Similar scenes were available in the former Cities of Port Melbourne and South Melbourne around the time this was filmed in 1962.

Description of the video accessed via the link below. The old 'bottle-oh’ has worked for seven days a week, year in and year out, collecting empties. He’s never used the whip on his mare and talks about her as though she is a person. The iceman is another of these great characters, who describes how easy it is to deliver ice when the horse stops at each door, ready to move on without having to be told.

Curator’s notes by Janet Bell Until the early years of the 20th century, horses were a common sight on Australian city streets. They were a necessary form of transport without which the commercial life of the community could not function. When this documentary was filmed in the early 1960s there were still a few workhorses plying their way around the streets of Melbourne. The bottle-oh, the iceman, the woodman, they were the last of their line. The city of Melbourne is magnificently filmed with its urban streets frozen in a time just before the untrammelled development of the late ’60s and ’70s. There’s a corner shop, empty streets with hardly a car, and men still wearing hats in public. The carters muse about their life and times encompassing the First World War, the Depression, the Second World War and into the postwar period. This documentary is part of Australia’s filmed heritage and an example of the richness of the ABC’s film and video archive, available to all of us for posterity.

CLICK on the link to travel back in time. https://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/with-gentle-majesty/clip1/?fbclid=IwAR1O3xNuZwNSAcU_omifelJPZcPHw2lI9x735Kcp2y1vP4H8N5I9MU0uvdo