and on Saturday she was taking back its olives.
“We’ve processed olives for eating over the years but we’ve always wanted to do the olive oil,” Wilson said.
Wilson put in more than 18kg of olives and is hoping to get more than a litre of oil. But it’s not just about the bounty, she says, it’s also about community.
“Everyone in the line was having a chat, talking about how they grew their olives,” Wilson says. “And the olive pressing process was really interesting too.”
The first Olives to Oil harvest was in 2018, when just 200kg of the fruit was dropped off. The collection point was on a staff member’s front porch.
It has exploded since, with hundreds of people across the state travelling to Ceres to drop off their olives.
Layden says the festival is about celebrating the cultural heritage of Melbourne.
“In the postwar era, we had big Greek, Italian and other Mediterranean populations migrating to Melbourne who brought olive trees – a lot of them original stock from their places of origin,” she says.
Making oil from olives is difficult to do for households, as you need access to a processor, a large batch of olives and complicated equipment, she says.
“The program was born out of wanting to bring the community together over a shared harvesting tradition,” Layden says.
“Which goes back to villages in the Greek Islands, where there is a village press, and people will harvest together and press together and celebrate the oil that they get.”
