History of Doncaster & Templestowe (Keogh 1975)

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The History of Doncaster and Templestowe

Graeme Keogh. City of Doncaster and Templestowe.  Published 1975. ISBN 0959948716.  Cover Design - Helen Bassett. Printed at Dominion Press, Joseph Street, North Blackburn 3130

Preface

In approaching the task of writing the history of a municipality an author should bear in mind that the subject of his study is not an isolated community living on a remote island in the middle of a vast ocean. The inhabitants of a municipality constitute an integral part of a wider society. Its development and its life are necessarily influenced by the life of the whole society. It follows that if the history of a municipality is to be intelligible it must be placed in the context of the society as a whole.
In trying to establish this relationship as economically as possible I have assumed that the reader has a general knowledge of Australian history. However, national events in the last twenty years or so have not yet passed into recorded history. Since some of these events had dramatic effects in the City of Doncaster and Templestowe, it was necessary to recount them in sufficient detail to keep the story in context.
I have tried to write the story of a people, of the development of a community, rather than to construct a compilation of details about families and individuals. Many of the persons mentioned contributed to the development of the munci-pality by public service and leadership in different spheres. Others were selected as representative or characteristic of the community in which they lived and worked.
My thanks are due to the many old residents who provided me with information about the early days of settlement and development. Since most of them were speaking from personal or family recollections unsupported by diaries or other documentary evidence, it is to be expected that there may be some disagreement about details. I believe, however, that the narrative does give a broad and accurate account of the growth of the district from 1839 to 1974.
The City of Doncaster and Templestowe has a proud record of solid achievement. Over the years her people have contributed much to the development of the nation as a whole. If they contribute as much in their second century as they did in their first, they will have done very well indeed.
E.G.K.

Image
Municipal Offices 1974

Contents

City of Doncaster and Templestowe

List of Councillors who have served in the Councils of the Shire of Bulleen, Shire of Doncaster, Shire of Templestowe, Shire of Doncaster and Templestowe and of the City of Doncaster and Templestowe

  • D = Doncaster
  • T = Templestowe
  • DE = Doncaster East
  • DW= Doncaster West
  • W = Warrandyte

Councillors of the Shire of Bulleen 1875-1892 (later Shire of Templestowe 1892-1916)

Councillor:From:To:Shire President:
Foundation Members 1875:
Edward Tathan187518761875; 1875/6
Matthew Henry Hoare18751876
John Smedley Jnr.18751876
James Kent18751876
John Delaney18751876
Robert Laidlaw18751876

Shire Subdivided into Three Ridings 1876 Doncaster Riding Severed
Shire of Bulleen renamed Shire of Templestowe 1892

John Smedley Jnr. D187618811877/8; 1880/8i; 1883/4;
188218881884/5; 1885/6; 1886/7
Henry Finger D18761879
Alfred Hummell D18761877
Robert Williamson T18761888
Robert Laidlaw T18761884I876/7; 1878/9; 1879/80;
1881/2;1882/3
John Delaney T18761883
Lewis Grant W1876—
George Holloway W18761881
Henry Stiggant Jnr. W187618791888/9; 1894/7; Pt- 1898/9;
18831889 1892/3; 1904/5
18911900
19021906
Matthew Henry Hoare W18761878
Tom Petty Dl87718891887/8
William Hutchinson W18781887
Carl Schmidt D18791882
Thomas John Dowd W18791885
Henry Firth D18811884


Councillor:FromToShire President
Henry Gardner W18811883
Joseph Smith T18831895
David Murray T18841887
William Sydney Williams D1884I887
Henry George Reynolds W18851888
William Sell D18871890
William Hunter T188718971889/91; 1893/5; pt-1896/7
William Kent W18871893
Alexander Calder T18881891
William Meader Snr. D18881890
George A. Goodwin W18881891
Edwin Lawford D18891890
Augustus Andrew W188918941891/2; 1906/7
19021908
David Williamson Snr. T189119001897/8
John Sloan W18931894
Alfred Squires Wi8941900
Francis Trezise W189419021901/2; 1910/11
19081915
George Hodgson T189519071899/1900
John Spears W190019151902/3; 1908/9; 1912/i3
James Lang T19001906
John Smith W190019021909/10; 1911/12
19061914
Thomas Hunter T189719101900/1; 1903/4; 1905/6;
191219161907/8; 1915/16
John Frederick Jones T19061907
Joseph Blair W19071910
Thomas Henry Petty T19071910
19141915
John Read T19101912
William J. Sloan W191019151914/15
Frank McNamara T191019151913/14


Shire of Templestowe united with Shire of Doncaster 1/10/1915
Councillors of the Shire of Doncaster 1890-1966
Shire renamed Shire of Doncaster and Templestowe on 16th March, 1926

William Sell189018921890/91; 1894/5;
189318961898/9; 1904/5; 1925/6
19011910
1916
19201923
19241926
Edwin Lawford189018921891/2; 1899/1900
18981901
John Smedley Jnr.18901892Pt. 1892
John Tully189018911909/10; 1914/15; 1919/20
1896-
19041922
Frederick Winter18901892
August Zerbe189018961892/3; 1906/7
Henry George Reynolds18911893
Edmund M. V. Thiele189218941893/4
George Henry Mays1892-
18921894
1894-
Robert George Cameron18921893
Tom Petty1892l894
Matthias John Henry Thiele189318941895/6
18941898
William Sidney Williams1893-
Frederick Pickeringi8941909l896/7; 1900/1; 1902/3;
191519161907/8
Henry Crouch18941900i897/8; 1903/4; 1908/9;
19021916i9!2/i3
Ferdinand Finger1894190819°5/6
Johann August Zerbe189619171901/2; 1910/11; 1915/16
William Stutt18961902
James Kent19001904
John Cronan190819151911/12
Henry John Crossman Clay190919241913/14; 1917/18; 1921/22
John Herbert Robinson19101913
William Jessop May19131915


Shire of Templestowe Councillors at amalgamation with Shire of Doncaster 1st October, 1915

William J. Sloan1916-
Frank McNamara1916-19l8/19; 1920/1
19171922
Thomas Henry Petty191619171916/17
Francis Trezise1916-
John Spears19161917
Thomas Hunter19161918

Shire of Doncaster

Percy Carnegie Clay D19171920
James A. Mitchell T19171920
William John Duxon T19181921
19221926
James Bower Sutherland T19201921
Alfred Thomas Scarborough T19211922Pt. 1922
Edward Patrick Sheahan T19211926pt. 1922/3
Robert George Hillhouse T192219261924/5; 1930/31; 1936/7
192619561942/3; 1948/9
Arthur Ernest Ireland D192219261923/4; 1935/6; 1944/5;
193219621952/3
Joseph Albert Smith D192319261926/7
1926!932
John James Tully D192619481929/30; 1938/9; 1947/8
Edwin Inglis Lawford D192619381932/3
Robert Read T1926j9361933/4
Patrick Cashen T192619291927/8
Angela E. J. Booth W19261933
Charles R. H. Hemsworth W192619461928/9; 1934/5; 1940/41
John Vincent Colman W192619361931/2; 1943/4; 1946/7
19401953
William Alexander Smith T19291954
Harold George Adams W193319451937/8; 1951/2; 1954/5
19491955
Edward Miles T193619441939/40
Julius Grant W19361937
William David Moore W19371940
George Thom.as Knee D193819551941/2; 1950/51



CouncillorFromToShire PresidentMayor
John Bryson Horsfall T194419521945/6
Francis Nankivell W19451949
William Taylor W19461947
John Blair Hutchinson W194819541949/50
Douglas Inglis Lawford D19481954
William Read Oliver T195219581953/4; 1956/7
William Francis Betton W195319621957/8
George William Dunlop T19541956
William Raymond Garrett D195419601955/6
Lindsay Heyward Gown W19541956
Maxwell Jock McKenzie D195519661958/9
William Bruce Kennedy W19551958
John Desmond Fetherston T19561957
Edward Leslie Newbigin T195619621959/60
Edmund Uel Domeyer W19571957
Sturt Sydney Swilk T195719631962/3
Alfred Percy Withers W195719611960/61
Roy Stuart Andrews T19581961
William Keith Wilson W19581961
Leslie John Cameron D19601961/21971/2
Victor John Theobald T19611963
Vivian Campbell Collins Rush W196119731963/4
Alan Humphrey Croxford W19611966
Stanley Kirtley Shepherd W19621968Aug 1966-Feb 1967Feb-Aug 1967
Morris Thomas Williams T196219681965/6
19701973
Geoffrey James Steadman D19621964
Geoffrey Stewart Watson T19631967
Roy Aubrey Harle T196319721968/9
Russell John Hardidge D196419701964/5
Kenneth Frank May W19661969
Basil Stanley Elms196619711967/8
Alan Bruce Kelly W19661967
Keith Henry Remington DE196619721969/70
Robert Douglas White DE19661973/4


Proclaimed City of Doncaster and Templestowe on 28th February, 1967

CouncillorFromToMayor
Ivan Edgar Peter-Budge DW19671972
Walter James Montgomery T19671970
Frank Edward Douglas T19681971
Darryl Robert Francis Marsh W19681970
Kenneth John Buxton W19691972
1970/71
Ian Lloyd Edwards W19701972
Ronald Edward Kitchingman DE19701973
William Robert Davey T1971
1972/3
Barry Anthony Jones DW19711974
Kenneth John Gray DE1972
Alan Patrick Morton W19721974
Ian Rupert Marsden W1972
1974/5
Edward Albert Maurice Ajani T1972
Thomas Octavius Willason DW19731973
Faith Mary Fitzgerald T1973
Vera Muriel Green DE1973
Robert William Poppins DW1973
Jack Colin Scott W1973
Robert Charles White W1974
Ronald William Russell DW1974

The Vanguard of Land Seekers

Within twenty years of the arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788 the colony of New South Wales had become firmly established. Settlers were pushing inland and the administration was encouraging exploration and searching for places on the coast suitable for new settlements. In 1802 John Murray in the Lady Nelson explored Port Phillip Bay, and in the following year an expedition led by Colonel Collins was despatched from Sydney to establish a settlement there. Collins landed on the sandy dunes near Sorrento but, finding the land unproductive and water scarce, he moved on to Tasmania where his settlement flourished and rapidly expanded.
In 1824 the explorers Hume and Hovell walked from Sydney to Corio Bay, and on their return published glowing accounts of the fertility of the land through which they had passed. Two years later the colonial authorities made another attempt at settlement in the Port Phillip area. However, the expedition landed at Western Port by mistake. The site proved hopeless for agriculture and the settlement was withdrawn in 1828. Thereafter settlement on the Victorian coast was officially discouraged.
By this time most of the easily accessible land in Tasmania had been occupied and land-hungry settlers were casting about for new pastures for their expanding flocks.
All applications for permission to cross to Port Phillip were refused, but in 1834 Edward Henty defied the official ukase, crossed Bass Strait and established himself at Portland.
About the same time farming and mercantile interests in Hobart and Launceston formed the Port Phillip Association, and commissioned John Batman to explore the area and negotiate with the natives. Batman solemnly ‘bought’ one hundred thousand acres around Port Phillip from the aborigines for twenty pairs of blankets, thirty knives, twelve tomahawks, ten mirrors, twelve pairs of scissors, fifty handkerchiefs, twelve red shirts, four flannel jackets, four suits of clothes and fifty pounds of flour.
A rival expedition led by John Pascoe Fawkner soon arrived. Both men established their settlements on the lower reaches of the Yarra where the City of Melbourne now stands.
By 1836 the number of settlers who had crossed from Tasmania or marched overland from Sydney impelled the Governor of New South Wales to proclaim Port Phillip as a district open to settlement and to appoint an administrator.
In 1837 Governor Bourke named the township ‘Melbourne’ in honour of the British Prime Minister, and arranged for land sales to give the townspeople security of tenure. The surveyor Robert Hoddle laid out the unimaginative rectangular town plan which provided the future city with thoroughfares nicely oriented to funnel the burning blasts of summer and the icy draughts of winter.
Port Phillip boomed. The flocks and herds spread inland and Melbourne became the port through which their owners exported their produce and received their supplies. At its christening, the township was an untidy sprawl of thirty or forty tents, huts and humpies. Three years later it had 4,000 people, thirty hotels, three newspapers and boundless confidence in its future. Merchants, farmers, market gardeners and speculators paid high prices for land as fast as the surveyors made it available for auction. Land-jobbers bought much of it, and auctioned it off again to eager bidders plentifully supplied with free champagne.
The landseekers who pushed out from the ports of Melbourne and Geelong, or came overland from north of the Murray, faced a formidable undertaking. Men with funds at their disposal could hire stockmen and other assistants. The less affluent loaded their possessions and often their wives in a dray and managed single handed with a couple of cows and a few sheep. The poorest carried their swags. But they all faced the same problems of a roadless land. They all had to make their way through a virgin country across rivers, through scrubby gullies and over timbered ridges, and they all had to build their first homes with the materials they found at hand.
Not all of the settlers remained in the place that first took their fancy. One of the early overlanders, John Gardiner, arrived in Port Phillip in December, 1836, and established the first cattle station in southern Victoria on grasslands now covered by the cities of Hawthorn, Camberwell and Kew. A few months later he discovered the rich country around Lilydale and set up a new station near Mooroolbark.
No early Victorian squatter, rich or poor, had a title to his land, though they were supposed to pay rent to the Crown. Outside the surveyed areas close to Melbourne there were no clearly defined property boundaries. The boundaries claimed often overlapped, while small squatters infringed temporarily or permanently on the bigger runs.
The historian trying to unravel the tangle of those restless years may take comfort from the fact that the government of the day had the same problem. As soon as possible Robert Hoddle sent out his assistant surveyors to map the country, define leaseholds and establish the data for the regularisation of land tenure.
The first survey of the area now occupied by the City of Doncaster and Templestowe was made by T. R. Nutt in 1839. Nutt ran his traverse along the Yarra and appears to have roughly sketched in the country from hill tops as he went along. Most of the notes written across the map read ‘Grassy hills thickly timbered’, ‘Stringybark forest’, ‘Principally gum and stringybark’, with an occasional ‘Fine grassy flat’ along the river. The only names shown on this map are ‘Mr. W. Wood’s Sheep Station’ in the area now known as Bulleen, and ‘Mr. Newman’s Sheep Station’ west of Mullum Mullum Creek. Further to the east, probably in the area between Yarra Glen and Lilydale, ‘Mr. Gardiner’s Cattle Station’ and ‘Messrs. Ryries’ Cattle Station’ are shown.
Early in 1843 Mr. W. Darke made another survey of the area, running his
Major Newman’s first homestead at Templestowe
main traverse along the Yarra and returning by the high ground approximately along the line of Doncaster Road. Darke sketched in the ridge lines and streams with fair accuracy, and covered his map with notes similar to those of Nutt. A few more names appear on this map. Immediately south of Koonung Creek near its junction with the Yarra is a hut marked ‘Grover’ and further up the creek on the south side are two huts marked ‘A. Wright’. Just west of the mouth of Anderson’s Creek ‘Anderson’ is shown. Further to the east comes ‘Selby’s’ and then ‘Ryrie’ and ‘Gardiner’. Several unnamed huts are shown along Anderson’s Creek.
Striking in from the south-west approximately near the junction of Elgar and Doncaster Roads there is a dotted line marked ‘Best line of road from Melbourne’. After junetioning with a track running south-east and marked ‘Track to Dandenong’, the line continues easterly past the heads of Koonung and Mullum Mullum Creeks, turns north for about two miles, then swings south easterly with the note ‘Road to Port Albert will probably be found on this range’.
Apparently both Nutt and Darke were concerned with exploring and roughly mapping the country rather than with the definition of property boundaries. At any rate no boundaries are shown on their maps. Between 1839 and 1^43^ however, Crown lands carrying proper titles had been sold in the area between the Yarra and Koonung Creek. In 1840 the Imperial Government had decreed that any approved person could buy eight square miles of Crown land at $2 an acre provided the block was at least five miles from a surveyed township. One man who took advantage of this generous provision was a Sydney solicitor named F. W. Unwin, who in March, 1841, paid the modest sum of $10,240 for the title of 5,120 acres between Koonung Creek and Templestowe. South of the creek Henry Elgar, a West Indian merchant, made a similar deal for the land lying between the present Bourke, Elgar and Canterbury Roads.
The Governor soon suspended the Special Survey provisions to prevent speculators from cheaply acquiring such large tracts of land close to expanding districts. Nevertheless smaller parcels of Crown land could be bought for the same price. A plan Tart of the Parish of Bulleen’, dated 18 November, 1843, shows portions varying from 640 to 1,057 acres in the area around Newman’s Road available for selection. A written notation on the plan says that several lots were offered for sale on 20 March, 1844, at $2.00 an acre but no bids were received.
Another map of the same period boldly labels the Park Orchards-South Warrandyte area ‘Poor pasture heavily timbered’.
The first people of European origin to reside in the municipality were the brothers J. and W. Wood who established themselves on the Bulleen flats in 1838. In the following year James Anderson overlanded his cattle from north of the Murray and squatted near Warrandyte on the stream which became known as Anderson’s Creek. In the same year Major Charles Newman, a retired officer of the Indian Army, settled himself and his sheep on the flats near the present Newmans Road.
As early as 1820 newspapers and periodicals in Great Britain began to feature the Colony of New South Wales as a place where men with some capital could find more scope for their energies than they could at home. This publicity attracted well-to-do migrants bent upon acquiring extensive properties at the cheap rates offered by the government. As knowledge of the colony spread throughout the United Kingdom, men of modest means determined to seek their fortunes in the new land. A steady stream of migration soon developed, chiefly from England and Scotland but with a sprinkling from Ireland and the western countries of Europe.
Early in 1840 John Chivers, from Cambridgeshire in England, and his wife Mary Ann packed their trunks, gathered up their baby son William, looked apprehensively at the few coins left after paying their passage money, and walked aboard a ship about to sail for Port Phillip. When the ship docked at Melbourne five or six months later Major Charles Newman was on the wharf looking for
Von Schramm’s cottage in its original position in Doncaster Road
hands to work on his property at Templestowe. He struck a bargain with the Chivers; John agreed to work on the farm for $50 a year while Mary Ann became the governess of Newman’s children for $30 a year. Two years later the Chivers left Newman’s property and built their own small home on the flats near Fitzsimon’s Lane. John went into a timber-cutting partnership with Thomas Cunningham whose wife was a step-daughter of Major Newman.
Some months before the Chivers sailed from England, Robert Laidlaw arrived in Melbourne in the Midlothian, the first ship to bring Scottish immigrants to Victoria. In 1841 he came to Templestowe and in partnership with Hugh Kerr bought out the Woods Brothers for the princely sum of $30. Eighteen months later this pastoral venture withered in a sharp economic recession when the price of sheep fell from $3.50 a head to less than fifty cents. Laidlaw then selected land along Bulleen Road, and went into a farming partnership with Alexander Duncan who had been running a dairy farm on Gardiner’s Creek in Hawthorn.
How long the Laidlaw-Duncan partnership lasted cannot now be determined. However, both men were successful farmers, and both worked hard to further the development of the district. Laidlaw in particular gave many years of public service on the Templestowe Road Board and later on the municipal council which succeeded it.
By 1841 the population of Melbourne had reached 11,700 and land seekers were spreading out in all directions. On the eastern side, however, they encountered the unbridged Yarra, an obstacle which shepherded a goodly proportion of the prospective settlers, most of whom were in a tearing hurry for the best land, towards Heidelberg. The pleasant and fertile country along this route also attracted well-to-do men with influence in government circles.
Routes leading eastward were opened up when an enterprising gentleman named James Palmer installed a flat-bottomed punt on the Yarra near the present site of the Hawthorn bridge. Pretty soon John Hodgson, who lived in a town mansion in Flinders Street near Young and Jackson’s Hotel, installed a rival punt at Abbotsford. Palmer’s punt opened a direct route to the country now covered by the cities of Hawthorn and Camberwell, while Hodgson’s venture opened the route to Kew. For many years, however, these two routes were difficult ones for people moving to and from the outer fringes of settlement. Unbridged creeks, logs and stumps had to be negotiated. In winter the track through Camberwell became a morass, while the one through Kew had some heavy gradients. When a punt was installed on the river near Heidelberg it opened the best route between Melbourne and the sparsely-settled Bulleen-Templestowe area. For a long time the Heidelberg Road, built no doubt at the promptings of influential gentlemen, was the best country road around Melbourne.
These lines of communication greatly influenced early development in the municipality. Templestowe-Bulleen was the most accessible district, and the first arrivals naturally settled along the rich river flats rather than push on into the higher, heavily timbered country.
By 1844 most of the Unwin Special Survey had been sold or leased, and the flats from Bulleen to Templestowe were under cultivation. In addition a steady trade in timber was developing. Men found a ready market in Melbourne for the firewood cleared from the Templestowe selections, while along the river several saw pits were busily converting the plentiful red gums into highly prized building material. The partners Laidlaw and Duncan consigned parcels of wheat
‘Friedensruhe’ residence of the Thiele family
and barley to England — the first to be exported from Victoria — to test the reaction of the British market. Although the grain was favourably received, crop raising efforts on the flats were frustrated by persistent flooding. After a few years most of the farmers on the flats switched to dairy farming.
The Templestowe-Bulleen district made steady progress and in 1847 the first school was established near the Heidelberg bridge with some twenty-seven pupils. Expansion was rapid and three years later a school, officially described as being in a ‘very dilapidated condition’, was opened at the junction of Williamsons and Serpells Roads with a rated attendance of eighty pupils. From the inspector’s reports it appears that attendance was erratic. Labour was scarce in the country districts, and farmers were prone to keep their elder children at home to lend a hand.
By 1851 John drivers had saved enough money to buy 100 acres along Church Street, the first successful attempt to settle on the heavily timbered hills from the Templestowe side. Soon afterwards James Read also tackled the high ground and planted the first commercial orchard in the district. The descendants of both families are still working the same ground.
Besides working his land, John Olivers devoted a great deal of his time to
spiritual affairs as a lay preacher of the Methodist Church. Since his religious scruples forbade him to work a horse on a Sunday, he often walked to preach at Greensborough, Heidelberg or East Doncaster.
By the middle of 1852 the Templestowe settlements had spread eastward across the lower country as far as Newman’s Road and the township was beginning to take shape. On 23 September Templestowe was proclaimed a village, and six months later the first town allotments were auctioned at an average price of $78, well above the reserve price of $5.
The origin of the name ‘Templestowe’ is obscure; the word is not mentioned in gazetteers of the British Isles. However, Templestowe is the name bestowed by Sir Walter Scott on the Preceptory of the Knights Templars in England in his novel ‘Ivanhoe’. It was the scene of a dramatic encounter between his hero Ivanhoe and one of the villains of the story. The novel was published in 1819 and enjoyed wide popularity. From the association of the two words — Ivanhoe is just across the river — we may suppose that both names were bestowed by a government official with an admiration for Scott’s work.
The Bulleen-Templestowe dairy farmers learnt much from the advice and example of George Smith who came out from Scotland in 1854, bought some land from Robert Laidlaw and settled in alongside the Duncans. Later he married one of the Duncan girls, and in 1881 took first prize with his cheese at the Melbourne Exhibition.
In September, 1854, a number of Melbourne businessmen launched a concern called the Victorian Vineyard and Garden Fruits Company. The promoters claimed, rightly as it turned out, that agriculture would provide the colony with a more enduring economic foundation than gold. The principal object of the company was stated to be the cultivation of fruits, particularly grapes. To counter the temperance movement developing in the colony, the company argued that the introduction of local wines would promote sobriety by reducing the consumption of more potent liquor.
The company secured 200 acres of land adjoining the village of Templestowe, but never quite succeeded in getting a single vine planted. Nevertheless, in the two years of its existence, the company did much to draw public attention to the possibilities of horticulture and sponsored the construction of the first bridge over the Upper Yarra. Believing that a bridge between Eltham and Templestowe would benefit both districts, the directors called a public meeting at the Upper Yarra Hotel on 10 March, 1855. By means of some simple arithmetic it was demonstrated that charges based on current rates for crossing by the punt at Heidelberg would make the proposed bridge a profitable undertaking. Shares in what was virtually a subsidiary company were bought at the meeting, and subsequently at similar gatherings at Eltham and Kangaroo Ground. By July sufficient capital had been subscribed and the bridge was opened for traffic about four months later.
It is doubtful if the bridge paid a return on the capital invested. Theoretically it shortened the distance between Eltham and Melbourne by about four miles — a weighty consideration in those days — but the atrocious state of the roads through Bulleen and Kew impelled most of the through traffic along the better route through Heidelberg. The bridge was demolished in the great flood which swept down the river in 1863.
In the 1860s and ’70s Templestowe presented a typical picture of the villages
Doncaster Road in the i86o’s, looking east
spread along the routes radiating from Melbourne and Geelong — some scattered houses set in struggling gardens, a few shops, a smithy and a couple of inns. The Templestowe Post Office, opened on 1 July, i860, with Mr. J. Field as the first Postmaster, followed the usual practice of being run in conjunction with a store. For managing Her Majesty’s mails at Templestowe Mr. Field was paid $20 a year.
A common feature of early Victorian villages was the close association of the inn and the blacksmith’s shop. The roads were long and rough and dusty, hard on the horses and hard on the humans. If one were prudent the smithy provided the means of having one’s horse’s shoes attended to; if one were thirsty the inn offered refreshment. From the frequency with which smithies stood close to inns it would seem that most early Victorian travellers were both prudent and thirsty.
Besides catering for the thirsty traveller, the inns filled an important social need. In the days when there were few public halls in the country districts, the inn was the venue for meetings of many kinds, serious as well as convivial. It was common practice for meetings, called to discuss some matter of public interest, to be held at the local inn. If there were too many to get inside, the meeting was held in the open, though most of them probably got in afterwards. For many years it was not uncommon for the monthly meetings of the District Roads Boards, the first step towards local government in the colony, to be held at an inn.
There is no record of a church service being conducted at an inn, but many a marriage was celebrated in the parlour, a practical arrangement which saved a lot of mileage. Although neither the eight hour day nor the five day working week had been heard of, countrymen managed to find time to gather at the local inn simply to enjoy each other’s company. With beer at three cents a pint and
practically no restrictions on trading hours, these social occasions could be protracted affairs.
Since a great deal of public and social life centred on the inn, much depended on the landlord. Templestowe was fortunate in having two innkeepers both of whom were colourful characters and renowned for their probity and public spirit. One of them, Jimmy Finn, migrated from Ireland with only a few pence in his pocket but soon found a steady job as a stableman and general hand at the Catholic Presbytery at Heidelberg. Jimmy was ambitious, saved his money and eventually bought the squat two-storeyed brick and stone building known as the Upper Yarra Hotel. Later on he added a taller timber structure at one end of the original building. In this ‘mother and daughter’ structure the Finn family conducted the business for over fifty years.
In addition to his reputation as a hotel keeper, Jimmy Finn was renowned for his impeccable attire, his ready wit, his generosity and his colourful language. Legend has it that when the parish priest of Heidelberg, accompanied by two other priests, called at the hotel one of them said: ‘Jimmy, I believe you are a terrible fellow for swearing.’ Jimmy banged down his fist in righteous protest: ‘I’m ... if I am.’
Although a devout Catholic, Jimmy supported all local good causes, including those promoted by other denominations. Visiting a sale of gifts in aid of the Presbyterian Church, he was invited to try his luck at the ‘fishpond’. The anglers placed a coin in a canvas bucket attached to a fishing rod and passed it over a screen where the attendants loaded it with some inexpensive item. When Jimmy’s bucket came over they put in a dead rabbit. Jimmy looked at it with distaste: ‘Well that’s the first . . . fish I ever caught with hair on it.’
Jimmy Finn ran the Upper Yarra Hotel until he died about 1908. The business was carried on by his family until the hotel was delicensed forty years ago. The building was burnt down in 1967.
The landlord of the Templestowe Hotel, Patrick Sheahan, also arrived from Ireland with practically no money. For some years he drove a bullock dray in the Yarra Valley. Like Jimmy Finn, he worked hard and took care of his money. By 1871 he had saved enough to buy the Templestowe Hotel, and ran it until he died in 1916. His wife carried it on until her death in 1931.
There was keen rivalry between the two hotels, but business interests did not stand in the way of romance. James Finn, a son of old Jimmy, married Hannah Sheahan, an event which did little to lessen the competition but did ensure harmony between the two families, most of the time anyway.
Patrick Sheahan was a noted step dancer and was always willing to match his skill against any other exponent of the art. With Billy Cannon as his violinist, he practised assiduously, and contests with visiting dancers before a highly critical audience were a feature of the neighbourhood.
Hotel keeping in those days must have been a pretty strenuous occupation. Many of the Templestowe settlers used to cut the timber cleared from their land into firewood and sell it at the markets in Clifton Hill, Fitzroy and Col-lingwood, or if need be, hawk it around the streets. Returning from a hard day’s work, groups of them would drop in at the Templestowe for a few drinks and a game of cards. More often than not it was two or three o’clock before the party broke up. Yet Patrick Sheehan, fresh and brisk, was always on the job first thing in the morning.
Besides the hotels there were two beer shops in Templestowe, facing each other across the main road near Foote Street. The proprietors, Louis de Compte and Jackerish Jenkens, bore no love for each other and verbal passages of some warmth often passed between them. It is said that the exchange of invectives reached dazzling heights when one night in June, 1870, de Compte’s haystack caught fire and burnt down Jenkens’ beer shop. Each loudly accused the other of incendiarism and much else besides.
Templestowe was a brief entry in the annals of bushranging in Victoria. In 1842 four heavily armed men stuck up the Newman homestead and robbed the occupants of $60, some jewellery and a silver soup tureen. Gossipers around the firesides of the Upper Yarra and the Templestowe took the view that some of the bushrangers were ex-convicts from Tasmania bent upon paying off a grudge against Newman. Whatever their motive, the gang was hardly in the Ned Kelly class for they were rounded up a couple of days later in the Plenty Ranges.
The reconnaissance surveys made by Nutt and Darke in 1839 and 1843, and other records in the Lands Department, show that at that time the high ground from Doncaster, through East Doncaster and Park Orchards to South Warrandyte was heavily timbered with stringybark, messmate, peppermint and wattle. The formidable nature of the country earned for it a low official rating, while the earlier arrivals in the colony naturally settled on the more accessible and attractive land.
The opening up of the high ground owes much to the enterprise of William Burnley, a Richmond landowner and speculator. In 1847 be bought land along Doncaster Road from Tram Road to Blackburn Road. Although he never lived in Doncaster, the energetic salesmanship of his agents drew public attention to the district and, no doubt, earned a profit on his investment.
It is difficult to say who was the first man to settle on the high ground along the general line of Doncaster Road. Joseph Pickering, who migrated from England in 1847, *s thought to have been living near Blackburn Road as early as 1851. He was certainly settled on a block near the Municipal Offices by 1854. Two years later the first Church of England service was held in his home, and in the early ’sixties he was running a grocery and butcher’s shop. In 1865 he became the Registrar of Births and Deaths in Doncaster and retained the office until he died in 1870.
Probably the first person to establish himself in Doncaster was John Robert Wilson who came out from England in 1847, bought some land in the district in 1852 and two years later built an inn on Doncaster Road at the corner of Victoria Street. Wilson named the inn the ‘Doncaster Arms’ after his birthplace in Doncaster in Yorkshire. Wilson sold the inn in 1857 and bought a selection further to the east on Doncaster Road. For nearly forty years he was active in the social and sporting affairs of the district.
When Wilson built his inn there were few local inhabitants to cater for, but the track which later became Doncaster Road was one of the routes to the goldfields discovered at Warrandyte in 1851. There was probably a steady trickle of fortune hunters glad of the rest and refreshment offered by the inn.
Originally the district was known as Vermont, and opinion differs as to how the name came to be changed to Doncaster. One school holds that the name was bestowed by William Burnley after his birthplace. On the other hand, A. E. Martin in his book ‘Place Names in Victoria and Tasmania’ says ‘Doncaster —
was named by John Robert Wilson, and is indicative of Doncaster, England, where the St. Leger is run each year’.
During 1853 several families accepted the challenge of the timbered highlands. Which of them first toiled with all their worldly possessions up the long hill from Koonung Creek does not matter very much. They were all founding fathers of a community which grew steadily in spiritual and material wealth and some of them pioneered one of Victoria’s most important primary industries — horticulture.
Tom Petty did not go all the way to the crest. Soon after crossing Koonung Creek he turned aside, pitched a tent, took a long hard look at his forested land and got out the axe. If the axe was an unfamiliar implement to a man who had been a weaver in his native land, he made such good use of it that he soon had a vegetable garden and the beginnings of an orchard under cultivation. But the wattle and daub hut he had built by the creek was hardly roomy enough for his wife and children. So he built a stone cottage further up the hill, and wrote for Jane and the children to come out to the two-storeyed house he had built for them. Jane, buoyed up with the vision of a commodious English house, walked all the way from Port Melbourne to find that the only means of access to the top storey of her new abode was a rope ladder. If the strangeness and the discomfort and the toil bothered her at first she did not let that stand in the way of caring for a family whose inventiveness and ingenuity did much for the district and for Victorian horticulture.
The original Upper Yarra Hotel
Richard Serpell, with his wife, four sons and a daughter, came from England in 1850 and settled in Glenferrie. Three years later he bought 40 acres at the head of Serpells Road. Richard and his elder sons took turns at camping out in a bark hut, carrying out from Glenferrie seedlings of currants, gooseberries and grape vines. For some months they tried their luck with indifferent success on the Anderson’s Creek goldfield. Despite the interruption, they had a small orchard well established by the spring of 1855.
While the Serpell boys were felling their first trees, John Clay and his family from Devonshire climbed laboriously up the hill and settled on a block of land on the south side of Doncaster Road a few hundred yards from the municipal offices. His son Richard later served the community as a member of the Templestowe Roads Board and his daughter Eliza married young Tom Petty.
The first of a band of German migrants to settle in Doncaster came Gottlieb Thiele with his wife Phillipine and his children Oswald and Adelaide. Gottlieb, a tailor by trade, had arrived in Melbourne in 1849 and established a sound business with one of his customers no less a personage than Governor La Trobe. Then the gold fever laid its grip upon him and he went off to the Bendigo diggings. He found little gold and returned to Melbourne. In 1853, convinced that there was more wealth to be won from the surface of the earth than from its depths, he loaded his family and chattels in a bullock dray, and jolted them through the pot holes and over the stumps to the ten acres he had bought at Doncaster.
Gottlieb knew as little about husbandry as he did about gold mining, and even less about business affairs. But he was a man of great tenacity of purpose. His potatoes and vegetables thrived, his vines and berry fruits took root, and the family’s fortunes brightened when Phillipine took over the management of financial affairs.
Gottlieb was joined by his brother Gotfried, a stonemason, who built the first section of the house in Victoria Street which they called Friedensruhe. Friedens-ruhe is still occupied by descendants of the pioneers. Many additions have been made to the house over the years, but parts of the original structure can still be seen.
When the gold rush was at its height very high prices for vegetables could be obtained on the diggings. Gottlieb loaded a wheelbarrow with potatoes and set off for Bendigo. However, he made a deal at Kyneton and walked home again. The family thought the price was not good enough because he had not allowed for transportation costs. But then, they were not trundling the barrow.
Gottlieb’s sons and grandsons were to become leading authorities in the Australian fruit industry; one of them was to make his mark in the academic world and to be knighted for his services to the nation.
Other German families followed the first wave up the long haul from Koonung. Creek. The Fingers, the Zerbes, the Fromholds, the Aumanns and the Dehnerts pushed back the forest a little further, planting their gardens and vines and building their first homes from the materials they found at hand. Some, like the Fingers, built with bricks hand made from the local clay, others with wattle and daub or slabs hewn from the forest.
Migrants from the British Isles marched parallel with those from Germany. In the early 1850s John Ireland, his wife, and his children, John, Elijah and Eliza, left the soft downs of Huntingdonshire and faced the long journey across
half the world. On the same ship travelled George Bullen and his wife. John Ireland built with wattle and daub in Beverley Street, the first humble seat of what was to become a local dynasty. Each of his three sons — Jonah was born in Doncaster — acquired his own orchard and each in his own way contributed much to the development of the district. Daughter Eliza married a son of George Bullen of shipboard acquaintance and lived with him on the site where Wool-worth’s building now stands in Doncaster Road. Elijah’s son Arthur was a Councillor for many years and represented the district in the Legislative Assembly from 1947 to 1952.
About the same time, on another windjammer, John Whitten was wondering wistfully if he had done the right thing in leaving the sweet meadows of his native County Down when he met Margaret Harvey from neighbouring County Armagh. When their ship docked, six months out from Plymouth, they plighted their troth to marry in twelve months’ time. Margaret went into domestic service in Geelong while John worked in the Western District. Twelve months to the day he returned to Geelong to claim his bride. For a while they lived in Kew and then came to Doncaster where they established themselves on a side track which later became Whitten’s Lane.
Thomas Tully also came from Ireland and, after working in Melbourne for a year or so, settled in a modest home near the junction of Doncaster and Williamsons Roads. His son John, as Councillor and orchardist, contributed much to the material and social development of the community.
Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, ‘Toil, tears and sweat’ epitomizes life on the high ground of Doncaster and Templestowe in those early days. The hard virgin soil resented the hoe and the spade. Galvanised iron had not reached the
colony, roofs were made of shingles and the rainwater ran off into casks. While this limited storage was usually sufficient for domestic needs in winter, it seldom lasted through the summer. Besides, the vegetable gardens on which many of the settlers depended for their livelihood demanded large quantities of water. Nearly all of it had to be carried by hand from the creeks and gullies, and ladled out sparingly along the rows, back-breaking work in the hot weather.
To supplement their meagre income, many settlers cut the trees cleared from their land into firewood, carted it to Kew or Melbourne and hawked it at prices ranging from five to ten cents a hundredweight. Since this kept them away from home a good deal, much of the hard work of tending the gardens fell to the women and children.
The German families, strong in the Lutheran faith they had brought with them, banded together to build the first church in Doncaster. They built it of wood and shingle in the midst of their community about half a mile north of the present Lutheran Church in Victoria Street. In and around that little church the people of different faiths and from different lands forged the first links which, through marriage and the sharing of common experiences and responsibilities, were to develop into a closely integrated community. Three times a day the church bell tolled the hour for all to hear. And on Sundays the Lutherans held their service in the mornings, and left the door ajar for the Anglicans to hold theirs in the afternoons.
By the late eighteen-fifties some small private schools had been established in and around Doncaster, and towards the end of the decade the Lutherans set up a school in their chapel.
In i860 Joseph Pickering cleared one end of the counter in his general store, and on 17 May he became Doncaster’s first postmaster at a salary based on a percentage of the business transacted. In the first year he earned twenty dollars.
James Anderson was probably the first person of European origin to settle in the eastern part of the municipality. Anderson crossed from Tasmania in 1838 and worked for a few months as a messenger in the Bank of Australasia. In the following year he invested $20 in a squatting licence, went to Sydney to buy cattle, droved them overland and settled on the banks of Anderson’s Creek near its junction with the Yarra. Late in 1843 a survey of the area reduced his run to some 350 acres, whereupon he took himself and his cattle off to a bigger holding at Werribee.
About the time that Anderson was moving out, three partners established the Warrandyte Station on the eastern side of the Ringwood-Warrandyte Road near Pigtail Hill. The partnership broke up and the property was sold by the Shire of Bulleen in 1883 to secure payment of overdue rates. It was bought by a Captain Selby who became a leading figure in the district and is believed to have introduced trout into the Yarra near Warrandyte in 1888.
George Tortice came out from England in 1848 and lived in Hawthorn for three years when he went to Warrandyte to try his luck on the newly discovered goldfield. He soon decided that there were better ways of making a living than gouging for gold, and in 1852 he selected land in South Warrandyte on both sides of the Old Warrandyte Road. Later, the Milnes and the Dicksons established themselves to the south of the Tortice property.
About 1870 Stephen Mullens came out from Ireland and, after working for a while in Melbourne, selected land near Warrandyte. His son Sylvestor served his
apprenticeship as a blacksmith, and in 1890 bought the business in Templestowe which is still being run by the Mullens family.
The early settlers in the municipality probably had to go to Melbourne for professional medical attention. About 1895 Dr. E. M. Inglis established a practice in Kew and for a good many years he was the nearest doctor for everyone living further to the east. His son, Dr. L. B. Inglis, carried on the practice until 1962 when he retired to live in Templestowe.

The Goldseekers

In the winter of 1851 sensational news drifted out along the dray tracks leading eastwards from Melbourne. Gold had been discovered at Bathurst in New South Wales! Melbourne was in a tumult. Men, fired with dreams of wealth engendered by stories of the riches won by the first arrivals on the Californian goldfields in America, were besieging the shipping offices in frantic competition for passages to Sydney. Others, impatient of delay, formed themselves into parties for the long overland journey.
With warehouses, shops and offices shutting down because the staffs had disappeared in the general direction of Bathurst, Melbourne faced the prospect of becoming a ghost town. On 9 June the Lord Mayor called a meeting of businessmen who agreed that the only thing likely to stop the rot would be the discovery of gold in or near the Port Phillip area. The meeting decided to offer a reward
of 250 dollars for the discovery of a workable deposit or mine within 200 miles of Melbourne, and appointed a committee to administer the fund.
While the ultimate intention of this offer was the preservation of Melbourne as a commercial centre, its immediate effect was to draw still more of the population into the search. Numerous prospecting parties were formed and spread out into the surrounding countryside, probing and washing in the creeks and gullies. The first specimen submitted to the committee was found to contain only mica; the second was equally barren. Nevertheless, the formal proceedings of the committee increased the excitement. In an age of acute social consciousness, men who had never handled a pick or a shovel paid exorbitant prices for these mundane articles and joined the search.
One of the numerous prospecting parties hastily formed was led by Louis John Michel, Licensee of the Rainbow Hotel in Swanston Street. For several weeks they fossicked in the Plenty Ranges and along the Yarra, and on 30 June they found some likely looking quartz near Anderson’s Creek. However, the assayer who tested the specimen and examined the site reported that although traces of gold were undoubtedly present, he was unable to express an opinion about the probable richness of the find. This was not good enough for the Gold Reward Committee and the party broke up in disgust.
Early in July Michel and William Habberlin, a member of the original party, agreed to have another try. Leaving Melbourne well before dawn, so that they would not be seen and followed by other prospectors, they took the track through Kew and for some days fossicked in the creeks and gullies between the present Maroondah Highway and the Yarra. On the 13th, with supplies running low, they followed a creek down towards the river to find out where they were.
Coming to a place where the creek had apparently changed its course, Michel started to clear the surface soil while Habberlin boiled the billy. After a while Michel turned up some likely-looking material and gave it to Habberlin to wash. After several negative reports, Habberlin suddenly called out excitedly Tour Worship, here’s the clickerty’. Close examination showed that the residue contained ten small grains of gold. While they were inspecting them a puff of wind blew all the grains into the grass, and it took a lot of careful washing to recover six of them.
In the morning they went on downstream and met a woodcutter named Ginger who told them that they were on Anderson’s Creek. Mistaking them for runaway sailors, he advised them that there was no work to be had in the district and suggested that they might try the market gardens at Brighton.
Having found out the direction of Melbourne, they made a wide detour back to their camp and found gold in every dish they washed. Then, after carefully covering their workings with brushwood, they returned to Melbourne. The same evening they showed their specimens to Mr. John Hood, a Collins Street chemist, who certified them to be high quality gold.
Michel’s claim for the reward was submitted to the Gold Reward Committee on 16th July, together with a rival claim for a discovery in the Pyrenees Ranges. After protracted discussion, the Committee decided to ‘have a bob each way’ by publishing the news that gold had been discovered but withholding the reward until further information was available.
Michel and Habberlin then attended the government offices and showed their specimens and certificate to Governor La Trobe. The Governor arranged for the
Commissioner of Crown Lands, Mr. A. Fenwick, and some other officials to inspect the workings. The party arrived on 6 August and, despite heavy rain and inadequate equipment, found about forty small pieces of gold.
Subsequently a Royal Commission awarded Michel $4,000 in recognition of Ihe fact that he was the first to publish precise information about a discovery of gold in Victoria.
The Anderson’s Creek discovery was named the Victoria Goldfield in celebration of the fact that Victoria had just been severed from New South Wales and made a separate colony.
Hopeful diggers, most of them without any experience, flocked towards the field on foot, on horseback, or with their wives, children and household goods stacked on drays. By the middle of August more than 200 men were at work between Jumping Creek and Harris Gully. The black-bearded Mr. Ginger, an enterprising individual who apparently pinned his faith in commerce rather than in mining, opened a general store in a tent on the slopes of Melbourne Hill. He served hot and cold meals at an open air cafe, and built commodious bark huts for stabling his patrons’ horses. When gold mining slumped at Anderson’s Creek, Mr, Ginger took off for the more popular field at Mount Alexander.
At this stage probably fifty per cent of the diggers were merely scratching the surface and continually moving on in the hope of finding riches without too much physical exertion. The more energetic miners were mostly scattered along Anderson’s Creek, and although some of them were getting payable gold they had to work pretty hard for it. By general consent Michel was accorded the leadership of this group, but he was not one of the lucky ones. On Sunday 18 August the Reverend Messrs. Gregory .and Cheyne of the Home Mission visited the field and conducted the first public religious service held on the Upper Yarra.
The government, sensible of the fact that if gold brought wealth to the colony it would also bring demands for roads and other services, determined to charge a fee for the right to dig for gold. On 14 August the Commissioner of Crown Lands arrived at Anderson’s Creek to collect the licence fees. The diggers were prepared to be reasonable and, in view of the meagre results they had so far obtained, suggested ten shillings a month. The Commissioner declined to negotiate and insisted on thirty shillings a month. On 1 September, 1851, twenty-four licences, the first to be issued in Victoria, were handed over on payment of the prescribed fee. They were handwritten on plain white cardboard; printed licences did not appear for another month.
The idea of charging thirty shillings a month for the right to search for gold on public lands was bitterly resented by the miners and violently attacked in the press. The government remained adamant until the Eureka Stockade disturbances brought them to a more realistic valuation of the worth of a licence to the average digger. Indeed, the recipients of the first licences were scarcely earning enough to pay for them. Most diggers were making about 15 cents a day in return for much labour and perseverance. Up to 1 September less than a pound of gold had been produced on the Victoria field.
Nevertheless, large numbers of diggers continued to flock towards Anderson’s Creek along tracks turned into quagmires by winter rains. Some travelled with their belongings festooned on pack horses, some pushed wheelbarrows. Family parties struggled with drays overloaded with tools, beds, prams, cooking utensils and odd bits of furniture.
Then far richer diggings were discovered further afield. Buninyong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Clunes hit the headlines in rapid succession, and diverted from Anderson’s Creek the heterogenous crowds of goldseekers pouring into the colony. Most of the original diggers hastily packed their swags and joined the throngs moving northwards. By the middle of December only two miners were working on the Victoria field, supervised by three gold commissioners living in a tent.
The richer fields continued to attract attention until early in 1854 when some hopeful souls drifted back to Anderson’s Creek. By the end of the year an estimate placed the population at 600. Most of them were living in tents though a few huts and cottages had been built here and there in the present town site.
For months conflicting reports about the rewards being obtained by the Anderson’s Creek miners appeared in the press. Some said that they were barely making a living, others that they were doing fairly well. In February, 1855, the Gold Complaints Committee, which had been appointed by the government to tour the goldfields on a fact-finding mission, went to Anderson’s Creek by way of Heidelberg and Templestowe. In his book ‘Victorian and Australian Goldfields in 1857’ William Westgarth, a member of the committee, gives an account of activities on the field.
Westgarth writes that the Anderson’s Creek diggers were using methods not seen on any other field. Apparently there was insufficient water flowing in the creek for effective washing. Carting the gold bearing material to the river for washing had proved unremunerative because of the low yields obtained. Then someone discovered that the river had a slatey bottom with numerous cracks into which it was thought the flow would have deposited gold washed down over the centuries from the upper reaches. Diggers combined into parties to build coffer dams by driving rough-hewn piles into the river bed and filling the crevices with rocks and soil. The water was then pumped out and the river bed thoroughly worked over. Westgarth thought the returns pretty poor in relation to the labour involved. Probably they were just high enough to hold out the lure of a big find.
At another place Westgarth came upon a more ambitious undertaking. At a point where a small island divided the river for about 200 feet, diggers were damming up one of the channels with the object of getting at a fairly wide expanse of the bed. In view of the poor results already being obtained, Westgarth was not optimistic about their prospects.
The committee does not appear to have taken any evidence on the Victoria field. They had a picnic lunch and returned to Melbourne, a pleasant day’s outing at public expense. Westgarth’s only complaint was that on the way back to Heidelberg the horse made repeated attempts to lie down — ‘A common fault among horses bred in the colony.’
Diggers generally were secretive about their returns, and it is hard to say whether any of the men on the Victoria field were making much more than average wages at this time. Certainly no finds comparable with those of Bendigo or Ballarat were made, and when the winter rains put a stop to operations in the river bed the population again declined.
In the spring the remaining diggers took to quartz mining on the hills and ridges. However, the locally made crusher was unequal to the particularly hard variety of quartz found in the district, and the expedient of carting the ore to Melbourne for treatment proved unprofitable. In January, 1856, some twenty
shafts were being worked, with heaps of untreated quartz rising beside them. If these heaps were a source of frustration to the miners, they impressed the journalists and company promoters who began to visit the field in increasing numbers.
The difference between the Victorian miners and the government, which culminated in the Eureka Stockade disturbances in November-December, 1854, scarcely raised an echo on the generally peaceable Victoria field. The only incident which threatened to become serious developed in February, 1856, when some miners began prospecting on private property at the foot of Pigtail Hill known as ‘Thomson’s Pre-emptive Right’. The Manager, Mr. Henry Frenchman, ordered them off the property. They refused to leave and the district mining warden, Mr. W. C. Brackenbury, accompanied by a police officer and six troopers, hurried to the field. The miners claimed that their licences gave them the right to dig anywhere. Thomson submitted that they were causing severe damage to his property and that they had even dug up his garden.
With the aid of a pocket compass, Brackenbury tried to define the boundaries within which the diggers could work, but the result was not acceptable to either party. Brackenbury then ruled that matters would have to remain in abeyance until a government surveyor came out to fix the boundaries. However, Thomson offered to let the miners work his property on payment of a fee of $2, with another $2 deposit against failure to repair any damage they might cause. Ballots
were held for the right to work the claims and the storm blew over without further incident.
The notices about the field which appeared in the Melbourne press from time to time were not unduly exaggerated, but they were rosy enough to impel the government to take steps to put local affairs on a regular footing. In July the deputy chief surveyor, Mr. Clement Hodgkinson, surveyed the township and selected the site for a punt to give access to the goldfields further to the north. Hodgkinson chose a site about 500 yards downstream of the present bridge, apparently oblivious to the fact that the approach on the north bank was very steep. Subsequently it was pointed out that there was a far better site upstream but Melbourne paid no attention. The punt, which began operating in November, 1856, opened a pack-animal route to Kangaroo Ground and the country beyond. The charges were three cents return for each adult, eight cents for a working bullock, five cents for other cattle and horses, and one cent for sheep and pigs.
In September Mr. W. C. Brackenbury was appointed mining warden for the Victoria field and established his office and residence in a cottage in Yarra Street.
The first imported crusher to reach the field was set up on the river bank by a German firm. This machine had enough power for the job, but it persisted in washing most of the gold into the river with the tailings. Dranfield, Dowling and Company undertook the installation of another crusher but technical difficulties delayed construction for six months. Meanwhile another firm, McArthur, Hardy and Company, brought out a 20 horse-power machine equipped for flour milling as well as for quartz crushing. Both crushers worked more or less satisfactorily and competed keenly for customers.
By this time the field was becoming known in Melbourne as a place where a trip to the country could be combined with the novelty of seeing gold miners at work. To meet the growing demand for transport, Mr Alfred Ford, the proprietor of a Melbourne livery stable, organised a coaching service, and advertised the inaugural run for 8 October, 1856. The township turned out in strength to admire the decorations and give their first regular coach a rousing reception. No coach appeared, but a number of footsore gentlemen limped in with the news that it was bogged in Mullum Mullum Creek. However, the crossing was soon improved and Mr. Ford’s coaches ran a thrice weekly service throughout the summer.
Postal Department records show that the first post office in the town was opened on 1 August, 1857, and describe the mail service as ‘To and from Kew and Lilydale by way of Box Hill, Doncaster and Warrandyte, three days a week, by horseback.’
Originally the name ‘Warrandyte’ was loosely employed to describe the whole district from Anderson’s Creek to the area now called Croydon, and was not officially applied to the town until Hodgkinson’s survey in July, 1856. When the railway to Lilydale was opened in 1882 the station at Croydon was called Warrandyte and a post office was opened there. Although this office was officially called ‘Warrandyte Railway Station’, the distinction was often missed by the customers, with the result that a great many letters were shuttled back and forth before finding their addressees. While the post office could always point to an incomplete address, the railways had more difficulty in explaining to prospective
anglers why, on alighting, they found themselves miles from the river. To end the confusion the station was renamed ‘Croydon’ in 1884.
Warrandyte is an aboriginal word meaning ‘warran’ to throw and ‘dyte’ the object aimed at. It is believed that the aborigines had a boomerang range in the district where they held inter-tribal competitions in the approved Olympic style.

Roads and Tolls

Up to 1853 road making and maintenance in Victoria was a very haphazard business^ There were only two municipalities in the Colony, the City of Melbourne and the Town of Geelong. Within the limits of their financial resources, these municipalities built and maintained roads within their boundaries. Outside these boundaries the Government gave spasmodic attention to a few arterial highways. Apart from that practically nothing was done to improve the rough tracks within and between the settlements. There was no central authority to formulate policy, provide finance and co-ordinate effort. Widespread agitation, strongly supported by commercial interests, at length moved the Government to pass in February, 1853, ‘An Act for Making and Improving Roads in the Colony of Victoria.’
The Act provided for the establishment of a Central Roads Board to build and maintain main or arterial roads throughout the Colony, and for the setting up of District Roads Boards for the construction and upkeep of local and cross roads. District Roads Boards could be formed by a public meeting of owners and occupiers of land presided over by a Justice of the Peace. The Boards were empowered to raise money for their roads by erecting toll gates, but rates on property could be fixed only by a public meeting of ratepayers called for the purpose each year.
This Act is significant for several reasons. At that time the government of the Colony was anything but democratic in the sense that we understand the term today. Yet the 1853 Act was remarkably democratic in its provisions that all Members of District Roads Boards should face election annually, and that the rates should be fixed each year at a meeting open to all landowners and householders.
Apart from Melbourne and Geelong, the provisions for District Roads Boards represent the first steps towards local or municipal government in Victoria. Although the powers of the Boards were strictly limited, many of them became the forerunners of the present municipalities. Further, the general organisation established by the Act — a central authority for arterial roads and local authorities for local roads — remains in being in the form of the Country Roads Board and the municipalities.The existing division of responsibility follows the general pattern established by the Act of 1853.
Many districts promptly took steps to form District Roads Boards, but in some cases the enthusiasm of wealthy landowners suddenly subsided when an amendment to the Act empowered the Boards to fix rates on property without recourse to an annual meeting of ratepayers. Although the lack of public spirit does not seem to have impeded progress in the Doncaster-Templestowe district, residents spent nearly three years complaining loudly and bitterly about the state of their ‘roads’ before they took the necessary steps to set up a Board of their
own. On 19 September, 1856, a Proclamation published in the Victorian Government Gazette notified the establishment of the ‘Templestowe Road District’ and defined its boundaries as:
The Parish of Bulleen and that portion between the said Parish and the Deep Creek, bounded as follows, viz. a line bearing from the south-east corner of the Parish of Bulleen to the Deep Creek, thence by the Deep Creek north-westerly to the western boundary of the above parish, and by the said boundary bearing south to the point of commencement.
(At that time Mullum Mullum Creek was known as Deep Creek.)
Memorial cairn at Warrandyte on the spot where gold was discovered by Luis Michel in 1851
In plain language the Templestowe Road District, with some minor adjustments subsequently made, comprised the whole of the present municipality except the Warrandyte Ward. This area was included in the Upper Yarra Road District which was proclaimed on the same day.
With the Road District duly proclaimed, the next move in accordance with the provisions of the Act was the convening of a public meeting to elect the members of the Board. This step was taken on 15 November when a number of landowners and householders petitioned Captain F. A. Powlett, Commissioner of Crown Lands in the County of Bourke, to convene the necessary public meeting. The petition was signed by Sydney Ricardo, Robert Laidlaw, Thomas Hicks, John O’Neil, Bernard McMurray, Edward Bona, James Hewish, James Seemar, William Malcolm and Henry Waterfield.
Powlett responded by calling a public meeting: Tor the purpose named in the requisition, to be holden at Mrs. Bell’s hotel (Upper Yarra), Templestowe, on Monday the 8th day of December, 1856, at 6 o’clock p.m.’
Long before 6 o’clock the hitching rail of the Upper Yarra held its full quota of horses, with numerous buggies and carts parked by the roadside. Early arrivals slaked their thirst and discussed the impending business until at the appointed hour the meeting was called to order. Preliminary formalities were quickly disposed of, and the first ballot for local public office to be held in the municipality resulted in the election of Messrs. S. Ricardo, R. Laidlaw, J. Hewish, J. McKind-ley, J. Mahon, J. Webb and W. Malcolm. At the same meeting the first rates to be levied were fixed at five cents in the dollar.
The following week the Board assembled at the Upper Yarra Hotel, elected Sydney Ricardo Chairman, and decided methods of procedure. Ricardo promptly wrote to the Central Roads Board pointing out that the summer was well advanced, and if anything was to be accomplished before the onset of winter it was necessary to know what financial assistance was likely to be forthcoming.
At its January, 1857, meeting the Board approved the appointment of Mr. John Turner as Secretary, Surveyor, Assessor and Rate Collector at a salary of $300 a year, with the right of undertaking private work in his spare time. Turner began his duties by supporting the Chairman’s letter to the Central Board with a statement showing that the Templestowe District’s assessment amounted to only $280 and that it was doubtful if it could all be collected. Against this the cost of road work requiring urgent attention was estimated at over $5,000.
In subsequent letters, Turner drew attention to the amount of traffic moving through the District to the Anderson’s Creek goldfields and the Upper Yarra district, and pointed out that it was impracticable to charge tolls for the use of roads until the roads were fit to use. These arguments produced a grant for 1857 of nearly $4,000. But this financial spring yielded practically nothing in 1858. Mr. Turner’s services had to be dispensed with and Sydney Ricardo undertook the duties of honorary secretary. The charge for the use of the room at the Upper Yarra Hotel was eliminated when John O’Neil offered the use of his home for Board meetings. Presumably the office work was done there too. Very little was accomplished during the year. In fact the Board was reduced to filling the worst pot holes with bundles of tea tree.
By this time residents, hitherto without any authority to which they could complain directly about the shocking state of communications, began to press
Doncaster Road looking west from the tower in the i8go’s
their claims upon the harrassed Board. Claims that a road was bad brought no response because all the roads were bad. It had to be shown that a road was positively dangerous before the Board could be induced to dole out a few dollars from its slender resources.
In July, 1861, Mr. J. E. Sparkes was appointed part-time Secretary to the Board at a salary of $30 a year, five cents for each dog registered, 10 per cent on rates actually collected and per cent of the expenditure on public works.
Rivalry between Doncaster and Templestowe developed in 1860-61 on the question of priority of attention to Doncaster and Templestowe roads. The annual meeting of landowners and householders held at the Upper Yarra on 8 December, 1861, was so well attended that the room was overcrowded. A proposal to adjourn to the school lapsed when the Chairman pointed out that the legality of the meeting might be challenged if it were not held at the place advertised. As the meeting settled down supporters of the Templestowe group voiced many remarks about the ‘stringybarkers’ from Doncaster, some of them witty, all of them good-humoured. Sydney Ricardo topped the poll while the new Board as a whole represented a fairly even division of votes between the two parties. Rates for the year were fixed at 10 cents an acre on cultivated land, one cent on pasture and one quarter of a cent on land leased from the Crown. The annual report showed that the rates for 1861 should have yielded $382 but,
despite the bonus of 10 per cent of the takings, the collector had been able to rake in only $278.
In 1859-60 some of the then outer suburban areas of Melbourne were separated from the Roads Board Districts and created municipalities on the lines of Melbourne and Geelong. Hawthorn and Kew separated from the Boroondara Board and became municipalities in the second half of i860. Early in 1863 there was much talk about a projected Bill to extend the municipal organisation to other districts. In July the Templestowe Board had two suggestions before it. One proposed the amalgamation of the Nunawading, Boroondara, Heidelberg and Templestowe Districts to form the Shire of South Bourke. The other suggested the incorporation of Templestowe and the northern portion of Nunawading in the municipality of Kew. The Board could see no advantage in either proposal and decided to remain a Roads Board District for the time being.
While the talk went on the Boards did the best they could to meet the demands and petitions of ratepayers from their meagre funds. Some Boards seem to have adopted the practice of stalling off very severe pressure by calling tenders for the work and then rejecting them all because the lowest was too high. In the circumstances a circular from the Central Board describing in glowing terms the advantages of buying a mechanical stone crusher coming on the market, was not very helpful. They all agreed it was a good idea but the price was far beyond their means. Nevertheless, Templestowe took a step towards mechanisation when, on 26th January, 1864, the Board decided to buy its first piece of equipment — a wheelbarrow. Emboldened, they followed up by buying a seal for their correspondence.
Up to this point the Board had refrained from giving further cause for complaint by charging tolls for the use of the roads. However, in March, 1865, the Boroondara Board notified its intention to install a toll gate at Doncaster Road near Koonung Creek, and requested Templestowe’s opinion on the subject. The Board replied that it had no objection, but thought that the gate should be near the Doncaster School where it would be more difficult for travellers to evade the barrier.
After protracted negotiations it was agreed that the gate should be placed on Doncaster Road at the point where it is now joined by Elgar and Tram Roads. Construction expenses were to be a first charge on the tolls and the takings were to be divided equally between the Boards. Charges at this gate were fixed at:
Man has never regarded the evasion of taxes as particularly sinful, and otherwise honest men derived much satisfaction from dodging the tolls. Vehicles often travelled in convoy, and if the driver of the leading one could manoeuvre it to hold the gate open while he argued about change or something, some at least of the others could get through without paying. Young bloods riding to an evening engagement travelled in company with the intention of all crushing through for the price of one. Tollkeepers, who had to open up any hour of the day or night, were always complaining that the job was grossly underpaid.
A census taken at Templestowe in 1865 gives some idea of the traffic moving through the District. The result, together with an estimate of the revenue from a proposed toll gate, is shown in the following table from the Board’s minutes — from 21 November to 27 November, 1865
Table Showing the Traffic on the Templestowe Road Taken at Templestowe
Number Weekly Yearly
One horse drays “7 $5-85 $304.20
Two 41 $3-°7 $159.64
Three „ „ 3 $0.30 $15.60
One horse spring cart 34 $0.85 $44.20
Two „ 1 $0.05 $2.60
Bullock drays 11 $0.93 $47.84
Horses 47 $0.60 $31.40
Cattle 6 $0.03 $1.56
Totals $11.67 $627.04
The Templestowe Board was one of the poorest around Melbourne, so poor in fact that when in 1866 the Commissioner for Roads and Bridges asked for a return showing the construction that had taken place since the Board’s inception, they replied that they had no funds to pay for the compilation of the statistics. However, when the Commissioner said that he had no funds either but would like the return all the same, members of the Board did the work themselves. The Table shows the work accomplished by the Board between December 1858 and April 1866.
Road Formed, Drained and Metalled Formed and Drained Only
Templestowe 1 mile 57 chains 3 miles 21 chains
Doncaster - 57 - 2 „ 21
Thompsons - 3 » - 35 »
Total 2 miles 37 chains 6 miles 7 chains
At this time the formed portion of Doncaster Road extended eastward as far as Church Road. Beyond that it was a boggy track virtually impassable in wet weather.
Although the Board could not do much about road building, its members nad the vision to foresee future development. Whenever they could scrape up the fees they surveyed roads which eventually became necessary, a measure that saved future ratepayers heavy costs in land resumption.
Early in 1867 the lessee of the Doncaster toll gate asked to be released from his contract as he was operating at a loss. After failing to persuade adjacent land-owners to erect at their own expense check fences to prevent cattle and other stock from being driven across country, the Board arranged with Boroondara to move the gates to Koonung Creek bridge. Three years later another toll gate was erected on Templestowe Road at its intersection with Foote Street, with a check gate at the junction of Manningham and Thompsons Roads.
Soon after the Athenaeum Hall was built in 1871 the management committee suggested that the Board should establish its office there, no doubt with an eye on the regular income from the rental. The Doncaster members favoured the proposal but the Templestowe members, with a majority of the votes, put through a motion directing the erection of the Board’s own office on land granted by the Government for the purpose at the corner of Templestowe Road and High Street. The building remained in use as a municipal office until 1915.
Manoeuvring to convert the Roads Board Districts east of the Yarra to municipalities developed again in the early seventies. Boroondara and Nuna-wading wooed Templestowe with many blandishments, while a small group within the district put forward a scheme for joining the Shire of Upper Yarra which had its headquarters at Lilydale. The Board remained firmly of the opinion that the district was better off as it was.
The Board, however, showed lively interest in the representations of a committee from Warrandyte which complained bitterly about that district’s treatment by the Shire of Upper Yarra and suggested its transfer to the Templestowe Roads Board. The necessary formalities were set in train, and on 1 June, 1873, the area now known as the Warrandyte Ward was severed from Upper Yarra and incorporated in the Templestowe District. If the acquisition added to the Board’s revenue, it also increased its responsibilities. The two main access roads to the district, the Warrandyte-Templestowe Road and the Warrandyte-Ringwood Road, were all but impassable in winter and not much better in summer.
Early view of Templestowe looking towards Heidelberg
The incorporation of the Warrandyte district sent the Board’s net annual valuation beyond the point required by law for its transformation into a Shire. However, the Board did nothing about it until it discovered a move to have the district made into a Riding of the Shire of Heidelberg. Then it moved with commendable celerity, and on 3rd May, 1875, the Templestowe Roads District was proclaimed the Shire of Bulleen.
The first municipal elections in the new Shire took place on 1st July, 1875, when the following councillors were returned: Edward Tatham, John Smedley, James Kent, John Delaney, Robert Laidlaw and M. H. Hoare.
The Council met for the first time on 21st July and elected Councillor Tatham the first Shire President. With the pomp and ceremony due to the occasion, the Chairman of the supplanted Roads Board formally signed the documents transferring the Board’s bank balance of $139 to the Shire.
At the same meeting Mr. T. O’Brien was appointed Shire Secretary and Mr. T. N. Bride Inspecting Engineer.
The Victorian Year Book of 1876-77 gives the following statistics of the Shire of Bulleen:
Estimated Population Estimated Number of Dwellings Rateable Property Total Revenue
Total Net Annual Value
1,600 320 $320,000 $21,000 $4,56°
An entry in the Section ‘Population and Pursuits — Towns and Villages’ reads:
Town or Village Inhabitants Occupied Dwellings District Pursuits
Doncaster 267 47 Agriculture
T emplestowe 159 32 99
Warrandyte 306 8* Mining
Box Hill 154 32 Agriculture
Lilydale 212 4i ”

The Builders
Peaches and Pears

The history of fruit growing in Victoria coincides with the history of settlement, for the first arrivals brought with them fruit, plant and vegetable seeds. We know from their diaries that one of their first tasks was to plant a garden. John Pascoe Fawkner established a garden on the banks of the Yarra in 1835, and is said to have brought from Tasmania some 2,500 seedlings embracing several fruit sorts and varieties for nursery purposes. Thus the development of horticulture was in the minds of the more far-sighted and experienced settlers from the time of their arrival.
Most of the early settlers who took up land in Doncaster, Templestowe and Bulleen were men of limited means, and were faced with the prospect of earning a living in a country where soil and climate were very different from those of their homelands. Many of them were without experience of primary production of any kind.
Since the land had to be cleared and prepared before anything else could be grown, the sale of firewood brought in some ready money, even- if the amount was small in comparison with the labour involved. Vegetable and grain crops promised the quickest returns, and for both these products the rapidly expanding population of Melbourne offered a ready market. The settlers, however, soon ran into unforseen difficulties.
Crops on the river flats were repeatedly ruined by flooding, and after a few years most of the settlers on the low ground converted to dairy farming.
While the growers on the flats suffered from a surfeit of water, those on the high ground were plagued with scarcity of it. Vegetables require a great deal of water, and in dry weather it had to be carted or carried up from the creeks and distributed by hand along the rows.
Although the demand for fresh vegetables in Melbourne and on the goldfields gave good returns, experience showed that the heavy, shallow soil of the district was not really suitable for this kind of crop. Many growers turned to the cultivation of strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries and red and black currants.
Over-production for the local market worried the growers. Refrigeration had not been invented and it was generally argued that in the long run the cultivation of the vine would give the steadiest returns, since wine was the only horticultural produce which could be stored for long periods and exported to overseas markets with the means then available. Consequently vines were planted extensively in the districts around Melbourne and Geelong. Wine production does
not seem to have been very successful in Doncaster-Templestowe, though good results were obtained at Lilydale and in other districts.
Nearly every settler, as soon as possible after arrival, planted a few fruit trees for his own use. The trees flourished and by the late eighteen-fifties the more far-sighted settlers in Doncaster-Templestowe saw their future in the orchard rather than in the market garden or the vineyard. Among the earliest pioneers in the commercial production of pome and stone fruits were Richard Serpell, T. Petty, F. Finger, J. S. Williams, James Read, John Tully and the Thiele family.
There were marked differences of opinion among the producers of Doncaster and Templestowe. Some boldly staked their fortunes on the fruit tree. Others held that extensive plantings could only result in a more or less permanent glut on the market. The majority hedged their bets by planting a few trees while retaining their berry bushes and vines.
Daniel Harvey’s blacksmith and coach-building shop in Templestowe
In the end nature helped to resolve the problem. The berry fruits had flourished at first, but as time went on the steady and indiscriminate destruction of the surrounding forest exposed the plantations to the ravages of wind and weather. Summer ground temperatures became a good deal hotter than they used to be, and the productivity of the bushes and canes sharply declined. At the same time competition in the Melbourne markets began to develop from berry fruits imported from the cooler Tasmanian horticultural districts. Many growers began planting trees, hoping that their berries and vegetables would keep them going until the trees came into production. The argument in favour of the vine suddenly subsided when the disease Phylloxera appeared around Geelong and, despite vigorous efforts to stamp it out, spread rapidly to other districts.
The growers quickly appreciated the effects of indiscriminate deafforestation, and proceeded to plant wind breaks of pinus insignus to protect their orchards. In time these plantings grew into the miles of magnificent pine trees that were such a marked and beautiful feature of the district.
Conversion to fruit trees did not solve the water problem, for production suffered unless moisture was applied at the right time and in sufficient quantities. Experience soon -showed that nature, in the capricious Victorian climate, could not be relied upon. So the growers turned to water conservation. At first, in the absence of pumping machinery, they simply deepened hollows and edged up banks at suitable spots on the higher parts of their properties. The water conserved in these first primitive catchments was fed to the trees by gravity. Later, when pumps to lift the water became available, dams were scooped out on the lower ground where a much greater run off could be collected. With the means at hand dam making was not at all easy, and it was the general practice for growers to assist one another with the laborious work.
It would, perhaps, be drawing too long a bow to assert that the Doncaster-Templestowe orchardists were the first to practice irrigation in Victoria. Nevertheless, their successful efforts in water conservation attracted the attention of the government and no doubt influenced the discussions which led to the inauguration of the great conservation and irrigation schemes which play such a vital part in Victorian primary production.
Perhaps the biggest dam in the district was built by Sydney Williams on his lemon orchard. It is said that every orchardist in Doncaster lent a hand at one time or another during the two years it took to build. When completed it was 22 feet deep and covered two acres.
Primary producers far and wide attached great importance to a legal action that followed the construction of a dam by John Winter on his property in High Street. The owner of the adjoining property, downhill from the dam, claimed that Winter was obstructing the natural flow of water on to his land. The court found that the claimant had no riparian rights because the gully in which the dam was built was normally dry and became a watercourse only temporarily after heavy rain.
The settlers who first turned to fruit growing had little experience to draw upon. Neither did the Department of Agriculture. Fortunately, however, a few of the early arrivals in Victoria had forseen that a demand for seedlings would develop in the colony, and had set out to supply it. Among them was Thomas Cornelius Cole who established an orchard and nursery on the Merri Creek at Coburg in the early ’forties. Later he moved to Abbotsford near the Johnston Street bridge, and in 1850 he issued the first catalogue of nursery plants to be published in Victoria. Later he published a book ‘Gardening in Victoria’ which became the standard reference work for Victorian horticulturalists. Many of the Doncaster-Templestowe growers obtained their first seedlings from Cole and learnt much from the advice and instruction he readily gave.
Doncaster-Templestowe seems to have been the first district east of the Yarra in which extensive plantings of fruit trees were made. In the late ’fifties the example was followed in adjoining districts, notably in Box Hill, Blackburn and Mitcham. The Wandin district started seriously with berries in 1874, but it was not until 1890 that pome and stone fruit growing was extensively undertaken in the Dandenongs.
Since there was little experience to draw upon, the early plantings in Doncaster-Templestowe covered a wide range in kind and variety of fruit. Apart from berries and vines, the first trees planted included oranges, lemons, plums, peaches, apricots, apples, pears, quinces, loquats and cherries.
By 1885 fruit growing was well established and orchard competitions began to be held. The ‘Leader’, a weekly journal devoted chiefly to the interests of primary producers, and published by the proprietors of the Melbourne ‘Age’, donated a silver cup for annual competition by Victorian orchardists. The first winner was a Doncaster grower, Mr. J. S. Williams.
As the district developed, many changes gradually took place. The cultivation of vegetables and berries more or less ceased as pome, stone and citrus fruits, especially lemons, came into bearing. Plantings of oranges fell off when fruit from the warmer northern districts came on the market.
Probably 30 per cent of the original orchard plantings consisted of cherries which were, in the main, on the short-lived Kentish root stock. Production soon outgrew the local demand, and by 1873 cherries were being shipped by boat and rail through Sydney to New Zealand. Odd consignments went direct from Melbourne. This was probably the first fresh fruit exported from Victoria, and certainly the first to be shipped to an overseas market. It remained a profitable trade until it ceased about 1920.
The early growers took their fruit to the Melbourne markets by horsed wagons or drays, taking about three hours for the journey. The first markets were the Eastern Market which stood on the site now occupied by the Southern Cross Hotel at the corner of Bourke and Exhibition Streets, and the Emerald Hill Market in South Melbourne. Later the Victoria Market became the principal Melbourne market for fruit and vegetables.
Doncaster Road looking west from the crest near the Municipal Offices, about 1914
Doncaster-Templestowe gradually developed into a district growing mainly pears, dessert peaches, apples and lemons, while the districts further to the east tended towards cherries, plums and berry fruits.
From the early experiments in the Doncaster district, a fruit growing area, including the surrounding districts that merged into it, of some 20,000 acres developed. The peak of acreage was reached during the years 1935 to 1938-
Co-operation between the growers was always a marked feature of the industry in the Doncaster-Templestowe area. As early as 1885 they formed an informal association to protest against the government’s decision to permit the unrestricted importation of Tasmanian apples into Victoria. But they were reasonable men, and declined to join in opposing the importation of bananas from Queensland on the solid ground that bananas could not be grown commercially in Victoria anyway.
The Doncaster Fruit Growers’ Association was formed at a public meeting in the Athenaeum Hall on 1st April, 1892, with Frederick Thiele its first President. The Association aimed to modernise the industry by educating the growers on all aspects of production. Arrangements were made for lectures and demonstrations in tree culture, packing and orchard management, and in methods for the control of blight, fungi, codlin moth and other pests. These efforts were so successful that other districts joined in, and the original organisation became the Doncaster and Amalgamated Fruit Growers’ Association. The organisation continued to expand, and the Victorian Fruit Growers’ Central Association was formed in March, 1893.
The Doncaster-Templestowe growers sent representatives to an important conference convened by the Minister for Agriculture in September, 1889. Leading growers contributed to discussions on:
The best methods and varieties of fruit for the establishment of new orchards.
The whole question of marketing fruit which could be produced above Victoria’s immediate requirements, including packing methods, types of cases and
refrigeration.
The control of insect pests.
Discussion of the pest control problem led to a resolution that the government should introduce legislation requiring persons who grew horticultural crops to take appropriate steps to keep them free from pests. Although the conference assured the Minister for Agriculture that the growers were solidly behind the proposal, it was 1892 before the Vegetation and Vine Diseases Act was passed. This Act also provided for the appointment of inspectors in each horticultural district, and laid the foundations of the advisory service provided by the Department of Agriculture.
By the middle of the nineteenth century experiments in the cold storage of meat and vegetable products on a commercial scale were being made in several countries. In 1857 a Victorian, James Harrison of Geelong, patented a compression-type ice making machine which seemed to offer possibilities for the export of Australian produce. The first idea was to pack the ship’s chambers with ice made by Harrison’s machine. This was not very successful because the ice melted during the voyage. By 1870, however, the machine had been adapted for use on ships and the chambers could be re-iced as required. This method was probably in use in 1882 when three Doncaster growers, Tom Petty, Alfred Thiele and
Richard Serpell, became the first Australians to successfully export pears to the United Kingdom.
When direct refrigeration of storage chambers without the use of ice as an intermediate agent was introduced at the turn of the century, a number of Doncaster growers sent experimental consignments to the Glaciarium and Sen-nitt’s Cool Stores in Melbourne. The results were so encouraging that in 1903 the Doncaster Fruit Growers’ Co-operative Company was formed with the object of buying refrigeration space in overseas steamers for fruit export. The company also established a jam factory at Richmond to process fruit which could not otherwise be disposed of. The export venture proved successful, but the jam factory lost heavily and had to close down after a few years.
During the next ten years the export trade continued to develop, but at times the growers felt that there might be room for improvement in the methods of handling the fruit at overseas terminals. In 1914 the growers selected Mr. John Tully, a prominent Doncaster orchardist, to investigate the methods employed at British and European ports and markets. His discussions with the importers and his subsequent report to the growers led to several mutually advantageous improvements at both ends of the trade.
In August, 1903, a conference of Doncaster-Templestowe growers, on the motion of Mr. Tom Petty, petitioned the government to establish a cool store in the district. The government responded, and in March, 1905, the store was ceremoniously opened, the first government cool store in Victoria. It had four freezing chambers, a capacity of 6,000 cases, and was operated by a 16 horsepower oil engine. About the same time Mr. E. Lawford built a cool store on his property with a capacity of 1,000 cases.
Although other small, privately-owned cool stores quickly followed, the pressure on the government store became so great that in 1907 its capacity was increased to 10,000 cases. Two years later the erection of additional chambers and the installation of new machinery lifted its capacity to 20,000 cases. In 1915 it was purchased by the growers and operated as the Central Cool Store until it closed down in the economic depression of 1932.
Despite the extensions, the government store was never able to provide the space required. In 1911 a growers’ co-operative company built the West Doncaster Cool Store, the first co-operative cool store in Victoria. Four years later another co-operative, The Orchardists’ Cool Stores, was opened with a capacity of 120,000 cases. It was the largest cool store in Victoria outside Melbourne, and the largest in the Commonwealth catering exclusively for fruit.
On the northern flank of the area a number of leading Templestowe growers formed a co-operative and in 1919 built the Templestowe Cool Store with a capacity of 20,000 cases.
At the peak of production the co-operative cool stores in the Doncaster-Templestowe district had a total capacity of 200,000 cases, while the privately owned stores could hold about another 45,000 cases. With the exception of the original store, the whole of this capacity was provided by the growers without assistance from the government.
A co-operative venture launched by Doncaster Growers, the Blue Moon Fruit Co-operative Limited, is still operating successfully in Blackburn. Formed in 1931, it was first called the Southern Victorian Pear Packing Company. Its main objects at the time were to organise and standardise district growers in the
methods involved in the export of apples and pears to the United Kingdom. Later, its activities were more specifically listed as:
Cool storage
Packing and marketing of fruit
Manufacture and sale of fruit cases
Sale of spray materials and all orchardists’ requisites.
The first directors, all local growers, were — Messrs. A. E._ Ireland, T. H. Petty, J. J. Tully, E. Lawford and F. Moore. Messrs. H. J. Noonan, D. Whitten and R. J. Tully later joined the Board. The company’s original nominal capital of $10,000 grew to $500,000.
Over the years the Doncaster-Templestowe growers contributed much to the development of new varieties of fruit, particularly peaches. As early as 1896 August Zerbe produced a mid-season, white-fleshed variety known as the Zerbe, and the following year Alfred Thiele produced a late clingstone known as Thiele’s Cling. Some of the other varieties developed by local growers are:
Whitten’s — Produced by J. Whitten of Whitten’s Lane about 1900. Doncaster Crawford — About 1906 J. Petty and E. Wilson produced seedlings from the original Late Crawford that were superior in size and cropping habits.
Smith’s — A chance seedling that originated on an island in the Yarra and first noticed by G. Smith of Templestowe in 1900. It was developed by T. Smith of Serpells Road, and made popular by another member of the family, R. Smith, of Tindals Road.
Webb’s — In 1910 W. Webb produced two seedlings, one of which became very popular and widely grown.
Anzac — An early, consistent and heavy cropper produced by August Zerbe about 1913.
Ireland — A popular mid-season variety produced by A. E. Ireland.
In addition to propagating new varieties of fruit, the Doncaster-Templestowe growers also pioneered the development of implements and appliances specially adapted to orchard work. E. Lawford patented a disc plough, and August Zerbe developed the first single-furrow plough with a shifting handle, an implement specially adapted for ploughing between the trees.
A further advance in methods of cultivation was achieved when Frank and Herbert Petty, in conjunction with Daniel Harvey, a Templestowe implement maker, designed a disc plough which became known as the ‘Petty’ orchard plough. The pilot model was built from the chassis of a ‘T’ model Ford motor car. Harvey moved to Box Hill where he conducted an orchard implement and repair business for many years.
In the early days orchard spraying was a slow and laborious business. Usually the cumbersome hand-operated pump was carried in a horse-drawn dray or springcart.
A big step forward was made when Tom Petty invented a motor pump spray which was named the ‘Bay Vu’ after the name of the Petty’s home. The original models were built by J. E. Russell in Box Hill, and are said to have been the first succesful motor sprays in Australia.
Concurrently with the development of fruit growing in Doncaster and Templestowe, many orchards were planted in South Warrandyte though here the emphasis was on apples, pears and lemons. Strawberries were also grown extensively.
Although this district was a part of the municipality, communications impelled the South Warrandyte growers towards Ringwood rather than towards Doncaster or Templestowe. Even if there was not much to choose between the condition of the roads, the distance to Ringwood was shorter and it was the best route for the growers to take on their way to the Victoria Market. For the same reason Ringwood became the shopping centre for South Warrandyte, particularly after the Lilydale railway was built.
By the turn of the century a belt of orchards extended from Five Ways almost to the Maroondah Highway. The main artery of communication through the belt was the Ringwood-Warrandyte Road, and this fact caused the South Warrandyte growers to merge their commercial interests with those of the Ringwood growers. To meet the needs of the belt the Ringwood Cool Store was built in 1911 on the site where the Memorial Clock now stands. Four years later it was taken over by a growers’ co-operative in which most of the South Warrandyte orchardists held shares. The subdivision of many of the orchards in the belt brought about the closure of the store in 1959 and it was demolished a few years later.
In accepting the challenge of their environment, the early settlers of Doncaster and Templestowe laid the foundations of an industry which made the district one of the most prosperous primary producing areas in Victoria and one of the most beautiful. But in the nineteen-fifties the outposts of the vast array of brick and concrete houses, pushed outwards by the expanding population of the metropolis, established themselves firmly in Doncaster and Templestowe. Their appearance marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. Caught between the pressures exerted by the subdividers on the one hand and rocketing rates and taxes on the other, the orchardists fell before the flood. While an extensive area of the municipality remains rural in aspect and interest, most of it has become metropolitan in character and appearance.
MINES AND TUNNELS
In the eighteen-fifties the activities of independent miners throughout Victoria were greatly influenced by the reports of the astonishing returns obtained on the rich fields at Bendigo, Ballarat and Castlemaine. It was generally felt that there was plenty of alluvial gold about if only it could be found. Consequently diggers were prone to abandon low yield claims and go off in search of better ones.
The crushing machinery available on the Anderson’s Creek field was either inefficient or too expensive to provide the independent miners with anything like the returns reported from other fields. By the end of the decade most of the diggers had gone off prospecting for alluvial gold in the surrounding hills, leaving abandoned claims and heaps of uncrushed quartz scattered all over the field. However, as the main body of the independent diggers moved out mining companies moved in. In i860 two companies were working on the field. The Yarra Yarra Mining Company diverted the river through a cutting at Thompson Bend and for a time obtained very good yields. Continuous flooding, coupled with increasing scarcity of gold in the river bed, defeated them in the end.
The Yarra Yarra Steam Puddling Company erected elaborate puddling machinery equipped with a 7,000 gallons an hour steam pump in Whipstick Gully. Insufficient gold, combined with inadequate drainage facilities, forced the company to close down after a year’s unprofitable operations.
About the same time an attempt was made to follow up the good alluvial yields which had been obtained from Fourth Hill in 1856 by driving a tunnel
400 feet long equipped with a light tramway. The project was not a success though good returns were obtained from the old workings some twenty years later.
Nevertheless, the increased traffic between the Anderson’s Creek field and the diggings further to the north impelled the government to replace the punt with a bridge in 1861. Two years later, in December, 1863, the bridge was washed away in the highest flood ever recorded for the Yarra. With it went the dams and machinery working for gold on the river. The low-lying part of the town was submerged, while downstream the farmers on the Templestowe and Bulleen flats suffered heavy losses of stock and plant. In 1875 a new wooden bridge was built on the site of the present concrete structure.
Quartz mining by syndicates and small companies continued to be frustrated by crushing expenses though fairly good yields were sometimes obtained by parties working the river. In 1868 Lewis Grant built a crusher driven by a water wheel. Although this machine was only able to operate at full power during the winter, it did reduce crushing costs and enabled the syndicates to keep going.
In 1869 Grant formed the Yarra Tunnelling Company to work a claim just upstream from the ‘Island’. The Company drove a tunnel at a depth of 70 feet under the river with shafts extending to both banks. Good returns were obtained until the expense of coping with water seepage outran the profits.
In February, 1870, the Evelyn Tunnel Goldmining Company was formed with a capital of $32,000 for the purpose of conducting the most ambitious mining operation attempted on the field. The company proposed to drive a tunnel 639 feet long, 13 feet wide and 14 feet deep through the base of the peninsula at Pound Bend. A dam would then be built to direct the water through the tunnel and thus expose about three miles of the original river bed from which the company planned to recover a great deal of gold.
On 23rd July a big crowd assembled to witness the critical part of the operation — the diversion of the river through the tunnel. The river, however, refused to fall in with the Company’s intentions; it avoided the tunnel by cutting a new course for itself. After a lot more expenditure on unproductive labour the Company induced the water to flow through the tunnel, only to find that the mud in the old bed was much deeper than had been bargained for. With the machinery then available its removal was beyond the financial resources of the Company. Very little gold was recovered before the project was abandoned.
In 1872 the Magnet Company was formed to work a claim on Fourth Hill and the Sailor’s Reef Company began operations near the Gold Memorial Cairn on Anderson’s Creek. Both companies made steady profits for some years.
In 1874 Henry Stiggants found a rich deposit on Pigtail Hill and the Pigtail Quartz Mining Company, with Lewis Grant as the general manager, was formed to work it. For some reason several months were allowed to elapse without any work being done on the mine, and a man named Lawler sought a declaration of forfeiture under a regulation of the Castlemaine Mining Board which ruled that any claim on which work had been suspended for 14 days could be declared forfeited. Involved and lengthy legal proceedings ended in a verdict for Lawler and disastrous financial results for the company. Lawler formed a new company which recovered a lot of gold before it ceased operations after a landslide. In 1906 another company, Caledonia Consuls, worked the mine with some success.
In 1876 the Warrandyte Freehold Goldmining Company was formed to work
the masses of small quartz leaders known as the diorite dykes running through decomposed rock in an area to the south-east of the town. Although the gold content was small, the soft material could be crushed for two shillings a ton and the company won 1,762 ounces of gold in the three years of its existence.
For the next 25 years mining at Warrandyte proceeded spasmodically without any outstanding results. During this period the only really successful mine was the Victory on Third Hill. In the eighteen-eighties it had been worked as the Young Colonial and later as the Warrandyte Claim. In 1896 it was taken over by a Melbourne syndicate, renamed the Victory, and in the next three years produced 1,870 ounces of gold.
The brightest episode in the history of mining at Warrandyte occurred in 1905 when a crushing from the Caledonia mine in the bend of the river east of the ‘Island’ yielded 145 ounces of gold from a crushing of 80 tons of quartz. A few weeks later a crushing of 140 tons produced 314 ounces. Rewards continued to be good until 1908 when the cost of coping with persistent water seepage exceeded the profits. The mine produced $102,178 worth of gold and paid dividends of $25,166 on a paid up capital of $12,500.
Although quite a number of other mines were worked over the period 1890-1910, the Caledonia was by far the richest, with the Victory and Pigtail reefs competing for second place a long way behind. No reliable records were kept before 1861, and even after that the mining wardens often had difficulty in getting information from the miners, particularly from the individuals and syndicates who fossicked for alluvial gold or worked over the mullock heaps. The available figures suggest that between 1861 and 1910 about $178,000 worth of gold was won from quartz mining on the field. Perhaps another $20,000 could be added for alluvial gold and the crushings from the diorite dykes.
Atlhough some 21,000 tons of quartz were crushed on the field, Warrandyte is unscarred by the unsightly mullock heaps which disfigure so many of the old gold mining districts. The particularly hard quartz produced tailings which proved to be good construction material and most of it eventually went into local roads.
In the early days of the gold fever impatient prospectors probed hopefully over most of the municipality, but they found gold in anything like payable quantities at only one place outside the limits of the Anderson’s Creek field. In 1857 a ree^ was discovered at Templestowe near the junction of Thompsons Road and Feathertop Avenue. The mine was abandoned after a few years. In the early eighteen-eighties it was reopened by the Antimony Hill Gold and Antimony Mining Company. How much gold was produced is not on record, but the antimony must have been a success for at one time the company had 30 men on its payroll. However, in August, 1892, a sudden inrush of water, apparently brought about by a breakthrough into the old workings, caused the death of two men and made further operations unprofitable.
AROUND THE COUNCIL TABLE
The Shire of Buiieen started with a bank credit of $139 and a rising chorus of demands for the building of new roads and the improvement of existing ones. The Council’s inability to satisfy all demands led to a crop of allegations that Doncaster and Templestowe, from which most of the Councillors were drawn,
were being favoured at the expense of other districts. Eventually residents of Bulleen and Warrandyte presented a petition requesting that the shire be divided into three ridings in order to ensure that the outlying districts were more adequately represented and got their fair share of the available funds. The Council indignantly denied the allegations and opposed the petition. However, the Minister for Public Works took a different view and carved the shire up into ridings of Doncaster, Templestowe and Warrandyte.
The new arrangements provided for three councillors from each riding, and at the elections held in August, 1876, the following candidates were returned. Doncaster — Henry Finger, John Smedley and Alfred Hummel; Templestowe — Robert Williamson, Robert Laidlaw and John Delaney; Warrandyte — Lewis Grant, George Holloway and Henry Stiggants. Lewis Grant resigned without taking his seat, and Mr. N. H. Hoare, who had failed to secure a place in the Doncaster team, was elected to the vacancy.
Within 12 months the Council’s chances of satisfying anybody were considerably reduced when the Government ruled that all toll gates earning less than $4,000 a year were to be abolished. Wails of anguish arose from Councils throughout the land, but the road users were not so vociferous. Bulleen Council tried its hand at political finesse by threatening to decline to join in the protests unless it got a bigger slice of the profits of the Doncaster toll which had to be shared with Boroondara. The government suddenly put an end to the discussion
Early quartz crusher operated by a horse moving in a circular track
by abolishing all tolls as from 31st December, 1877. The Doncaster gate and residence fetched $24, but Council felt that the four dollars offered for the Templestowe installation was rather too low to be accepted.
Not long afterwards morale received a boost when the Council won its first law suit. All landowners affected by a road deviation between Newmans Road and Mullum Mullum Creek accepted the compensation offered, except a Mr. Johnston who owned a tiny allotment of two roods. Johnston wanted $40, the Council offered $20. Johnston chased the contractor off the property, then offered to split the difference and settle for $30. The Council, with proper regard for the ratepayers' interests, took the matter to the Heidelberg Court. The Bench awarded Johnston $10 and charged him costs of $3.30.
During the next three years road construction made steady progress, and the Council felt that it was getting on top of the problem when they became involved in another law suit, this time an unsuccessful one. A buggy capsized on Doncaster Road, and the occupants sued the Council for damages on the ground that the accident was caused by the bad state of the road. After protracted legal proceedings, they won a verdict for $1,600. Total costs amounted to nearly $4,000, a disaster which compelled the Council to raise a loan to carry on with essential works. With the ruling rate of interest at 6 per cent, the loan remained an incubus on the Shire’s finances for several years. As a precaution against further incidents of this kind, the Council hastily fenced off the worst sections of many of the side roads.
During the first twenty years of settlement more people established themselves in the Templestowe and Warrandye districts than in Doncaster. However, between i860 and 1885 the development of fruit growing in Doncaster reversed the trend, and by 1890 the Doncaster Riding was contributing rather more than half of the revenue of the Shire. While this financial circumstance was not of itself a sufficient reason for dividing the municipality, divergence, of interests between Doncaster on the one hand and Templestowe and Warrandyte on the other, led to frequent deadlocks at the Council table. Disagreements culminated in a situation in which the Doncaster Councillors declined to provide the necessary quorum, and the Council was unable to pay its employees or its creditors for more than a month. Finally, Doncaster Riding secured government consent to the formation of a shire of its own.
The first elections for the Shire of Doncaster were held in August, 1890, when John Tully, August Zerbe, John Smedley, William Sell, Edwin Lawford and Frederick Winter were returned.
Since the shire office was at Templestowe, the Doncaster Council began meeting in the Athenaeum Hall, but the question of providing proper office accommodation soon raised another storm. There was a sharp division of opinion about where the hall should be built, while a strong body of ratepayers held that building should not be undertaken at all until more urgent works had been completed. Richard Serpell offered to donate a block of land, but the Council was unwilling to accept it for fear of legal proceedings threatened by the opponents of the building proposal. In the end the Council paid Mr. Serpell $200 for the land though it was worth a good deal more. The hall still standing in Council Street was immediately erected, and business in it was conducted for the first time on 3rd June, 1892. An impressive opening ceremony was arranged, but the key produced refused to actuate the lock.
The Shire of Doncaster was launched on the crest of the land boom. By the beginning of 1893 the tide had receded, the Council’s bankers had suspended payment and prices for the produce of the district fell to bedrock. Nevertheless, neither Doncaster nor Templestowe suffered so severely as other areas, primarily because land ownership in these districts was based on production rather than on speculation for big and quick returns. If orchardists, shopkeepers and other business people had to draw in their belts they were, with a few unfortunate exceptions, able to ride the storm. Indeed, both districts sent large quantities of fruit and firewood for distribution to Melbourne’s unemployed multitudes, while local charitable organisations worked hard to alleviate the general distress in many ways.
Just when things were beginning to brighten up Doncaster Council was riven by another disagreement, this time over the alleged incompetence of the Secretary. A little earlier, two councillors had gone to Western Australia without resigning, and the attendance of the remaining four was necessary to constitute a quorum.
Councillor Sell moved that the Secretary be dismissed, and Councillor Thiele gave notice of motion that a rate be struck for 1894. In order to prevent a vote being taken on the first motion, Councillor Petty left the meeting.
At the next meeting the President declined to permit the motion about the rate to be discussed until the motion about the Secretary had been disposed of, whereupon Councillor Petty went home again. This routine was repeated every week for three months, during which time the Council was unable to pay their contractors or other creditors. When the Minister for Public Works declined to intervene, the Secretary broke the deadlock by resigning.
Another sharp difference of opinion occurred in the debate on a letter from the Shire of Echuca requesting the Council to send a delegate to a conference to discuss the projected amendments to the Constitution Act, particularly women suffrage and the ‘one man one vote’ proposal.
Councillor Thiele moved that no action be taken, but Councillor Stutt, after protesting his liberal principles, declared that the ‘one man one vote’ proposal was a monstrous shame and that the only women who wanted votes were a few fanatics and canting humbugs who wished to gad about and neglect their homes. The President, Councillor Pickering, declined to accept nomination as a delegate because he was all in favour of one vote one value and of extending the franchise to women. Finally, Councillor Stutt was appointed to attend the conference, but the outcome of this excursion into high politics is not on record.
Despite these distracting episodes, the Council made steady progress with road construction. They also worked hard on their parliamentary representative to obtain police protection for their peaceable citizens against the depredations of weekend trippers from the city, and for measures to prevent suburban contractors from dumping night soil at various places in the district. A police station was established in 1882 with Mounted Constable M. Gleeson in charge, but it was a long time before the night soil nuisance was finally checked.
Domestic water requirements for the town were met when a 2 inch main was laid from the Surrey Hills reservoir in 1896. Mail services were improved and in 1907 Doncaster was connected to the Melbourne telephone network. The Postal Department, however, refused to extend the service to East Doncaster because there were not enough trees to hang the line on.
When the Doncaster Riding severed from the Shire of Bulleen the remainder of the municipality was re-named the Shire of Templestowe. From the beginning, the financial imbalance created by the new situation fell heavily upon Templestowe. Much of its area was undeveloped and therefore contributed only a comparatively small amount of revenue, while the roads in its eastern section had never been given much attention. After providing for the inescapable overhead, the Council never really had enough money to undertake the public works essential for the steady growth and expansion of primary industry.
Nevertheless, the Council managed to cope with its more pressing problems, and might well have succeeded in attaining a sound position but for an unfortunate incident in 1906, just when the eastward and southward extension of the orchard area gave promise of more substantial revenue. In October of that year the Shire Treasurer suddenly resigned on the grounds that he was unable to obtain from the Secretary satisfactory answers to his enquiries about certain aspects of the Shire accounts. Investigation disclosed that the Secretary had embezzled $1,260, a sum that represented the greater part of a year’s revenue. Neither the Council nor the ratepayers derived much comfort from the subsequent disclosure that the Secretary had also embezzled $400 from the Shire of Upper Yarra.
The Council acted energetically by appointing new officers, raising the rate and insisting upon the prompt payment of arrears but never quite recovered from the blow. Six years later they were still so close to insolvency that the President offered to donate four dollars from his allowance of $24 towards the cost
Entrance to the tunnel at Pound Bend, Warrandyte
of repairs to the atrocious Warrandyte-Ringwood Road. The end came in April, 1915, when the Minister for Public Works informed the Council that as the General and extra rates did not yield the sum of $3,000 he intended to secure an Order-in Council reuniting the Shires of Doncaster and Templestowe.
The last meeting of the Templestowe Council took place on 28th September, 1915. In the next municipal elections in August, 1916, Templestowe and War-randyte, as a single riding, elected representatives on the reconstituted Doncaster Council. In 1926 the municipality was re-named the Shire of Doncaster and Templestowe, and Warrandyte became a separate riding. The Warrandyte ratepayers demonstrated their political maturity by electing Mrs. Angela Booth to represent them on the Council, together with Mr. John Colman and Mr. Charles Hemsworth.
RELIGION, LEARNING AND ENTERTAINMENT
Although a few ministers of religion arrived in Port Phillip soon after the first settlers, there was not enough of them to attend to the spiritual needs of the outlying districts for some years. However, this did not prevent the settlers from practising their faiths for they often met to. worship together in private homes.
Possibly the first religious service to be held in the municipality was conducted in 1842 — the exact date cannot now be determined — when the Presbyterians of the district assembled in Alexander Duncan’s barn in Bulleen Road. In the following year the Reverend Peter Gunn was appointed to minister to the needs of the Presbyterians of the Heidelberg, Templestowe and Doncaster districts. In 1845 he built a small church in Jika Street, Heidelberg, at which the Don-caster-Templestowe Presbyterians worshipped until 1895 when they built their own church in Templestowe.
In Doncaster both the Lutheran Church and the Church of England appear to have formed congregations in 1856. In that year the Anglicans held their first service in the home of Joseph Pickering, and about the same time the Lutherans began services in private homes. The Lutherans built their first church in Victoria Street about a mile north of Doncaster Road in 1858. Baron von Mueller, the genius who laid out Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens, sent them a gift of cypress pines and other seedlings for their garden. Now little- remains of the garden and the cemetery in which many of the original German settlers were buried has fallen into a sad state. The first chapel was demolished and replaced by the present Lutheran Church in 1892.
At some time in the late eighteen-fifties or the early ’sixties the Baptists built a small chapel on a site near the old Shire Hall. However, the congregation seems to have melted away, for in 1863 the chapel was bought by adherents of the Church of Christ and moved across the road to the site of their present Church. The congregation grew steadily and in 1881 a resident minister was appointed. Seven years later the little chapel was replaced by a brick structure. Further extensions were made in 1957.
Meanwhile the Anglicans, a relatively small community, were struggling to provide themselves with a home of their own. Both the Lutherans and the Church of Christ made their churches available for Anglican services until Holy Trinity Church of England was built in 1869, with local stone quarried on the property of Mr. A. F. Thiele in Church Road.
The Anglicans in Templestowe beat their co-religionists in Doncaster by two years, for in 1867 they built a small wooden chapel in High Street. It was replaced by the present Christ Church in 1900.
The first Anglican Church in Warrandyte was built in 1870 on land granted by the Crown. It was only one small room, and was replaced by a larger structure in 1906. This Church was destroyed in the bush fire of 1939 and replaced by the existing St. Stephen’s.
The Methodists are believed to have held their first service in the home of a Mrs. Mays in King Street in 1862. Four years later they bought a butcher’s shop in Warrandyte and re-erected it as a small chapel at the corner of Doncaster and Blackburn Roads. This building served as a church and Sunday school for eighteen years, and then as a Sunday school for another forty-five years.
The Roman Catholic community in Warrandyte built their own church — St. Gerard’s — in 1907, but their co-religionists in the eastern and southern parts of the municipality do not seem to have been sufficiently numerous to build their own churches until quite recent times. In the early days Father William Finn of Heidelberg visited the Templestowe, Doncaster, Warrandyte and Croydon districts at regular though infrequent intervals.
During the second world war the Templestowe Catholics bought a service hut
and used it as a church until they were able to build St. Kevin’s in Herlihys Road. In 1959 St. Peter and Paul’s was built in Beverley Street, East Doncaster. Three years later development in the western sector of the municipality necessitated the erection of St. Clement’s in Bulleen, followed a little later by St. Gregory the Great in Doncaster.
THE SCHOOLS
In the early days education was neither free nor compulsory. Parents had to educate their children themselves or pay for attendance at privately conducted schools. However, in the eighteen-fifties the government set up a National School Board which exercised some supervision over the curriculum and paid subsidies to local school committees.
In the late eighteen-fifties Doncaster children were attending several small schools scattered about the district. The Misses Finch taught for a while at a house in High Street. About the same time, or a little later, Ann and Robina Wilson conducted a school in a log cabin just off Wilson’s Lane. Other children walked across the fields to a school at the corner of Williamson and Serpells Roads.
The situation worried the Lutheran settlers. While they had nothing against the little schools of the district, they felt that insufficient emphasis was being placed on religious instruction. There was not much they could do about it until on a visit to Melbourne Gottlieb Thiele met the man he was looking for — Max von Schramm. Max von Schramm, an officer in the German merchant marine, left the sea in 1852 to seek his fortune on the Bendigo goldfields. He had no luck at all, his money ran out, and he was working in a Melbourne soap factory when Gottlieb found him and brought him to Doncaster to teach the Lutheran children.
Von Schramm held his first classes in the Lutheran Church in 1861. English children joined his classes and by the end of the year he had about fifty pupils. In 1864 von Schramm, with the aid of a subsidy from the Board of Education, built a school on Doncaster Hill. It was converted into a ‘Common School’ under the Education Act of 1872.
The first school in the Templestowe district seems to have been established near the Heidelberg Bridge in 1847 with an attendance of some 27 pupils. Three years later a school, officially described as being in a ‘very dilapidated condition’ was opened at the junction of Williamsons and Serpells Roads with a rated attendance of 80 pupils. From the inspector’s reports it appears that attendance was erratic. Labour was scarce in the country districts, and farmers were prone to keep their elder children at home to lend a hand.
In November, 1856, an inspector of the National School Board visited War-randyte and ascertained that there were about 40 eligible children in need of formal instruction. A local school committee applied for a government building grant of $200, but when only $42 was forthcoming they abandoned the project. However, the Church of England opened a school with Mr. Thomas E. Downward as the first headmaster. Although the government subsidised fees on a two to one basis, this school does not appear to have lasted very long. In November, 1859, Miss Elizabeth Blair opened a private school in the Court House, alongside the present police station, in which she taught until a National School was
established at the corner of Yarra and Forbes Streets in 1862, with Mrs. Rosa Mary Pretty as the first head teacher.
For some years the children of the South Warrandyte area walked across the ridges to the Warrandyte school. Then, at a date which cannot now be accurately determined, a Miss Hill opened a school with an initial attendance of about twelve pupils in a house near Five Ways. This little school served the district until the South Warrandyte State School was built in 1906.
In the East Doncaster area two sisters, the Misses Finch, began evening classes in the Methodist Church soon after it was built in 1866. Many of the children of the district got their only formal education from these two ladies.
However, the days of the subsidised schools were numbered. During the eighteen-sixties the whole future of education in Victoria was hotly debated. It was generally agreed that the existing system of government grants to schools which had been established by individuals or parents’ committees was unsatisfactory. The quality of the instruction and the accommodation varied from the very good to the very bad, there was no standard curriculum and there was no legal requirement for parents to send their children to school at all. There was
Church of Christ, Doncaster. The original church is the timber structure in the background
also a definite movement towards secularism in all aspects o£ public life, a movement which looked askance at schools run by religious denominations whether they were good, bad or indifferent.
The Education Act of 1872 sought to remedy the defects of the subsidy system and satisfy the secularists by making education free, secular and compulsory. It virtually established the state school system as we know it today. Henceforth the state would provide free primary education for all children; no government grants would be made to private or denominational schools.
The government proceeded to implement the Act by taking over existing schools and establishing new ones. The effect in Doncaster was that Max von Schramm, prohibited from giving religious instructions to his pupils, handed over his headmastership to Oswald Thiele, a son of old Gottlieb, and set up his own unsubsidised denominational school in a stone cottage he built on part of the land now occupied by the municipal offices. About the same time he was ordained a minister of the Lutheran faith and became the first resident pastor of the Doncaster community.
The block of land on which Schramm’s old school stood was too small to permit the extensions made necessary by the steadily increasing attendance, and in 1886 the Education Department bought from Richard Serpell the block on which the original section of the present State school was built.
For a while the Education Department seems to have had difficulty in deciding permanent locations for its schools. In 1883 the Department built the Rooming Creek State School at the junction of Bulleen and Thompsons Roads. Frank Tate, its first headmaster, later became the Director of Education. The school was moved to the corner of Burke and Doncaster Roads in 1893 but has since disappeared. The situation in the Templestowe area settled down in 1874 when the present State School in Main Road was opened.
In the late eighteen-seventies there was a school at the corner of Reynolds and Andersons Creek Roads. However, in 1886 it was moved to George Street, East Doncaster, and became the first State School in that district. For some years it did duty as a post office as well as a school.
The National School at Warrandyte was replaced by the present State School in 1877, built originally to accommodate 100 pupils.
The number shown on a State School does not necessarily indicate its relative date of establishment. Numbers were not given to State Schools until several hundred were in operation. Then numbers were allocated to existing schools in alphabetical order. Thus the No. 12 allotted to Anderson’s Creek, as Warrandyte was then called, does not mean that it was the twelfth State School to be established in Victoria, nor does Doncaster’s mean that it was the 197th.
RECREATION
As the municipality developed the need for halls for public meetings, entertainment and social gatherings began to be felt. The Templestowe people led the field with the erection of a Mechanic Institute in 1882. The Institute was replaced by the Memorial Hall, opened by the Premier on 22nd June, 1922.
In Doncaster it was the establishment about 1866 of a branch of the Band of Hope, an expression of the temperance movement then gathering strength in the colony, that led to the erection of the first public hall in the district. Unable to
The old State School at Warrandyte
find a suitable meeting place without a denominational flavour, the Band invited a number of leading residents to discuss the problem. The first meeting, held on 24th November, 1870, elected Mr. Alfred Hummel chairman of the building committee and tentatively selected a site on Doncaster Road. Mr. Hummel promptly bought the three-acre block from the government, donated one acre to the committee and advanced $140 to the building fund.
When the hall — the Athenaeum — was ceremoniously opened in 1871 it contained the first public library in the district. In 1877 Oswald Thiele formed a committee to assist the trustees in their efforts to improve the facilities offered by the Athenaeum. Initially the committee concentrated on the library and in the course of a few years built it up from 225 books to over 1,000. In the eighteen-eighties it was rated as one of the best reference libraries outside Melbourne.
The Band of Hope suffered a setback when Alfred Hummel, one of their strongest supporters, suddenly seceded and built a hotel with 39 bedrooms and stable accommodation for 20 horses. Hummel had previously built two wooden lookout towers on Doncaster Hill but they were blown over. Now, in conjunction with his new hotel, first called the Beaconsfield and later the Tower, he built a steel structure 285 feet high. This imposing landmark stood for nearly
forty years, and from its summit countless trippers beheld a magnificent panorama stretching to all points of the compass.
In 1914 the Athenaeum committee remodelled the hall, adding a stage, anteroom, lodge room, cloak and supper rooms and a kitchen. The granite pillars on the end facing Doncaster Road were added in 1921 as a memorial to the men of the district who lost their lives in the first world war (1914-18). The hall was taken over by the Council in 1964.
Unfortunately the Athenaeum library was allowed to get so out of date that it became practically worthless either for entertainment or reference. Proposals to revitalise it were defeated by the economic depression of the nineteen-thirties and then by the second world war. The problem of providing adequate library facilities for the rapidly expanding population was taken up in 1961, and in February of the following year representatives of the Council conferred with the Box Hill Library Committee with a view to setting up a joint library service. As a result the Box Hill-Doncaster Regional Library Service was established. In July the Box Hill Central Library, with a stock of 36,000 books, was opened to residents of the Shire of Doncaster and Templestowe. Six months later a bookmobile, with 2,500 volumes on its shelves, began a weekly service throughout the municipality. Another important link in the regional service was forged on 20th May, 1967, when the M. J. McKenzie Library, named in honour of a councillor who had given many years’ service to the municipality, was opened in East Doncaster.
The Warrandyte folk built themselves a Mechanics Institute on the north side of Yarra Street in 1890. With the revival of gold mining around the turn of the century and the consequential increase in population, the hall became too small and in other ways unsuitable for public needs. However, it was 1928 before a group of residents succeeded in having the present hall erected. Motion pictures were shown in the town for the first time in the new hall on 28th April.
In 1910 residents of the thinly populated South Warrandyte area raised enough money to buy a small hall at Footscray and re-erect it alongside the school in Hall Road. Both school and hall were destroyed in the 1939 bush fire and later replaced by the present buildings.
In 1932 the East Doncaster Hall near the junction of Anderson’s Creek and Blackburn Roads was built by residents of the district on land donated by Mr. A. Zerbe.
Before the advent of the motor car the horse was not just some remote seldom seen animal on which one lost one’s money at the local ‘tote’. In the country districts it was, after walking, the most common means of locomotion. You rode it or you were drawn along behind it in a dray, springcart, buggy or drag. It was the ambition of every young man with any pretentions of personal prosperity to possess a fine steed of his own. It is not surprising, therefore, that horse racing was very popular throughout Victoria. Like most other sports, horse racing was not so highly professionalised as it is today. Nearly every country town had its racecourse on which the local boys competed among themselves and with visiting horsemen.
Horse racing in the municipality appears to have begun in Templestowe in the ’sixties for a sporting journal of the times gives an account of a successful meeting held there on an Easter Monday. By about 1870 a small club had been formed at Doncaster, the first course being up and down the main road between
Victoria Street and the Blackburn Road corner. Later it was moved to a circular track behind the Doncaster Arms. The club flourished until the turn of the century, and some of its more important meetings attracted attendances of up to 2,000 people.
Warrandyte does not appear to have gone in for horse racing but was first in the field with cricket. The Warrandyte Cricket Club was formed in 1855 and has been in continuous existence ever since. The present Recreation Ground is shown on Hodgkinson’s survey of 1856 as a ground used for cricket. When in 1864 attempts were made to obtain mining leases on the unofficial sports ground, the club energetically canvassed residents for signatures to a petition asking the government to reserve the site for a recreation ground. The petition was granted in the following year, and now no-one knows whether there is gold there or not. Warrandyte did not participate in organised inter-club cricket until 1905 when they entered the Cameron Trophy Association. In the intervening years they played with teams made up from local groups and exchanged picnic matches with Doncaster, Templestowe, Ringwood, Eltham and other places in surrounding districts. Perhaps the most notable match in these years was played on St. Patrick's Day, 1887, when a team from the West End Brewery came to Warrandyte, bringing a generous supply of their produce with them. Something went wrong with the scoring; there are no less than three official versions on record.
Cricket in Templestowe seems to have got going about 1864, but it was 1910 before the Recreation Ground was formally gazetted. Nevertheless, Templestowe soon became a favourite place for visiting teams from Melbourne and the inner suburbs. Templestowe folk took their cricket seriously. There is a legend that on one occasion in the middle of the fruit picking season when the club had an engagement to play at Lilydale only three players could be mustered. Un-
Templestowe Post Office and bakery
daunted the trio set off in a springcart. There is no record of the match, but it is said that when the party got back three days later even the horse was alco-holically exuberant.
Cricket was first played in Doncaster in 1866 on a ground near the junction of Elgar and Doncaster Roads, but there are no records to show whether a club was formally established. However, in 1874 the Doncaster Club was formed and played on the racecourse behind the Doncaster Arms until the Recreation Ground became available. About 1878 a club, known as ‘The Miserables’ played at the corner of Doncaster and Blackburn Roads. Three years later another club — Doncaster Heights — was formed and, after several moves, finally settled on a ground immediately north of the State School.
Australian Rules football became popular in Melbourne during the eighteen-seventies and gradually spread to the country districts. In this municipality the game seems to have been first played at the schools. Senior clubs were not formed at Doncaster and Templestowe until about 1892 and in Warrandyte in 1908.
From these small beginnings there developed the numerous sporting bodies and activities which today are a marked feature of the municipality.
The first tram on the Box Hill-Doncaster line
CONSOLIDATION
RAILWAYS AND TRAMWAYS
A century ago railways were seen as the answer to Victoria’s transportation problems, and, through investors’ eyes, as the key to quick profits and affluence. You could invest your money in them or, if you were in the know, you could buy up tracts of land on the cheap and subdivide when the line went through. Railway construction, however, proved to be more costly than had been thought, and many of the early attempts to float companies fell through for lack of sufficient capital. Nevertheless, by the end of 1859 the trains of the Melbourne and Suburban Railway Company were running from the city terminus at Prince’s Bridge to Windsor, with a branch line from Richmond to Burnley. In 1861 the railhead was carried to Hawthorn, but the extension proved unprofitable and the owners were glad to sell out to the Melbourne and Hobson’s Bay United Railway Company.
The new owners concentrated on wringing reluctant profits from the capital they had already invested, and for twenty years the terminus remained at Hawthorn. By that time the chaotic state of private railway construction had forced the government to take over most of the companies. The great land boom was just beginning, investment money started to flow and everyone was clamouring for a railway. So the government started an ambitious construction programme, the implementation of which was characterised by much skulduggery in places high and low.
In the outer suburban areas particularly, political patronage often dictated the routing of the lines. It is said that the extension from Hawthorn to Lilydale, authorised in 1880, followed a route more favourable to influential landowners than to the communities it was supposed to serve.
All the same, they did things rather well in those days. When the line to Lilydale was opened in 1882 the first train was the Ministerial Special. It carried the Premier, Sir Bryan O’Loghlin, and his Cabinet with their wives and children, and numerous officials and friends with their wives and children. At each station there was pomp and ceremony. Corks popped and champagne flowed, bands played and spectators cheered. All the way from Hawthorn to Lilydale and back again!
Numerous efforts were made to induce the government to build a railway to or through one point or another in Doncaster-Templestowe. As early as 1869 the Upper Yarra Railway League was formed for the purpose of persuading someone to build a line to Lilydale through Heidelberg and Warrandyte. When
the Lilydale members got their line through Box Hill they lost interest in the original project. The next proposal was for a line from Canterbury through Balwyn, Doncaster and East Doncaster to Warrandyte. Alternatively, it was suggested that the line to Kew should be driven through a tunnel under High Street and continued to Doncaster, Templestowe and Warrandyte. In 1908, when things had got a lot tougher, the Railways Standing Committee investigated a proposal to build a line from Victoria Park through North Kew and Bulleen to Warrandyte. The committee found that the line would probably operate at a loss of some $15,000 a year unless ample freight traffic could be guaranteed. Since the orchardists, the only people who could provide sufficient freight, considered that they would be better off taking their fruit to Victoria Market by road, they were unable to give the required assurances and the project was shelved.
But if the City of Doncaster and Templestowe did not get its railway, it got the first electric tramway to be operated commercially in the southern hemisphere.
The tram was originally imported as a side show at the Melbourne Centenary Exhibition in 1888. When the exhibition was over the owners sold the idea of operating the tram as public transport to some people interested in land development in Doncaster and North Box Hill. These gentlemen formed a company called the Box Hill and Doncaster Tramway Company, with a nominal capital of $30,000. Richard Serpell and William Sell, both of Doncaster, were two of the signatories to the Memorandum of Association.
Beginning at Box Hill, the Company’s engineers laid their tracks across the paddock in a cleared swath which later became Tram Road. But not without trouble. Many of the farmers and market gardeners along the route strongly
opposed the tramway. They feared that the activities of the land jobbers would result in higher rates without any compensating increase in the price of their products. They resented the intrusion of the trippers who, all too often, despoiled their gardens and their orchards. When verbal protests failed, they chased the workmen away or sooled their dogs on to them. They tore up the tracks and chopped down the poles. The company invoked the protection of the law and got it. But it took them nearly two years to put the line through, and it cost a lot more than they had budgeted for.
The line was formally opened on 14th October, 1889, in the presence of a large gathering of parliamentarians, municipal dignitaries and curious spectators. The Premier stayed away, perhaps wisely since his government had just thrown out one of the Doncaster-Templestowe railway schemes. But for the distinguished gentlemen who did accept invitations there was a grand banquet at the Tower Hotel and a free ride on the tram.
The first tram is described as an open six-bench car with reversible seat backs, running boards, along each side and a passenger capacity of from 35 to 40. It was driven by a 15 horsepower motor, the electricity for which was generated in a power house along the route. Later a glassed-in car was put on the run.
For a while the tram made ten return trips each week day. The return fare to Box Hill cost seven and a half cents, and you could buy a combined rail and tram return ticket to Melbourne for fifteen cents. On holidays there were excursion fares, and on Easter Monday, 1882, the tram carried 1,500 passengers.
The first half-yearly balance sheet showed a profit of $116.70 and the directors faced the future with confidence. But the effects of the inflated land prices they had helped to create caught up with them. The property owners along the route had surrendered strips of their land in return for shares in the company. But now the land was worth more than the shares, and some of them disputed the legality of the agreements. When argument failed they got out their axes and crowbars again. The company collapsed under the strain of trying to cope with the damage and satisfy the landowners.
But the directors were not deterred. They formed another company called the Doncaster and Box Hill Electric Road Company, with plans for extending the line along Williamsons Road to the junction of Heidelberg and Templestowe Roads.
The new Company ran the tram between Doncaster and Box Hill until 1894 when the collapse of the land boom and the financial debacle reduced the takings almost to vanishing point. In desperation, the company offered to rent the whole plant to their Engineer, Mr. H. J. Hilton, for ten cents a week. For two years Hilton struggled manfully to keep the line going, doing duty as manager, stoker, engine driver, dynamo attendant, armature winder and track repairer. It was a magnificent performance, defeated in the end by the economic chaos of the times. The last tram ran on 6th January, 1896.
With the closing of the tramway, communications between Doncaster and Box Hill reverted to a horse drawn coach service which terminated at the Doncaster Hotel. In 1912 Mr. Victor Sonenberg, who was then operating the service with a four-horse coach which took 45 minutes for the journey, extended the terminus to East Doncaster, doing five trips on week days, three on Saturdays and two on Sundays. At the eastern end of the municipality a horse drawn coach ran daily between Warrandyte and Ringwood.
By this time the motor vehicle was beginning to make its appearance in the district, not always to the delight o£ the local inhabitants. The strange contraption, tearing noisily along at anything up to twenty miles an hour without any visible means of propulsion, scared the wits out of the stock. Horses galloped madly about the paddocks, cows went off their milk, fowls and ducks scattered to the four winds, small children gazed goggle-eyed or ran for cover. So unpopular was the visiting weekend motorist that at its meeting on 30th December, 1913, the Templestowe Council had before it a letter from the Automobile Club complaining that someone had deliberately scattered broken bottles along the Templestowe-Warrandyte Road. The Club asked the Council's assistance in apprehending the miscreant, and hinted darkly that it might be able to supply his name. The Council, whose sympathies lay with the irate ratepayers, refrained from enquiring about names and simply forwarded the letter to the Warrandyte police station without comment.
On 1st October, 1914, the Doncaster Council approved a series of traffic bylaws, one of which read:
Any person riding or impelling a machine or in charge thereof shall:
(a) carry a bell, horn or other instrument capable of giving at the will of such person audible and sufficient warning of the approach or position of the machine;
(b) at the request of any person having charge of a horse, cause the machine to stop and remain stationary so long as may reasonably be necessary.
Nevertheless, when early in 1913 A. A. Withers and Son proposed to run a motor bus service from Warrandyte to Melbourne via Doncaster and Templestowe they were strongly supported by the Progress Associations. This service
operated until the scarcity of petrol and replacement parts occasioned by the first World War forced it to stop. Starting about the same time, Victor Sonenberg put a motor bus carrying 26 passengers on the Doncaster to Box Hill run, but war conditions forced him to return to horses.
In November, 1919, twelve months after the conclusion of hostilities, a number of Doncaster people, in conjunction with the Kew Traders’ Association, formed the Box Hill-Kew Motor Bus Company and bought a fine new solid-tyred vehicle. The company provided five daily runs to Box Hill and two to Kew. Sonenberg sold his horse-drawn service; it was motorised and run by a succession of operators until it ceased when the mail contract was awarded to the opposition.
In the early nineteen-twenties the mushrooming of motorised road transport services throughout the State gave rise to much public controversy. The government was concerned on two counts — the loss of business on the State operated railways and tramways, and the sudden increase in wear and tear on the main roads. Even in districts which had hitherto been badly served by public transport, the new development was by no means an unmixed blessing. The roads had not been built to carry the fast and heavy vehicles, many of them shod with solid tyres.
The Doncaster Council, like many others, wras caught between the pressures exerted on the one hand by people who wanted cheap transport and considered that open and unrestricted competition was the best way to get it, and on the other by a mounting chorus of complaints about the state of the roads. There was certainly plenty of competition between the four or five services which at one time were running simultaneously in the district. So fierce was the contest that some of the operators resorted to the practice of sending cars along the routes to pick up passengers and then transfer them to the bus for the run to the city. Eventually the situation throughout Victoria became so chaotic that the government was forced to rationalise the road transport services by means of a licensing system. In this municipality Mr. W. Hussey was licensed to operate a motor bus service between Warrandyte and Ringwood, while the firm of Camfield and Picketts was awarded the run from Warrandyte to the city via Templestowe and Doncaster.
In 1925 Withers and Son bought the Warrandyte to Melbourne service. During the next 18 years they sold the service and bought it back several times until in 1943, operating as the Warrandyte Transport Service Pty. Ltd., they finally acquired all the bus services in the municipality. This company ran bus services from Warrandyte to Melbourne via Doncaster and Templestowe, and from Doncaster to Blackburn and Mitcham until it sold out to the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board in 1962.
PUBLIC SERVICES AND UTILITIES
Up to 1911 the municipality was without street lighting of any sort, and in October of that year the Doncaster Progress Association requested the Council to provide street lights at a few points in the business area along Doncaster Road. When the Finance Sub-Committee reported that the capital cost of each light would be $13.00 and that the kerosene required to burn the light until midnight on moonless nights would cost $1.60 a year, the Council informed the Progress Association that it could not see its way to erect the lights and attend to them.
However, the Progress Association kept pegging away, and in September, 1912, the Council requested the permission of the Postmaster-General’s Department to hang the proposed lamps on the telegraph poles and asked a number of shopkeepers if they would be willing to light and extinguish the lamps. While the negotiations were taking place the Gloria Light Company appraised the Council of the benefits that would accrue from the installation of its equipment. In July, 1913, the sub-committee appointed to handle the matter reported that the Gloria Light was too complicated. They had, however, bought three kerosene and three carbide lamps. Six months later the Council was asking the shopkeepers who had promised to light the lamps why they were not doing so. At the same time the Council investigated the possibility of each cool store running an electric light from its own plant outside its premises. The West Doncaster Cool Store, the only one to meet the Council’s request, switched on its light on 1st September, 1913, the first electric street light in the municipality.
In July, 1914, the Progress Association returned to the attack with a deputation to the Council requesting that steps be taken to provide the district with electric light and power. After much discussion and consultation with various authorities, the Electric Light Sub-Committee placed two proposals before the Council on 11th August. One scheme, estimated to cost $9,232 provided for the construction of a power house. The other provided for the purchase of current from the Melbourne Electric Supply Company and was estimated to cost $7,596.
To make either scheme a payable proposition at least 150 householders would have to accept the service, and it was doubtful if that many could be induced to abandon their lamps and candles. Eventually a third plan was adopted, but only after seven guarantors had undertaken to indemnify the Council against loss for five years and even then in the teeth of strong opposition from a section of the ratepayers.
The outbreak of the first World War delayed completion until the end of January, 1916. A switching-on ceremony was arranged for the evening of 8tli February but had to be postponed at the last minute when it was found that the Melbourne Electric Supply Company could not provide the current until the next day. Then it rained and rained. But the councillors who had supported the project from the beginning determinedly turned out to see the President, Councillor Zerbe, pull the switch. The assemblage then repaired to the Shire Hall to enjoy appropriate refreshments under the glare of the new means of illumination.
By 1920 reticulation had been carried east to Springvale Road and two years later, after some difficulty in finding guarantors against loss, the lights went on in Templestowe.
Nearly fifteen years of untiring effort by the Warrandyte Riding councillors was required to secure the reticulation of electricity in the eastern part of the municipality. One of the early schemes proposed the installation of a hydroelectric plant in the Pound Bend tunnel, but investigations showed that it would be hopelessly uneconomic. At length the Council, unable to provide the capital for the extension of its own service, persuaded the State Electricity Commission to undertake the work. Warrandyte people were able to discard their kerosene lamps in December, 1935.
For water supply Doncaster had to make do with its single two-inch main from Surrey Hills until 1921 when the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of
Works was persuaded to provide something better. Construction of the new main began about the middle of 1922 and the house connections were installed towards the end of the year. However, it was 1930 before the Board was able to provide reticulation in the Templestowe area.
Water supply in the town of Warrandyte posed a problem because it was well beyond the reticulation area of the Board of Works. After much discussion the Warrandyte Water Works Trust was constituted on 2nd June, 1959, to provide the town on both sides of the Yarra with a reticulated supply drawn from the river. House connections began in June, 1961. South Warrandyte had to wait until 1967 when the Board extended its mains from North Ringwood into the area. The Board took over the Warrandyte Water Works Trust in January, 1971.
The first steps to establish an infant welfare service were taken in May, 1937, when the Warrandyte Public Purposes Committee sent a deputation to seek the support of the Council. After some hesitation, the Council agreed to set up a part-time service at Warrandyte, and to contribute $40 a year towards the sister’s salary.
The first service in the municipality was established on a one day a week basis in the supper room of the Warrandyte Mechanics Institute. The Warrandyte Infant Welfare Committee faced the problem of building a proper centre, a formidable undertaking since the Council declined to contribute and at that time there was no government building subsidy. It was 1946 before the committee had enough money — $1,800 — to build in Yarra Street a Centre which served the town until a new one was built by the Council in 1966.
Warrandyte was well ahead of other parts of the municipality for it was 1952 before a Centre was built in the East Doncaster district (George Street), and 1957 before one was erected at Templestowe.
E.S. & A. Bank, Doncaster, now demolished
The first infant welfare sister in the municipality was Sister Olive Houghton, an English nurse who had married an Australian soldier during World War i and settled in Warrandyte in the ’twenties. For home visits, an essential part of infant welfare work, she was dependent on the generosity of the bus companies. Off the bus routes she pedalled her way round on a bicycle.
GENERAL DEVELOPMENT 1900-1945
During the first thirty years of the present century the municipality settled into a clearly defined pattern. Fruit growing on the higher ground from South Warrandyte through East Doncaster and Doncaster to Templestowe had developed into a vigorous, well-organised industry. In the Bulleen area and along the river flats dairy farming flourished. Warrandyte suffered a setback as gold mining ground to a halt, but by that time the district had become known as a picnic resort and a pleasant place to live in a rural setting within easy reach of the metropolis. If the population tended to fall with the departure of many of the miners, several noted artists came to live there and the district developed a distinctive flavour of its own.
It was towards the end of this period of steady rural development that the first encroachment of suburbia into the orchard area took place. Some years earlier Mr. Tom Petty had bought the area now known as Park Orchards, cleared it and established an extensive orchard. However, in 1926 he sold the property to Gibb, Sell, Bright and Company. The company devised an elaborate scheme of subdivision based on the idea of an exclusive country club for the residents. It was proposed to lay down a cricket ground, tennis courts, a bowling green and a golf course. Lots were offered for sale on the condition that the streets within the estate would not be open to the general public.
The scheme was not a success for only four or five lots were sold in the first eighteen months. At the end of two years the company abandoned many of its ideas and earnestly importuned the Council to take over the roads. The Council did not respond with any marked degree of enthusiasm to the proposal that it should extricate the company from one of its major difficulties.
When originally planned, the provision of roads was economically feasible. By the time the urgent requirements of other developing districts had been fulfilled, costs had rocketed. Consequently Park Orchards residents, many of them with large blocks, found themselves committed to heavy road building charges.
During the second World War the Army established a signals training centre on the estate, laid on water and electricity mains, and connected Park Road to the main Ringwood-Warrandytet Road.
In 1930-31 the effects of the great economic depression struck the municipality with full force. The price of fruit dropped to twenty cents a case and less. At that figure it was hardly worth taking to market, even if the grower and his family had picked, packed and carted the produce themselves. There was much unemployment, particularly in the Warrandyte and South Warrandyte districts. Nevertheless, one benefit did accrue to the municipality from the general economic chaos. In an effort to ameliorate the distress caused by the widespread unemployment, the government made money available to local authorities on very favourable terms. The Council seized the opportunity to improve its road system, particularly in the eastern parts of the municipality.
FLOOD AND FIRE
Just as the community was recovering from the worst effects of the depression disaster struck again in the form of a big flood. In November, 1934, phenomenal rain fell over the Yarra catchment area on three successive days. By the evening of the third day the river was two feet above the decking of the Warrandyte bridge and the low lying part of the town was inundated. The bodies of horses, cattle and sheep swept down on the flood by the dozen. Towards morning a floating haystack struck the bridge and might well have demolished the structure if it had not broken up and passed underneath. Downstream the floodwaters wrought havoc to pastures, market gardens and buildings. Coming as it did on top of the depression, this blow was a severe one to the districts involved.
By the turn of the century most Victorian country towns had organised volun-
teer fire brigades. Since these brigades received little or no government or municipal support, their strength and equipment was generally pretty poor. In 1933 the Bush Fire Brigade’s Committee was established to register existing brigades, encourage the formation of new ones and provide some meagre assistance. The first of these volunteer brigades in the municipality was formally established at Warrandyte on 24th June, 1938, under the leadership of Constable H. W. G. Birdsel.
As the year 1938 drew to a close few people on the periphery of Melbourne realised that a menacing situation which occurs at irregular intervals in southern Victoria was developing. A succession of good seasons had produced prolific secondary growth in the forests and nearer bushlands. In the dry winter and spring the vegetation wilted, and it required only a hot summer to make it explosively inflammable.
Summer came early that year and the second week in January, 1939, began in a heat wave with temperatures around the 40° Celsius mark. Fires broke out in numerous places early in the week, and by the Thursday the ranges were ablaze in a series of mighty conflagrations extending from Mansfield in the north to Noogee in the east. Borne by a fierce wind, ashes fell in the central city area. The metropolis was shrouded in a dense pall of smoke blotting out the sun and the sky. Tidings of death and destruction, of more outbreaks, of new disaster, followed in bewildering succession.
By mid-morning on Friday, 13th January — Black Friday — the temperature had climbed to 450 Celsius. Suddenly a column of smoke arose from a point between Eltham and the Yarra. The flames spread rapidly and, driven by a strong north-westerly, jumped the river on a wide front a little to the east of Alexander Road. The Warrandyte Fire Brigade, equipped with beaters and six knapsacks, had no hope of checking the onrush of the flames, and there was no time to weld the townspeople into an organised fire fighting force. Some took refuge in the river, others hastily departed in motor cars. The fire swept clean through the town, through South Warrandyte where it engulfed the school, the hall and the post office, and raced on into the adjoining Shire of Lilydale. In less than half an hour three churches and 168 houses went up in flames and one man lost his life.
The first organisation to get through with assistance to Warrandyte was the Melbourne Gas Works branch of the St. John Ambulance Brigade. By late afternoon they had established a post in the public hall, and were organising medical assistance for the injured and temporary accommodation for the homeless. Most of the burnt out families were taken to Ringwood where they were billetted for the night in the Church of England parish hall.
By Sunday morning most of the worst fires had been brought under control and the Warrandyte people returned to salvage what they could from the wreckage. Then in the afternoon there descended upon the stricken town a vast horde of sightseers from the city. Cars were bumper to bumper along Yarra Street, some looting took place and salvage work was impeded.
The outbreak of the second World War in September, 1939, diverted public attention from the bush fire problem. However, in December, 1944, the government set up the Country Fire Authority to improve and direct the volunteer fire fighting organisation throughout the State. In this municipality another brigade — South Warrandyte — was registered on 10th January, 1949.
EXPANSION
GROWTH OF THE METROPOLIS
The onset o£ the Great Depression in 1929 virtually brought economic development in Australia to a standstill. Recovery was only in its early stages when World War II broke out in 1939. During the six years that the conflict lasted practically the whole of the national output was necessarily channelled into the war effort. Consequently when the war ended in 1945 there was an acute shortage of almost everything, and the change from war to peace production could not be accomplished overnight.
Very early in the Depression the building industry ground to a halt and remained moribund until the end of the war. Thus for a period of sixteen years home building in Australia was insignificant. Although population growth during this period was small, an appreciable backlog in housing requirements developed. When the war ended a quarter of a million servicemen and women returned to civil life, most of them of marriageable age and prospective home buyers. In addition the Australian Government launched a massive immigration program. By about 1945-50 it was clear that migration and a rise in the birth rate were lifting the population level at a rate not before experienced in this country.
At that time Australia was in an excellent position to have adopted a policy of orderly growth through regional development and the timely provision of the public services required by an expanding population. However, the Federal authorities took the view that these were State responsibilities. The State authorities, firmly closing their eyes to the disastrous overseas experience with excessive and uncontrolled urban sprawl, left everything to the captains of industry. And the captains of industry followed with increasing momentum their established practice of concentrating everything in or very close to the State capitals. This attitude of laissez faire at both levels of government resulted in a very rapid increase of population in the capital cities, accompanied by a steady decline in country areas.
The Melbourne of 1950 did not expand evenly in all directions. From the beginning the strongest thrust was towards the east and south-east. Suburbia began to move into West Doncaster, Bulleen and Lower Templestowe during the 'fifties. And ahead of the builders went the estate agents and development companies seeking land for subdivision into home sites.
Under pressure from the subdividers on the one hand and mounting rates and taxes on the other, the old landowners sold out one by one. Rows of subur-
ban houses spread over the Bulleen and Templestowe paddocks and into the orchard country around Doncaster and East Doncaster. Between 1950 and 1955 the population of the municipality rose from 4,500 to 6,811, an annual growth rate of 5.14 per cent. Between 1955 and i960 the population rose to 16,500, an annual growth rate of 28.45 per cent. By 1971 the population had reached 64,286 with an annual growth rate of 17.03 per cent. Figures showing the amount and capital value of building activities in the municipality from 1957-58 to 1972-73 are given in Table ‘A’.
Table ‘A’
BUILDING PERMITS ISSUED 1959-1973
Municipal Year ( Oct.-Sept.) Total Building Permits Estimated Capital Value in Dollars Dwelling Permits
1957-58 1,101 5,590,00° 778
1958-59 1,052 5,274,586 683
1959-6° 1,378 7.593.678 984
1960-61 1,066 5.652.452 617
1961-62 1,501 8,654,296 932
1962-63 1,911 10,525,468 1,152
1963-64 2,231 13.573.°°° i,344
1964-65 2,3H 14.847,424 1,095
1965-66 2,324 15,906,480 i,4i3
1966-67 2,885 17,356,000 1,367
1967-68 2,914 30,755,515 (Includes Shoppingtown) 1,537
1968-69 3^25 25,201,667 1,548
1969-70 3,212 25,496,204 1,528
1970-71 3’144 26,424,419 1,394
i971-72 3>527 32,371,892 1,577
1972-73 3,794 40,512,329 1,521
THE ROAD PROBLEM
Plans made by the Metropolitan Town Planning Commission in 1929 — never implemented because of the Depression and the war — envisaged a much lower and steadier rate of growth based on the use of public transport by most of the population. However, by the time expansion began to accelerate during the ’fifties a high proportion of the people owned motor cars and were thus independent of public transport.
The motor vehicle expanded the horizons of the home seeker. He was no longer compelled to seek a home within a mile or so of a public transport route. Cheaper land, well beyond the densely built-up areas, was now within his reach. In increasing numbers home seekers took advantage of their new mobility, particularly towards the east and south-east of the old metropolitan fringes. Simultaneously commerce and industry brought motor transport into general use in a steadily increasing volume.
The motor vehicle, however, did not solve the transportation problem. It merely shifted the emphasis from one requirement to another. It created an urgent need for bigger and better roads and for more of them, not only to meet
local needs but also to accommodate the increasing volume of through traffic. The most severe pressure was, of course, experienced in the rapidly developing outer metropolitan municipalities where the greatest volume of expansion was taking place, and where public transport was totally inadequate or non-existent.
Until the sudden burst of post-war metropolitan expansion began, the subdivision of land for home building raised few problems in the provision of public services. The original owner simply subdivided the land, leaving the construction of the streets within the area to the municipal councils So long as the volume of subdivision remained small, councils had little difficulty in financing the construction of these private streets, and subsequently recovering the costs from the new owners. Eventually the practice was adopted of requiring the subdivider to make the private streets to the council’s specifications before settlement of the area began.
Before the new system was adopted, however, a great deal of subdivision had already taken place in Doncaster-Templestowe. Some quite large areas and numerous smaller pockets had been built up without any made streets. It was all very well to have a motor car to take you to work or to the shops. The problem was to get it to move over the tracks, often deep in mud during the winter, that criss-crossed the new housing settlements.
Financing the construction of private streets presented the Doncaster-Templestowe Council with a difficult problem. Borrowing money for all public works had to be approved by the Australian Loan Council, and the amounts that that body was willing to allot to municipalities usually left them insufficient for all of the private street construction required. Undeterred by this impasse, the Council evolved three methods of alleviating the plight of residents in the new housing estates. Firstly they offered to build and maintain a light temporary roadway where the residents of the street agreed to pay part of the cost. The residents collected among themselves their share of the cost, and the Council graded and lightly metalled the road. Wellesley Road, South Warrandyte, was one of the first temporary streets made under this arrangement.
While this method gave relief to many residents, it did not solve the problem of permanent street construction. Besides, it was unsuitable for several large subdivisions, especially those in which serious drainage problems had developed. Unable to obtain sufficient loan funds, the Finance Sub-Committee (Councillors Harle, Rush, Cameron and Croxford) persuaded the Council’s bankers to finance construction by means of a substantial overdraft. The first progress payment under this arrangement was made in November, 1964, for private street construction on the Lincoln Estate in Bulleen.
In 1961-62 the Council investigated a third scheme for financing private street construction. The proposal was that contractors would finance construction from their own resources or with credits they were able to negotiate themselves, and would be recouped by the Council on a system of deferred payments. At that time, however, there were grave doubts about the legality of the proposal, and the Council deferred action until 1965-66 after the Victorian Parliament had passed legislation authorising the procedure.
Expenditure on permanent private street construction over the period 1964 to 1973 is shown in Table ‘B’.
Private street construction was only one aspect of the road problem facing the Council. The increasing population, combined with the steadily mounting volume
of traffic passing through the municipality, demanded arterial roads wide enough and strong enough to carry the load, and provided with traffic engineering works to control the flow. The magnitude of the problem, and the rate at which it developed, is shown in Table ‘C’ which sets out the traffic counts on a number of arterial roads from 1961 to 1973.
While the Council receives assistance with arterial road construction and improvement from the Country Roads Board, provision of the necessary finance imposed a great strain on its resources. Expenditure on main or arterial roads from 1964 to 1973 is shown in Table ‘D\
In 1964 the Council evolved a ten-year plan for the orderly and progressive development of arterial roads. The plan, based on a study of traffic statistics and the forecasts arising therefrom, established priorities for the works required over the next ten year period. Wherever possible, works were planned right through to completion in the first instance, even though it might be necessary to undertake construction by stages. This forward planning enables water main and other facilities to be placed in their final positions, thus obviating future excavations with their consequential expense and interruption of the traffic flow.
A factor of considerable importance to road construction in the municipality is the Council's quarry, on the north side of the main Heidelberg-Warrandyte
Road. The quarry was operated by the Council as early as 1918, in rather a small way until pressure for extensive road building began in the early ’sixties. Then more machinery was installed and the quarry developed as a significant part of the construction program.
The quarry is run as a business undertaking selling road building materials to the Engineering Department at rates lower than those charged by commercial suppliers. By cheapening the cost of construction the quarry enables the Council to do more work with the money available. It also cheapens the cost of overhead administration by obviating the necessity for placing and processing orders on outside suppliers. The ratepayer gets an additional bonus from the availability at low cost of overburden and other waste materials for ‘filling’ for various purposes. The quarry accounts for 1971-72 show a profit of $13,486, a handsome return on investment particularly when the cheaper cost of road construction is considered.
At this point it may, perhaps, be convenient to mention the Council’s other business undertaking — the Electricity Supply Department. From a shaky beginning in 1916 when difficulty was experienced in inducing 150 householders to accept the supply, the venture has grown to the point where in 1974 it has 21,000 consumers. Other details are given in Table ‘E’.
Table ‘B’
EXPENDITURE ON PERMANENT PRIVATE STREET CONSTRUCTION, 1964-1973
Method of Finance 1964f65 1965/66 1966/67 1967/68 1968/69 1969/70 1970/71 1971/72 1972/71
Overdraft Finance $479,919 $778,316 $418,267 $715,008 $179,363 $516,749 $634,182 $79,291 $66,549
Underwriter Finance 110,451 365.257 197.436 18,054 214,017 275,349 48,000
Loan Funds 209,330 165,422 328,878 282,195 881,665 735,070 54,615 ll8,083 56,159
Totals $689,249 $1,054,189 $1,112,402 $1,194,639 $1,079,082 $1,465,836 $964,146 $245,374 $122,708
Table T)’
EXPENDITURE ON MAIN OR ARTERIAL ROADS 1964-1973
Finance 1964/65 1965/66 1966/67 1967/68 1968/69 1969/70 1970/71 1971/72 1972/73
Council Funds $357,340 $363,467 $361,033 $401,988 $522,047 $499,296 $457,921 $499,058 $447,102
Country Roads Board Grants 307,592 280,510 332,416 6l8,270 942,618 502,712 612,192 805,197 812,341
Totals $664,932 $643,977 $693,449 $1,020,258 $1,464,655 $1,002,008 $1,070,113 $1,304,255 $1,259,443
68 The History of Doncaster and Templestowe
Table ‘C’
TWENTY-FOUR HOUR TRAFFIC COUNTS ON A NUMBER OF MAIN OR ARTERIAL ROADS 1961-1973
Counting Point 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973
Doncaster Rd. opp. Municipal Offices 9,720 13*150 18,130 17,295 21,403 21,564 24,043 21,432 27,328 28,828 30,720 38,609
Doncaster Rd. east o£ Blackburn Rd. 5,084 7,592 8,734 10,739 11,290 12,55! 13,606 16,467 18,450 21,400 23,184 23,760
Williamsons Rd. north of Doncaster Rd. 6,658 8,833 11,665 CO 00 11,430 16,004 16,663 16,727 N.A. 24,728 27,681 32,656 37,089
Manningham Rd. east of Bulleen Rd. 9*3*° 7,796 9,397 11,465 9,970 13,869 14*071 20,392 24,462 21,171 23,671 25,815 27,600
Heidelberg-Warrandyte Rd. north of Banksia St. 1,909 3,808 4,203 5,275 8,180 5,493 7,802 9,756 11,271 10,628 12,350 11,125 11*307
Heidelberg-Warrandyte Rd. west of Andersons Creek Rd. 1,132 1**57 1,562 1,885 1,865 1,377 1,661 2,498 2,821 3,347 3*421 3,964 4*253
Thompsons Rd. south of Manningham Rd. 528 3,242 4,900 5,472 6,160 5,987 6,412 7*345 7,925 8,475 10,014 10,132
Elgar Rd. south of Doncaster Rd. 1,958 **35i 2,738 3,450 3,085 3,820 4*343 5,482 6,378 7*012 1M53 10,000
Whittens Lane, south of Doncaster Rd. 9,720 13,150 17,632 17,295 21,403 21,564 1,946 3,056 2,375 2*599 2,517 2,807
Wetherby Rd. south of Doncaster Rd. 780 2,437 1,829 3,837 4*571 5,462 N.A. 5,977 7,257 8,028 7,76i 8,971
Blackburn Rd. north of Doncaster Rd. 2,785 2A75 2,801 3,964 4,843 5,789 6,810 7,809 8,211 8,764 10,221 10,700 12,214
Andersons Creek Rd. east of Blackburn Rd. 1,052 L931 864 1,392 1,447 L494 L577 1*857 1,764 i*9i7 1,871 2,047
Park Rd. north of Mitcham Rd. 1,384 i*47* 1,497 2,290 2,075 3,190 2,i47 4,268 4,415 3*37° 3,561 3,796
Ringwood-Warrandyte Rd., South Warrandyte 669 1,352 1,652 1,605 1,087 1,027 1,090 1,200 i,254 1,408
Expansion 69
White’s Corner at Doncaster in 1910 looking towards the south-west and Box Hill
Table ‘E’
ELECTRICITY SUPPLY DEPARTMENT
Year Consumers Assets Revenue
1954 1,400 160,000 106,000
!964 7,700 1,000,000 75°,000
1974 21,000 6,000,000 3,500,000
In addition to roads, the Council had of course to provide other facilities required by the expanding population. The staff worked under severe disadvantages in the old shire hall in Council Street until the new municipal office was ready for occupation in 1957. However, the pressure continued to increase and in 1964 important additions had to be made to the building to accommodate the enlarged staff.
THE SEVERANCE DEBATE
The initial build-up of population occurred in the Bulleen and Doncaster areas and, during i960, pressure began to develop to have the riding boundaries adjusted in order to give the more populous districts stronger representation on the Council. In January, 1961, the Council, after considering reports by the Shire Secretary and the Valuer, resolved that at that stage re-subdivision was not
White’s Corner at Doncaster in 1970 looking towards the south-west and Box Hill
in the best interests of the municipality as a whole. In March, 1962, the question was again debated in Council when a motion to subdivide the Templestowe Riding was defeated. Suggestions to subdivide the Doncaster Riding were also discussed but no formal motion to this effect was placed before the meeting.
In 1963 the agitation for re-subdivision took a different form when some Doncaster residents proposed the severance of Doncaster Riding from the remainder of the Shire and its establishment as a separate municipality. The reasons advanced in support of the proposal rested partly on the contention that the Templestowe and Warrandyte Councillors consistently outvoted Doncaster Councillors on the allocation of priorities in the works program and other important matters, though few concrete examples were given. Claims that Doncaster money was being spent in other parts of the municipality skated rather lightly over the fact that, apart from general overhead expenses, all the money raised in each riding was spent in that riding, separate accounts being kept for each of them. However, looking at the situation as a whole, there was real substance in the complaint that Doncaster Riding had 54 per cent of the population of the municipality and provided 50 per cent of the revenue, but had only 33y3 per cent of the votes in Council.
In December, 1963, the Doncaster Riding Councillors interviewed the Minister for Local Government and placed their ideas before him. Shortly afterwards a committee of Doncaster residents was set up to take the formal steps necessary to secure the severance of the riding.
On 29th August, 1964, a poll of the Doncaster Riding ratepayers resulted in a majority for severance, but a poll of ratepayers of the whole Shire returned a verdict against it.
On the same day a poll was taken in the portion of the town of Warrandyte which lies in the municipality of Eltham immediately north of the River Yarra, to ascertain the views of the residents on a proposal to transfer the area to the Shire of Doncaster and Templestowe. They voted against it.
At a public sitting of the Local Government Advisory Board in the Athenaeum Hall on 7th December, 1964, the Severance Committee submitted its case, supported by much arithmetic, to demonstrate that Doncaster Riding was financially strong enough to function as a separate municipality. The Board, however, was in duty bound to consider the interests of the ratepayers in the whole shire and not merely those in a portion of it. They did some arithmetic of their own and arrived at the conclusion that:
The setting up of a new administration was likely to cause serious delays to
the carrying out of many projects required for a fast developing district, and
to cause a considerable increase in rates for both portions.
In conveying this decision to the Council, the Minister for Local Government said that he was, nevertheless, persuaded of the pressing need for more equitable representation of the Doncaster district, and requested the Council to submit proposals to bring it about.
While the Council was working out a plan for submission to the Minister a second poll of Doncaster residents in August, 1965, resulted in a majority for severance.
The Council submitted its proposals to the Minister on 21st September, 1965. This plan took note of the fact that the shire was growing rapidly and that the population had increased from 6,814 in 1954 to 31,800 in 1965. The plan sought to project the growth of population to 1975 and proposed re-subdivision into four ridings based on roughly equivalent population figures as at that date. If the estimated growth figures were realised the plan would work out as shown in Table T\
Table *F
COUNCILS PLAN FOR RE-SUBDIVISION INTO FOUR RIDINGS ON THE BASIS OF THE ESTIMATED POPULATION IN 1975
Proposed Riding Area in Acres Estimated Population in
North 5.375 22,222
East 11,429 23.853
South a,584 25.982
West 3.049 25.577
At another public meeting of the Local Government Board on 14th February, 1966, the Doncaster Severance Committee opposed the plan on the ground that it would destroy the unity of the Doncaster district by partitioning substantial segments of it to the other ridings. As an alternative, the committee recommended that the shire be re-subdivided into four ridings by leaving Templestowe and Warrandyte Ridings unchanged and by dividing Doncaster Riding into two approximately equal portions. In 1965-66 this plan would produce the situation shown in Table ‘G\
Table ‘G’
PLAN FOR RE-SUBDIVISION INTO FOUR RIDINGS SUBMITTED BY DONCASTER SEVERANCE COMMITTEE
Proposed Riding Area in Acres Voters on Roll Percentage to Shire Total (Voters)
East Doncaster 3.984 5,434 23-9°
West Doncaster 2,992 5,947 26.20
Templestowe 6,227 8,799 38.90
Warrandyte 8,887 2,561 11.00
A third plan was submitted by the Bulleen Progress Association and involved re-subdivision into five ridings, of which three would be substantially urban and two substantially rural or semi-rural. The plan was based on the contention that each riding should contain one type of land use and that all ridings should have an approximately equal population.
The Advisory Board rejected the Bulleen plan on the grounds that in a rapidly growing area any attempt to base the ridings on the type of land use is impracticable, and that in any case the soundness of the principle involved is doubtful.
The Board also rejected the Council’s plan on the grounds that the assumptions on which it was based might not be realised, and that it failed to produce re-subdivision which was really equitable in existing circumstances.
The Board considered that the plan submitted by the Doncaster Severance Committee reflected more accurately the needs of the present and the immediate future, and pointed out that it was always open to the Council to make an application for further re-subdivision should population growth warrant another alteration to riding boundaries.
In conveying this decision to the Council in a letter dated 5th May, 1966, the Minister for Local Government said that Doncaster Riding would be divided into East and West Doncaster by a generally north-south line through Leeds Street, Major Street, Daws Road and Tuckers Road. This plan came into effect at the Council elections on 27th August, 1966.
THE CITY
In view of the fact that both the population and the revenue of the Shire had passed the statutory requirements, the Council, on 12 th July, 1966, petitioned the Governor-in-Council to proclaim the municipality a city. The petition was granted and the proclamation was duly gazetted on 24th January, 1967.
On Tuesday, 28th February, 1967, before a distinguished assemblage at the municipal offices, His Excellency Sir Rohan Delacombe, Governor of Victoria, declared the municipality to be a city under the name of the City of Doncaster and Templestowe, and invested the first mayor. Councillor S. K. Shepherd, and the first Town Clerk, Mr. J. W. Thomson, with their robes and badges of office.
Immediately after the ceremony the Council held a Special Meeting to pass motions of loyalty to Her Majesty the Queen, and of appreciation of the presence of the distinguished visitors.
THE DISASTER OF 1962
While the municipality was suffering acutely from growing pains, on Tuesday, 16th January, 1962, it was struck by another disaster under seasonal conditions similar to those of 1939. On the Sunday fires had broken out in the Dandenongs and in the Christmas Hills area. On the Monday the fires spread and increased in intensity, and another one broke out at St. Andrews. By Tuesday morning the St. Andrews outbreak was out of control and racing towards Warrandyte before a strong, choppy northerly wind.
The Warrandyte Brigade was equipped with a fire fighting vehicle but South Warrandyte had only knapsacks and beaters. When the conflagration jumped the river on a broad front in the early afternoon the brigades wisely concentrated their efforts on saving homes rather than expend their resources in a vain attempt to stop the flames across the entire front. As the day wore on the wind changed frequently through a wide arc, driving the flames in all directions. On the eastern flank one branch raced through Wonga Park and Warranwood. The central prong penetrated to Five Ways, South Warrandyte, while the western branch, after sweeping through Warrandyte, went on through the edge of Park Orchards to Donvale. The battle went on until 1 o’clock in the morning when a light fall of rain enabled the fire fighters to gain control.
When the tally was taken the next morning it was found that 132 homes had been destroyed in the Warrandyte-Wonga Park-Warranwood areas, and that two men had been killed. Before night relief work had been planned, and the next morning staff to handle the operations was installed in a vacant shop in Warrandyte. Over the following weekends volunteers, backed by the Council’s staff and equipment, cleared the debris from every burnt out house in the stricken areas.
The disaster pointed up the need for organisational improvement. On the one hand the fire brigades formed a group headquarters to provide effective direction and control of fire fighting operations. On the other hand the Council, at the instance of Councillor V. C. Rush, set up a municipal civil defence organisation to support the brigades with back-up water supplies, medical care and refreshments. A little later, on the initiative of the Shire President, Councillor R. J. Hardidge, eight municipalities formed the Yarra Valley Municipal Emergency Organisation to support fire fighting operations should widespread outbreaks occur in the region.
Before the organisational arrangements had been perfected, and before the components had had an opportunity of testing the procedures tentatively adopted, another big fire swept down on Warrandyte from the north in March, 1965. On this occasion the Country Fire Authority quickly sent in reinforcements from the Dandenongs and civil defence marshalled its resources behind them. If co-operation between the two organisations was far from perfect, the fact remains that ample water supplies were readily available to fire fighting units at all points, casualties were promptly cared for and refreshments were served to some 400 men. In sharp contrast to the previous occasion only one house and a weekend cottage were lost. It is believed that this was the first occasion in Victoria on which Country Fire Authority units and civil defence undertook a combined operation of this magnitude.
DECADE OF ACHIEVEMENT
TOWN PLANNING
From the early ’fifties persons and organisations concerned with the preservation of the environment and with social and economic patterns began to point out the evil effects that would inevitably result from an indefinite continuance of the existing disorderly expansion of industry and population. In response to the representations of a growing body of concerned and informed opinion, the Victorian Parliament in 1961 brought an old Town and Country Planning Act up to date.
There is nothing new about town planning. Indeed, it has been practised in one form or another since the earliest civilisations, the object generally being a safe and pleasant place to live.
In earlier times it was not so difficult to guide and control the development of cities and towns because populations grew slowly and there was a natural affinity between rural and urban areas. However, the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century caused an unprecedented growth of cities in Great Britain, Western Europe and the United States. If this unexpected and uncontrolled growth brought riches to manufacturers and rentiers, it created living conditions which remain blots on our civilisation and sources of violent social unrest.
In its modern context town planning calls for civic design, the moulding of the various components of a municipality or a region into a harmonious and attractive whole. It requires the determination in advance of development, of the most appropriate pattern for the location of homes, industries, shopping areas, schools, parks and recreational facilities, public and community buildings; the adequate provision of roads, water supply, sewerage, power, public transport and other services.
Under the 1961 Act responsibility for the preparation of planning schemes was placed primarily on municipal councils. The Act also made the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works responsible for the production of a ‘Master Plan’ for the whole of the metropolitan area. Municipalities were required to conduct their planning activities in conformity with the general pattern established by the ‘Master Plan’.
At the municipal level town planning is a prickly problem. Inevitably it brings the Council into collision with many conflicting pressures ranging from speculative land development and powerful commercial enterprise to the protection of the interests of the small property holder, between public welfare
Original office of the Shire of Bulleen about 1875
and private profit. Whatever it does, it is bound to be vociferously opposed by someone. The Doncaster-Templestowe Council faced the problem squarely, and resolved in the public interest to control the development of the municipality in a manner designed to provide the population with a balanced and pleasant environment. The Council gave practical expression to this intention on 7th May, 1964, when it agreed to the appointment of a planning officer.
The Planning Officer was duly appointed in September, 1964, and, in conjunction with the Chairman of the Town Planning Committee, Councillor R. A. Harle, began the task of formulating a comprehensive plan for the orderly and progressive development of the municipality.
Basically the plan divided all land in the municipality into five types of zones — rural, residential, business, industrial and special use. Regulations prescribing the way in which land within each zone may be subdivided or developed were drawn up. Other regulations dealt with flat development, petrol-filling stations, car parking, advertising signs, re-zoning of undeveloped land, land subdivision, tree preservation, roads and building lines. Geqerous provision was made for the acquisition of land for parks and gardens, playing fields and other public purposes.
In December, 1966, the Council, as required by the 1961 Act, submitted its planning scheme to the Town and Country Planning Board in the form of an Interim Development Order. On the recommendation of the Board, the Governor-in-Council approved the scheme on 24th January, 1967, and a Notice to this effect appeared in Government Gazette No. 7 on the following day. Copies of the Notice were published in the ‘Doncaster Mirror’ of 22nd February and in the ‘Age’ of 25th February. Then copies of the Order and its accompanying maps were made available for public inspection at the municipal offices.
When the statutory period for public exhibition had expired, the Council
considered all the objections that had been raised to the scheme and made several modifications. The amended scheme was formally adopted by the Council on 25th September, 1967. The amended Interim Development Order was approved by the Governor-in-Council and a Notice of Approval was published in Government Gazette No. 12 on 13th February, 1968.
One of the most far-sighted provisions of the Doncaster-Templestowe Planning Scheme was the reservation for the development of a public park of about 170 acres on land west of Victoria Street running along the Ruffey Creek valley across Church Street north of McCallum Road, including the adjoining tributaries and catchments. This undulating piece of land lends itself admirably to the development over a period of years of a park which will undoubtedly be a source of much pleasure and pride, not only to local residents but to many thousands of other people as well. At the time of its acquisition it was described by experts in the field as ‘The most imaginative concept of its kind put forward by any Melbourne municipality since the Royal Botanical Gardens were thought of over a century ago’.
TRAFFIC PROBLEMS
While the Doncaster-Templestowe Council and many other municipalities took all possible steps within the limits of their authority to ensure orderly and harmonious growth, little positive action was taking place at higher levels of government. In the area encompassed by the Melbourne ‘Master Plan’ the outer suburbs continued to spread further and further into the countryside, while employment opportunities continued to be concentrated in the inner and central city zones. By 1973 the Melbourne central zone, comprising little more than 10 per cent of the total urban area, contained 64 per cent of the total employment opportunities.
This situation was not accompanied by any significant extension of the public transport facilities connecting the outer suburbs to the inner zone. Consequently the motor car became the normal means of transport, indeed the only practicable means available for an increasingly large number of workers. A survey conducted by the Bureau of Census and Statistics in 1970 shows that in the greater Melbourne area 58.0 per cent of journeys to and from work were made in private cars, 30.9 per cent were made in public transport, and 11.1 per cent by various other means.
For the first years of growth one of Doncaster-Templestowe Council’s chief worries was the provision of private streets to give the motor-borne ratepayers access to their homes. But the solution of one problem contributed to the development of another, an ever increasing volume of motor traffic generated within the municipality. The expansion of the built-up areas had created a requirement for new shopping facilities. This requirement was met in the main by the construction of large shopping complexes on or close to arterial roads. While most of these complexes were intended to serve local needs, the biggest one — ‘Doncaster Shoppingtown’ at the junction of Doncaster and Williamson’s Roads — was designed and strategically placed to attract customers from surrounding suburbs. These developments generated a vast increase in motor traffic on the arterial roads in the municipality. In addition these roads had to accommodate a steadily rising volume of ‘through’ traffic from other areas.
Over the four years from 1964-65 to 1967-68 the Council and the Country Roads Board spent $3,022,616 on arterial roads in the municipality. Over the next five years to 1972-73, before inflation really got going, they spent twice as much — $6,100,474. But the volume of traffic continued to grow faster than the construction of roads to carry it could be financed from these two sources. At the end of 1973 stretches of important arterial roads were quite inadequate for the number of vehicles crowding on to them. In an effort to by-pass the delays caused by bottlenecks, traffic lights and other ‘hazards of the course’ on main roads, motorists took to dodging along the quieter residential side streets. As it developed, this practice led to vociferous protests by irate residents who, having bought into a quiet suburban street, now found themselves, their children and their dogs menaced by hordes of motorists obsessed with the single idea of getting somewhere on time. The side street dodge did not really solve anything, even for the people who practised it. On the contrary, it added to the general congestion because mothers, fearful of their childrens’ safety, took to driving them to and from school and anywhere else they had to go.
Throughout the ’sixties planning by State authorities appears to have been based on the assumption that the solution to the transport problem lay in the provision of bigger and better arterial roads, known as freeways, to enable more and more motor cars to race into the metropolitan central zone.
By 1970 it became abundantly clear that concentration on the privately owned and driven motor car would inevitably result in a repetition of the disastrous overseas experiences in which a similar course of action had not only failed to solve the transportation problem, but had generated another one of major proportions — pollution of the atmosphere. Thoughts began to turn once more to public transport and, among other ideas, revived the old scheme for a Doncaster-City railway. In 1971 the Victorian Parliament passed the Eastern Railway Construction Act authorising the construction of a railway to commence at or near the northern end of the Victoria Park railway station and to terminate at or near the intersection of King Street and Blackburn Road, East Doncaster.
One of these freeways — the ‘Eastern Freeway’ — was planned to start at Hoddle Street, Collingwood, pass through the Yarra Bend National Park, thence by the valley of Koonung Creek along the southern edge of Doncaster and East Doncaster, and thence by the valley of Mullum Mullum Creek to the junction of the Maroondah Highway and Mount Dandenong Road about a mile east of Ringwood. The first stage of this freeway was planned to terminate in Bulleen at Thompsons Road near its junction with Bulleen Road.
Tentative plans provided for the railway to run along the Eastern Freeway to a point where Thompsons Road crosses Koonung Creek. In subsequent discussions before the Parliamentary Public Works Committee, two routes were suggested for the remainder of the line. These routes are shown as Route 1 and Route 2 on Map opposite.
At a sitting of the Committee on 18th September, 1972, Councillor R. A. Harle and the City Engineer, Mr. F. G. Andrew, presented the Doncaster-Templestowe Council’s views on the proposed routes through the municipality. Their evidence showed that Route 1 must have been selected without properly taking into< account the Council’s plans for the Botanical Gardens and other recreational facilities in the Ruffey Creek valley, the Council’s residential plan
Decade of Achievement 79
Holy Trinity Church, Doncaster
or the housing development already taking place. The route would have a deleterious effect on the planned and partially developed residential facilities and would gravely impair the scenic value of the area. Through much of its length it passed through country zoned and already partly developed for low density living where it was unlikely that heavy passenger traffic could be generated.
Route 2 passed generally through the middle of medium density residential areas and had a greater passenger potential than Route 1. It was also more conveniently placed for private car and bus feeder services. However, it would require the demolition of more than a hundred homes and extensive, grade separation at High Street, Church Road, and Victoria, George and King Streets.
In further evidence relating to the two routes the Council’s representatives outlined other deleterious effects either route would have on the established town planning scheme, and on the lives of many residents who had made heavy financial commitments on the assumption that the planning scheme would not be altered or otherwise impaired. The representatives suggested most of the more serious disadvantages would be avoided by carrying the line along Koo-nung Creek to Blackburn Road. If this suggestion could not be accepted, they preferred Route 2 to Route 1.
While the Parliamentary Public Works Committee continued its investigations over the next fifteen months or so public concern about protection of the natural environment, pollution and related matters developed very strongly.
Protests about the routing of proposed freeways through parklands, creek valleys and other open spaces grew in frequency and influence. Doubts were cast on the ultimate value on many of the proposed freeways. A movement favouring the retention of the Koonung and Mullum Mullum Creek valleys in their natural state made its voice heard.
Early in 1974 the Committee had under consideration a proposal to terminate the railway near the south-western corner of the City of Doncaster and Temple-stowe, presumably evolved with the object of cutting the cost. At a sitting held on 6th February, 1974, the Committee sought the Council’s opinion on two alternative sites for the terminus, namely:
(a) At or near a point where the line would meet Balwyn Road.
(b) At or near a point where the line would meet Doncaster Road.
The Council was represented by the Mayor, Councillor R. D. White, and Mr. Andrew. They stressed that so far as Doncaster-Templestowe was concerned there was little to choose between the alternatives. Both were equally disadvantageous in that feeder services, both bus and private car, from the northern, central and eastern sectors of the municipality would necessarily have to travel on roads already overcrowded at peak traffic periods. The traffic problem would be complicated by the fact that all feeder services would be converging upon a single point. Apart from congestion, the heavy increase in motor traffic passing through the most densely populated sections of the city would inevitably result in far greater noise and air pollution with the accompanying danger of lead poisoning.
In pressing for the terminus to be placed near the intersection of King Street and Blackburn Road as originally proposed, the Council’s representatives pointed out under this plan a great many people would live within walking distance of the line and that feeder services could be dispersed to a number of stations. On the other hand, if the line terminated at Balwyn or Doncaster Roads many potential passengers would decline to involve themselves in a traffic snarl twice a day. Further, the Council would be obliged to press most strongly for financial assistance in bringing up to the required standard the roads that would be affected by the increased traffic.
Soon after its election in 1972 the Australian Government led by Mr. Gough Whitlam announced a five year’s public transport improvement program under which it undertook to meet two-thirds of the cost of approved public transport projects. The Victorian Government included the Eastern Railway in its 1973-74 program. The Federal authorities, however, took the view that the submission had failed to demonstrate that the social and economic benefits likely to accrue were commensurate with the cost, and that a thorough investigation had not been made into other modes of public transport.
The Victorian Government then broadened the terms of reference of the Parliamentary Public Works Committee with an instruction to investigate other forms of transport, including a publicly operated bus service, as possible alternatives to the proposed railway. This meant that the Committee had to begin collecting much additional technical information and fresh evidence from organisations and individuals concerned. In September, 1974, the Committee was still engaged in its enquiries.
HISTORICAL RESEARCH
As a contribution to the functions and activities organised to mark the elevation of the municipality to the status of a City in 1967, a group of Doncaster residents undertook to mount an historical display in the stone cottage in which Pastor Schramm once conducted his school. In the course of collecting objects for the display it was found that information and records about the early days of settlement were not readily available. Family records that still existed were in danger of being lost or inadvertently destroyed. It was also found that much valuable historical material, diaries, family records and other documents, had been collected during the 1930’s. They were being suitably arranged and indexed at the South Warrandyte State School and were destroyed when the building was burnt in the 1939 bush fire.
As a result of discussions between members of the group organising the Schramm’s Cottage display, the Doncaster and Templestowe Historical Society was founded in May, 1967, with Mr. Frank Rogan as its first President, The aims of the Society were research with the object of developing a source of reliable historical information about the district, and the preservation of historic aspects of the environment.
At that time Schramm’s Cottage stood on its original site in the grounds of the municipal offices. It was historically important because in several ways it was characteristic of the early days of settlement. It was built of materials found
in the district, chiefly of stone quarried and hand-dressed locally. It was the home of a man whose learning and sagacity influenced important aspects of early development, and it was the building in which many district children received their only formal education.
In 1970 it became clear that Schramm’s Cottage would have to be demolished to make way for the widening of Doncaster Road. The Historical Society moved energetically to save the building from destruction. Since there was no alternative to the new road alignment, they resolutely faced the task, formidable in relation to their resources, of systematically dismantling the building and reerecting it on another site.
Dismantling began with voluntary labour on 17th April, 1971, and the materials were moved by the Council to the site once occupied by the original Lutheran Church in Victoria Street. In the three years that have elapsed the building has been re-erected with financial assistance from the Council and the State and Australian Governments. At the same time another old building on the site has been reconditioned to house the Society’s archives and artefacts.
While many people have worked untiringly to further the Society’s aims, most of the essential administrative effort has fallen on Councillor Muriel Green. The attractive format and much of the contents of the Society’s Newsletter derives from the artistic skill and patient research of her husband, Mr. Irvine Green.
WARRANDYTE STATE PARK
During the nineteen-sixties there developed a general public awareness of the necessity to protect the natural environment against the indiscriminate destruction and ruthless exploitation that had obtained in Australia since the early days of settlement. The Doncaster-Templestowe Council gave practical expression to this rising public concern in its town planning scheme, particularly in its acquisition of the Ruffey Creek area. That was about the limit its financial resources permitted.
Movements directed to the conservation of the Yarra Valley between War-randyte and the Banksia Street Bridge developed strongly in the three municipalities with frontages along this stretch of the river, Doncaster-Templestowe, Eltham and Heidelberg. The Doncaster-Templestowe Conservation Society took a prominent part in the movement.
In and around the township of Warrandyte there were several public reserves with a total area of some 300 acres. In addition there were parcels of Crown Lands totalling about 500 acres. With the exception of the Warrandyte Recreation Ground already laid out with sporting facilities, most of these areas were more or less in their natural state.
Local conservationists began to talk, perhaps a little wistfully, about the possibility of combining these public lands into a State Park under the control of a single authority.
The prospects were not bright. Of the six public reserves, four were in Doncaster-Templestowe, one in Eltham and one partly in Doncaster-Templestowe and partly in Lilydale. Some were controlled by committees of management, some were directly controlled by municipal councils. Some of the Crown Lands not classified as public reserves were under the control of the Lands
REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT
As settlement expanded from the original landing points during the first sixty years of Australian colonisation, it seemed likely that numerous substantial towns and provincial centres would develop as they had in other parts of the world in similar circumstances. However, the achievement of self government by the Australian colonies soon checked this natural and socially desirable tendency. From the beginning of their existence until the second half of this century, centralism was one of the most marked characteristics of State Governments.
Doncaster township in 1905 with Council offices in the foreground
Nowhere was centralism more actively pursued than in Victoria. The railway system, the arterial roads net, the concentration of political power, public administration and commercial interests all favoured and fostered the growth of Melbourne at the expense of the embryo provincial centres. As the city grew, so did its power of attraction increase at a rate which rose in proportion to the decline in the demand for farm labour brought about by mechanisation. Country people moved to Melbourne in search of employment in factories, offices and shops. They had nowhere else to go.
As the rural population declined so did the financial resources of the country municipalities. Indeed, the resources of all municipalities, both urban and rural.
fell steadily behind the growing demand for a greater range of community facilities. In the first half of the century ratepayers expected their municipal councils to provide little more than roads, footpaths, a few playing fields and some minor administrative services. However, as the population expanded and living standards improved, people began to demand a far greater range of services, public libraries, health services and recreational facilities of all kinds. Having no direct access to national loan funds, the municipalities were dependent for financial assistance on hand-outs the Victorian Government might choose to give them.
The very rapid post war expansion of the capital cities, however, did draw attention to the economic and social evils flowing from an excessive concentration of the population in one monstrous city. Decentralisation and the means of achieving it began to receive serious consideration in State and Federal Parliaments. For years the Australian Government, while talking a lot about the desirability of decentralisation, maintained that its implementation was strictly a State responsibility. At length, apparently realising that the States now lacked the resources to do anything much themselves even if they had the will, the Australian Government led by Mr. William McMahon in 1972 took a positive step by setting up a ‘National Urban and Regional Development Authority’ to advise on the financial assistance that should be given to States in support of specific proposals for the development of regional and sub-metropolitan centres. In the elections a few weeks later the McMahon Government was defeated and the Labour Government led by Mr. Gough Whitlam assumed office.
The Whitlam Government saw the solution in an extension of the role and a strengthening of the financial resources of municipal government, the level of government most closely in touch with the needs of the people and the level at which the citizen could most directly participate in decision-making. They saw regional development as an important means of achieving equality of living standards generally as between regions throughout the nation.
Accordingly, the Australian Government took three steps which could have revolutionary effects in the sphere of local or municipal government. Firstly they established the Department of Urban and Regional Development to foster regional development, planning and growth in consonance with the broad national objective of providing equality of access to the services and facilities required by modern communities.
Secondly they replaced the Grants Commission Act of 1933, which functioned only at State level, with a new Act that empowered the Commission to make grants direct to Local Government bodies. These would be ‘equalisation’ grants to municipalities based on differences in revenue-raising capacity and differences in expenditure needs. These grants would be unconditional, they would not be tied to any specific project or activity. At the same time they inaugurated a broadly-based program whereby regions and municipalities could obtain financial assistance for the development of approved community projects and facilities.
Thirdly they established the Australian Assistance Plan to assist the development and co-ordination at a regional level of the welfare services shown by experience to be necessary in our form of society. The plan promoted the formation of Regional Councils for Social Development. Financial assistance would be made available to these councils on the basis of $2 per capita per local
government area. Grants could be spent at the discretion of the Regional Council for Social Development on any or all of an approved range of services.
One of the first tasks of the Department of Urban and Regional Development was to plan, in conjunction with State governments, the grouping of municipalities into regions. As a result of these discussions, Doncaster-Temple-stowe was grouped with the Cities of Box Hill, Camberwell, Hawthorn and Kew in Region 15 Inner Eastern Melbourne.
On 25th February, 1974, representatives of the municipal councils in Region 15 met at the Civic Centre, Camberwell, and set up an Interim Regional Committee with the Mayor of Doncaster-Templestowe, Councillor R. D. White, as Chairman and his Town Clerk, Mr. J. W. Thomson as Secretary.
The immediate concern of the Interim Committee was to collect, collate and forward the bids of the constituent municipalities for equalisation grants. The many people who were sceptical of the whole scheme were agreeably surprised when on 24th August, the first list of grants to Victorian municipalities was issued. Doncaster-Templestowe was awarded $225,000 of the $422,000 granted to Region 15.
With their first task accomplished, the municipal representatives turned their attention to future development. To this end they adopted a simple constitution and appointed a Regional Committee comprising two councillors from each municipality, and an Advisory Committee of professional municipal officers. Councillor R. D. White of Doncaster-Templestowe was elected Chairman, and Mr. J. W. Thomson was appointed Secretary.
Concurrently with these events, action was taken to set up the Regional
Council for Social Development to promote within the region the aims of the Australian Assistance Plan. A public meeting held at Camberwell on 12th June, 1974, was attended by representatives of the municipal councils and of organisations concerned with welfare in Region 15. Officers from government departments attended to advise the delegates on details of the Assistance Plan. The meeting agreed generally with the aims set out in the plan but decided that more information was required before fixing the composition of the proposed council. Accordingly, the meeting set up a steering committee to investigate all relevant aspects of the concept, to receive submissions from individuals, organisations, municipal councils and government departments, and to report their findings and recommendations to a public meeting to be held not later than 31st October.
Doncaster-Templestowe was represented on the steering committee by Councillor R. D. White, Council representative; Councillor I. R. Marsden, organisations in the Warrandyte Ward; Mrs. Dawn Phillips, East Doncaster Methodist Church; Mr. R. Reynolds, Doncaster and Templestowe Inter-Church Council; Mr. R. F. Brawn, Doncaster and Templestowe Credit Co-operative.
Direct Commonwealth financial assistance to municipalities and the welding of municipalities into regions are new departures in the Australian experience. How these innovations fared and the effects they had on the lives of the people will, no doubt, be recorded by some historian of the future.
Municipal Swimming Centre, Williamsons Road
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT
The City of Doncaster and Templestowe may be said to have developed in five stages. First there was the settlement of the Bulleen and Templestowe river flats which began in 1838-39 and was virtually complete by 1851. The second phase, approximately from 1851 to i860, saw the discovery of gold at Warrandyte and the conquest of the high, heavily-timbered country around Doncaster, East Doncaster and Templestowe. The period i860 to 1900 was one of economic transition in which grain and vegetable cropping gave way to fruit growing and dairy farming. Phase four, beginning about the turn of the century, saw the rise of the fruit growing industry to its peak years of production from 1933 to 1938. Production steadied about this point for some years, then began to decline with increasing steepness as the tentacles of suburbia reached eastwards from the old metropolitan fringes. Phase five, the conversion of the greater part of the municipality from a rural to an urban character, is still in progress.
The pioneers who crossed the seas from Great Britain and Europe and settled in the municipality were not ambitious men inspired by dreams of wealth and grandeur. It probably never crossed their minds that they were among the founding fathers of a new nation. They aimed simply to make modest homes for themselves and to live in peace with their neighbours.
Drawn from countries with different traditions and ancient rivalries, they might easily have settled into a pattern of national groups. Yet from the beginning friendliness, tolerance and mutual respect became characteristic of the community. Although initially national groups did tend to settle separately, they were always ready to help each other in various ways and assimilation by marriage began at an early stage.
In the fullness of time the seeds of co-operation sown and nurtured by the first settlers blossomed into the commercial co-operatives which contributed so much to the development and success of the fruit growing industry.
From the establishment of the first Roads Board to the present day, Doncaster-Templestowe has been fortunate in the calibre of the men and women who gave so freely of their time and talents in the sphere of community leadership in all aspects. In religion, in social intercourse, in commercial co-operation and in local government, this community has been served by men and women of judgement, tolerance and foresight. They have met each successive challenge with a creditable measure of success.
The issues facing the community today present a challenge as formidable as any encountered during its first one hundred years. If some of the issues of the past were difficult, most of them were uncomplicated. What had to be done could usually be seen; the problem was to provide the means. Social values and structures seemed to be fixed as immutably as the laws of the Medes and the Persians.
At the beginning of our second century the old guide lines are changing dramatically. New concepts of human values and relationships are generating pressures for the rectification of social disabilities and injustices largely ignored in the past. Concurrently, massive immigration and the rapid, totally unplanned expansion of the metropolis, have created areas of what John Kenneth Galbraith aptly calls “private affluence and public squalor”.
These pressures have called into question the existing allocation of responsibilities between the established organs of public administration, federal, state and municipal. Whatever the outcome of this debate may be, municipal councils — the grass roots element in public administration — are beset with the pressing problem of providing the services and facilities required by modern, civilised communities.
The municipality has always produced the leadership to steer the community through difficult times. There is no reason to suppose that leadership will fail in the face of the new challenge which, of its very nature, is the most crucial they have yet encountered. Taking inspiration from its past, the community may face its future with confidence and serenity.
Bookmobile of the Doncaster/Templestowe and Box Hill Regional Library Service
'LIBRARY*

General Statistics 1973-1974
Area of City 8942 hectares
No. of Rate Assessments 26,733 No. on Voters’ Rolls 44,892
Rate Revenue 1973-74 $3>358>885
Unimproved Capital Value $161,371,624
Capital Improved Value $40,708,994 
Population of City 74*536
No. of Dwellings 20,510
Flats 334
Shops 494
Farms 386
Industries 66
Service Stations 43
Schools 34
RECREATIONAL FACILITIES:
(a) On Council Property
Public Open Space approximately
800 acres
Outdoor 8c Indoor Heated Swimming Pools 8c Diving
Pools 2
Playing Ovals J3
Cricket Pitches 27
Tennis Courts 45
Archery Club 1
ROADS
Main Roads:
7 miles asphaltic concrete and sheet
asphalt 21 miles tar or bitumen Nil unformed or not constructed
Bowling Club 1
Basketball Courts 12
Pony Clubs 3
Basketball Stadium 1
(b) On other Property
Golf Links 2
Bowling Clubs 2
Swimming Pools 6
School Sports Fields 9
Other Sports Grounds 1
OTHER ROADS
Private Streets, Council Streets, etc.
143 miles asphaltic concrete 66 miles tar or bitumen 7 miles gravel or sand 86 miles formed but not made 15 miles unconstructed
28 miles total
317 miles total
Box Hill-Doncaster Regional Library Service:
Overall Book Stock 98,000
Mobile Van Book Stock 15,000
Issues (year) approx. 650,000
M. J. McKenzie Library
Montgomery St., Doncaster East. Issues (year) 192,000
Building Approvals 1973-74
No. of Dwellings Value of Buildings Permits Issued
741
$33>ii7,°9°
2,748
City Finance
SUMMARY OF PROPOSED EXPENDITURE Roads, Streets, Footpaths, Bridges, ^ 1973-74 Proportion 1974-75 Proportion
Drainage, Traffic Lights and \ $ % $ %
Crossings J 602,499 H 697.639 12
Council Properties 789.755 18 1,166,420 21
Health Services 481,060 11 574-77° 10
Maternal and Child Welfare 323,150 8 352.°87 6
Loan Repayments and Interest 487,30° 11 521,373 9
Other works and services 648,975 *5 897,100 16
Grants and Contributions 339,606 8 431,888 8
Miscellaneous and Transfers 44,150 1 85,650 2
Administration 570,500 14 916,250 16
$4,286,995 100% $5,643,177 100%
Electricity Supply:
Operating $3,300,000 $3,848,000
Capital Works 550,000 565,000
$3,850,000 $4,413,000
Loan Works Allocation: !973-74 1974-75
General $740,000 $800,000
Private Streets — —
Electric Supply 360,000 400,000
$1,100,000 $1,200,000
Population by Age Groups—1971 Census
Percentage
6- 9 years ........................... 18,075 28
10-19 „   9,984 16
20 -39 „   9,480 15
3° -39 »   11.634 18
40 - 49 »   7.596 12
50-59 »   4.io6 6
60-69 „   2,107 3
70 plus   1,294 2
64,286
Warrandyte bridge in 1974

M. J. McKenzie Library, East Doncaster

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
1788 Under the command of Governor Phillip, the ‘First Fleet’ arrives at Botany Bay and establishes the first European settlement in Australia. 1803 Colonel Collins, with a party of soldiers, settlers and convicts is sent by the Governor of New South Wales to occupy Port Phillip. Collins lands at Sorrento, finds the land unproductive and water scarce, and moves on to Tasmania.
1824 New South Wales constituted a Crown Colony and an Executive Council formed.
The explorers Hume and Hovell march overland from Sydney to Corio Bay and return.
1825 Tasmania separated from New South Wales and made separate colony on 14 June.
1826 Governor of New South Wales sends a second expedition to occupy Port Phillip. The party lands at Western Port by mistake and finds the place unsuitable for settlement.
1827 Western Australia annexed to British Crown.
1828 The settlement at Western Port abandoned.
1834 Edward Henty crosses Bass Strait from Tasmania and establishes a settlement at Portland.
John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner lead privately sponsored expeditions from Tasmania and establish settlements on the River Yarra.
1836 The Governor of New South Wales approves settlement in the Port Phillip area.
South Australia proclaimed a British Colony on 28 December.
1837 The Port Phillip settlement is named ‘Melbourne’ and the town site laid out by the surveyor Robert Hoddle.
1838 The brothers J. and W. Wood establish a cattle station on the Bulleen flats.
1839 James Anderson establishes a cattle station on Anderson’s Creek near its junction with the Yarra.
Major Charles Newman establishes a sheep station on flats between Anderson’s Creek and Templestowe.
1840-41 Settlers begin to establish farms in the Bulleen and Templestowe areas. 1842 First religious service (Presbyterian) in the municipality held in Alexander Duncan’s barn in Bulleen Road.
1843 Selby, Dawson and Mitchell establish Warrandyte Station.
1847 First school in the municipality established near the Heidelberg bridge.
1851 1 July — Port Phillip district separated from New South Wales and constituted the Colony of Victoria.
July 3 — Louis Michel and William Habberlin find gold on Anderson's Creek.
August 18 — Reverend Messrs. Gregory and Cheyne conduct the first public religious service in the municipality at Anderson's Creek. September 1 — First gold miner’s licences in Victoria issued at Anderson’s Creek.
1852 Settlement of the higher ground around Doncaster and South Warrandyte begins. Templestowe proclaimed a village on 23 September.
1853 District Roads Boards established in Victoria.
1855 March 10 — Public meeting in Upper Yarra Hotel formed a company to build a bridge over the Yarra between Templestowe and Eltham. July — Mr. Clement Hodgkinson surveys the township of Warrandyte. November — Bridge between Templestowe and Eltham opened. Warrandyte Cricket Club formed. Victorian Constitution Act proclaimed (23 Nov.).
1856 September 19 — Templestowe Road District proclaimed.
December 8 — First Templestowe Road Board elected.
First school at Warrandyte opened.
1^857 January — First public auction of Warrandyte town lots.
August 1 — Warrandyte Post Office opened.
1858 First Lutheran Church built in Victoria Street, Doncaster. i860 May 17 — Doncaster Post Office opened.
July 1 —Templestowe Post Office opened.
1863 Church of Christ in Doncaster built.
Disastrous Yarra floods.
1864 Templestowe Cricket Club formed.
1866 Methodist Church in East Doncaster built.
1869 Holy Trinity Church of England, Doncaster, built.
1870 First Anglican Church in Warrandyte opened.
1871 Athenaeum Hall, Doncaster, opened.
1873 Warrandyte Riding transferred from Upper Yarra to Templestowe Road District.
1875 May 1—Shire of Bulleen proclaimed.
July 1—First Council of the Shire of Bulleen elected.
1876 State School, Doncaster, established.
1877 State School, Warrandyte, established.
1882 Melbourne-Lilydale railway opened. East Doncaster State School established.
1888 Captain Selby introduced trout into the Yarra at Warrandyte.
1889 Box Hill-Doncaster electric tramway opened for traffic.
1890 Doncaster Riding severs from Shire of Bulleen and becomes Shire of
Doncaster. Remainder of municipality renamed the Shire of Templestowe.
Warrandyte Mechanics' Institute built.
1892 Doncaster Fruitgrowers’ Association formed.
1895 First Presbyterian Church in Templestowe built.
1896 Box Hill-Doncaster electric tramway closed down.
1901 Commonwealth of Australia proclaimed 1 January.
1905 Government Cool Store opened in Doncaster.
1906 South Warrandyte State School established.
1907 St. Gerard’s Roman Catholic Church, Warrandyte, built.
1911 West Doncaster Cool Store built. (First co-operative cool store in Victoria.)
1913 First street lighting in municipality installed at Doncaster. (Three kerosene and three carbide lamps.)
1914 World War 1 began on 4 August.
1915 Shire of Templestowe reunited to Shire of Doncaster, 1 October.
1916 First electric light and power in municipality switched on at Doncaster. First conscription referendum defeated.
1918 World War 1 ended 11 November.
1922 Electric light and power carried through Templestowe district.
Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works provides water reticulation at Doncaster.
1926 Municipality renamed the Shire of Doncaster and Templestowe.
Park Orchards area subdivided.
1927 Transfer of Seat of Australian Government from Melbourne to Canberra.
1929 Beginning of the Great Depression.
1930 Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works provided water reticulation in Templestowe.
1934 Disastrous Yarra floods cause much damage in Warrandyte and Templestowe.

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