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Stand on Doncaster hill to-day; look north to the mountains and south to the sea; the red weed of suburbia creeps over the slopes once pink and white with orchard blossoms. Within 10 years, this quiet rural hamlet, cradle of the Victorian fruit industry, has dis- solved with the effervescence of change into the State’s newest city (Doncaster and Templestowe, as one, were so proclaimed on February 28), with a population of 38,000 and a birth- rate double that of the Australian metropolitan average. The army of bulldozers carving up Victoria’s history with its hillsides leaves only bituminous scars bearing names such as Thiele Street, Petty’s Lane and Serpell’s Road as memorials to those who planted an empire in fruit and harvested it from an unwilling countryside. Doncaster, a day’s walk from the Melbourne markets, has grown fruit continuously since 1853, 30 years ahead of other areas. In 1853 there was no bridge across the nar- row but steep-banked Koonung Creek, which marks the boundary of the city, but Gottlieb Thiele somehow got his bullocks safely across it, and their load of household goods, food, hens, flail, vegetable and fruit seedlings. With him was his wife Phillipina and little Os- wald and Adelaide; their cow trudged behind, unconcerned. They had left civilisation five miles behind at Kew, then a sprawling market garden village. Ten acres of virgin bush be- fore them was theirs. Gottlieb had paid £lOO for it, and hoped he had done the right thing. Still, it was a good country, a free country, where a man could worship as his soul dictated. In the five years since they had left their native Breslau to escape the religious regimentation of a militant Prussia, the Thieles had been grateful for this freedom. Gottlieb, a tailor, had become established in Melbourne’s Bourke Street, under the patron- age of Governor La Trobe, but his doctor had urged him out of the cutting room. He mused now on the irony of it; anyone who could negotiate this stump-riddled track to the Anderson’s Creek diggings, now Warrandyte (which vied with Clunes in producing Victoria’s first gold), needed to be in the peak of health. As Gottlieb paused for breath half way up the steep hill, he saw Thomas Petty’s tent down At the top of the page is a composite photograph taken from the Doncaster tower, now demolished, which shows the orderly rural pattern of the district. Below it, in a recent aerial photograph, the old shire hall, built in 1892, is the only identifiable landmark. by the creek. Phillipina hoped this would mean a woman’s company for her. Thomas Petty was more suited to weaving a tent than living in one. A slump in the cotton industry had sent him from his birthplace, Brad- ford, England. With his son Henry he had once gone to Germany to teach new weaving methods to her craftsmen. During the next 100 years, his sons and grandsons would become leaders of a new industry in a new land. Hard- working, straight as the stringybarks under which Thomas now camped, and with the ingenuity of which legend is made, it was inevitable for them. Now he and Henry batched in their tent and prepared a livelihood and a home for his wife Jane and four little ones, still in England. The map Gottlieb had showed various estates and boundaries, but not the density of un-axe trees and tangled scrub through which they still had to push. Oswald, a bright lad, helpe his father plot the way. He would one day teach the boy whose name was given to Victorias second University, Monash; would see his own son a professor and knighted (Sir Edmun Teal); and would see his yet unborn brothers recognised as leading authorities on fruit m Australia.
Before the bush would give them a living, it would make them a home. Wattles were felled and stringybark stripped for roofing. The same spades that broke clay for the plaster daub of the first huts turned the soil for the first plantings. In place of the pushed back bush, the gardeners, as they were then called, planted as windbreaks the pines which have become an integral part of the Doncaster scene. Creeks were life to those orchard pioneers, the Koonung, Ruffey’s, the Mullum Mullum and Deep Creek. They gave easily-worked stone for the first solid houses. In them the women did the family wash and from them carted bucketfuls of water to the struggling rows of potatoes, vegetables, grapes, raspberries and gooseberries in the narrow clearings, until house wells could be dug. Every gallon had to do the work of 10. It was not uncommon for women to carry water more than a mile from the creeks to their homes. In the 1850’s Melbourne could get little fresh fruit except berry fruits. Two acres, even in the established market gardens of Richmond, was a large commercial concern. The whole agricultural process was one of trial and error and knowledge of soils. The soil on Doncaster’s hillsides was found too shallow for vegetables. Grapes, raspberries, strawberries and goose- berries seemed more favoured. Quick-bearing soft fruits were “early money”. While waiting for a harvest, the men loaded their bullock-drays with firewood from cleared thickets, and received 4d. to 1/ld. a hundred- weight for it at Kew and Melbourne. By the time they returned their wives and children had chopped the next load. The women threshed grain from their wheat patch, baked bread from their own flour. Once a week they set off on foot for the Kew market with bundles of eggs, home-made butter and cream, potatoes and vegetables. Sometimes, hastened on by the rigours of these expeditions, an unexpected bundle was carried home to add to the tiny population. Richard Serpell, who had lived for a while with his wife and family at Glenferrie, bought an American plough for £6, 40 acres at Don- caster for £8 an acre and walked regularly to his block clearing, cutting, planting. In his diary of June, 1854, he referred to a “number of Germans residing to the west of us”. The Germans had been guided to their countryman Gottlieb by a German immigrants’ centre in Melbourne. Young 17-year-old Reinold Deh- nert was one. He hewed 22 acres of vineyard from virgin forest, became the uncrowned “pear king” and lived to more than 100 years. In the first big wave of neighbours in 1855 was James Read. He carried precious cuttings from Hawthorn which became the first fruit trees at Templestowe, on the edge of the even- tual orchard belt. Thomas Petty had now built a “two-storeyed” house on the hill, and had written proudly to Jane to come. The children, Tom, Elizabeth, George Thomas and John, had walked all the way from Sandridge (now Port Melbourne) and were excited at the prospect of seeing their father after two years. But they ran in tears from the bearded, sunburnt man who hurried down the hill to greet them. They thought he was a blackfellow. Jane glanced past the little stone cottage with a rope ladder leading to its attic and looked for her two-storeyed house. Then she realised THIS was it. She cried every night for three weeks, like most of the women at first; not because of the hardships, but because of the strangeness, of animal noises at night in the bush, and of imagined unfriendly black people, although few had been seen in this area. Later, with pioneering pride Jane boasted the first wooden floors in the district. When Thomas was killed in an accident 22 years later, she farmed their 47 acres on her own. Gottlieb’s house was now sturdy and com- fortable, too, with internal doors (a feature then absent from many others) and a flower garden planned by his friend Baron von Mueller, who became the first director of Melbourne s Botanic Gardens. Phillipina did Gottlieb the honour of bearing the first white child in the district, a son, Frederick. There were no doctors or midwives. Like the men, the women helped each other through Gottlieb Thiele (top) and Richard Serpell snr. (above) were two outstanding pioneers. their crises. Each had a small herb garden, and ground home medications with pestle and mortar. The Lutherans were the first to build a church there, in 1858. Around it, on Waldau Hill, they laid out a cemetery, beautified by Baron Mueller’s gift of cypress pines and shrubs. The church fostered the budding com- munity spirit, from which the orchard empire was to grow, and its bell tolled at dawn, noon and dusk to mark the time for everyone. From 1856, Victoria was increasingly pro- viding her own agricultural needs, and Don- caster’s gardens grew. Richard Serpell noted that he had planted 108 fruit trees, 112 vines, 59 currant and 66 gooseberry bushes.
The Doncaster Tower (above) was an early landmark of the district. Built in 1878 and demolished in 1914, it was flanked by the Tower Hotel. All the pioneer families of the district were represented in this 1904 picture of a pruning competition (below).
PIONEERING PEACHES AND PEARS
Government of 1858, anxious to encourage production, was considering bringing an Eng- lish farmer to teach inexperienced settlers. “No,” said Sydney Ricardo; “the land is different, the climate different, the soil is different. Methods must be different too.” Ricardo knew. Settled in Templestowe flats, he had seen his tomato gardens flooded out. He had seen the failures and triumphs of his neighbours in the hills with their fruit. He had been a member of their district roads board before they elected him to Parliament. He persuaded the Government to help in establishing an experimental farm. The nurseries of J. C., H. U. and T. C. Cole of Burnley, who developed the Blenheim orange and founded the Royal Horticultural Society of Victoria, received a grant. H. U. Cole later taught Frederick Thiele, Don- caster’s firstborn, how to grow fruit profitably. Frederick and his young brother Alfred even- tually became leading Australian authorities on fruit, and their peaches and pears household words. The ’6o’s were an important decade in the “empire’s” expansion. Many of the first settlers children had intermarried and had started their own market gardens. Others came across the newly-built bridge to join them. Peaches and other fruit trees began to bear well. Tom Petty was one who shared Frederick’s enthusiasm for fruit trees. When others said that too much was grown to be sold profitably, he planted more and encouraged sceptics to do likewise. If Tom hadn’t been a farmer, he would have been a time and motion man. To save the long haul by hand from berry bush to packing shed he invented a sled. He’d been thought “uppish” driving the district’s first spring cart to market. But not until he could save the backbreaking heave to get the load on to it was he satisfied. A lower axle, lower shafts, and Tom set a new fashion with his low-slung “jingle”. No other district had thought of it. The formation of the Department of Agri- culture in 1870, and the fruit, flower and vege- table shows in the Melbourne Town Hall helped along the infant industry. In 1873 wax models of Victorian fruit were sent to the Vienna Exhibition, and fresh Doncaster fruit later had considerable success at the Botanical Conference at Florence. Commercial export now seemed an exciting possibility. Lemons and thick-skinned oranges began to appear on the hillsides. Cherries, peaches, pears and plums sold well. Apples, taking 10 years to bear, came later. The new stone fruits, ripening in sequence, had to be got to market quickly. To avoid losses, cool holes were dug in the hillsides and in them fruit was stored in straw. But grapes and gooseberries were still the main products. Mending gooseberry-pickers’ gloves was an inescapable chore for the women; even on her wedding night, John Petty's bride sat up late mending the day’s holes ready for the next morning’s work. By the 1880’s, the Doncaster district headed all Victoria in output of fruit. Tom Petty, Alfred Thiele and Richard Serpell, in 1882, became the first in Australia to export pears successfully to England. In 1887 the shire (then called Bulleen) had 1,378 acres of orchard, 91 acres of garden and 45 acres of vines. Land prices had risen to £56 an acre. But outsiders who came to admire the countryside and speculate on its future, tramped all over the carefully tended land and helped themselves to fruit. Diseases came, too. Diphtheria became prevalent and typhoid took many lives because city dwellers habitually dumped their night-soil in the fruit-growing areas. Diphtheria wiped out whole families. Weeping par- ents returned from digging the grave of one child to find another dead in bed. Forty-four adults and 72 children were buried in the little cemetery before it was closed in 1888. When the value of manure to the soil was realised its collection became almost an obses sion. For years Doncaster virtually li vec * 011 horse manure. No one who took wood or produce to market came home with an empty dray; it was loaded with manure. Water was still a problem, especially for t e groves of lemons. Sometimes in summer e creeks dried up. The resourceful men of Doncaster began to edge up every hollow on hillsides above their crops, and gouge out mo dams. To galvanised pipes from the w joined hoses which reached to the trees. ra filled holes dug around the trees prevents hardening.
Moving the iron pipe from row to row was a perpetual after-school activity for the children. Aching little hands would have appreciated modern portable aluminium piping. The forerunners of to-day’s “soakits” were made by East Doncaster men who cut small holes in their hoses for a drip system of irrigation. When drought withered the leaves and fruit elsewhere, to the loss of two years’ crops, Don- caster’s thriving orchards aroused the curiosity of the authorities. “See Fred Thiele’s orchard,” Tom Petty told the Premier. “It’s like an Eden. He’ll tell you why.” Frederick explained the local system, obediently made a map of all dams and depressions in the district for the Government, and paved the way for irrigation in the State’s northern districts. When steam pumps became available dams were built in hollows. For his 40-acre lemon orchard W. Sydney Williams and his bullocks built the biggest yet seen. Sydney had come from Pembrokeshire, Wales, in 1853, as a lad of 19 with 4/6d. in his pocket. Every orchard- ist in Doncaster helped at some time during the two years it took to build the two-acre dam. Twenty-two feet deep, it held 22 million gallons of water. Once the wall broke, the welled-up creek flooded Sydney’s land and they had to start again. As a sideline, Sydney grew and marketed water lilies. This was 1891. The Pettys were still inventing. Herbert, son of George, made a new type of plough which is still sold. Thomas Lawford of West Doncaster patented a one-way disc. Phylloxera, an insect pest, wiped out all the State’s grapes, including Doncaster’s, in the 1890’s. From then on vines were completely replaced by fruit trees.
Sadly, this house, dating from the 1880’s, was demolished in 1958. Wreckers found shingles under the corrugated iron roof. Doncaster orchard- ists pioneered the use of sprays (right) in treating fruit pests. Fruit growers en- joyed interstate conferences like this one in Adelaide early in the century (below). Thomas Petty (above) was one of the founding fathers of Victoria’s fruit industry. His wife Jane (below) helped him build a thriving orchard. The Petty family were both inventors and imitators. This low-slung “jingle ” saved fruit-pickers much time and back-ache. Alfred Thiele, who now drove the first motor car in the district, became first president of the Victorian Central Fruitgrowing Association. In 1909 Tom Petty and Frederick Thiele were the moving spirits in getting fruit inspected at interstate points of entry, to detect fruit disease. Tom and his son-in-law, engineer Jack Rus- sell, had just invented the first motor spray pump. Doncaster’s children, who, before and after school had had to pump manual spray handles monotonously, would now have time to collect the destructive grey root beetle, for which the council paid them a penny a hundred. The experiment of a few Doncaster orchardists of storing fruit at the Melbourne Glaciarium an ice rink ushered in the refrigerated cool store era. Tom Petty suggested building a refrigerated store at Doncaster, and he approached the Premier, Sir Thomas Bent, about it. The first Government cool store was sub- sequently built in West Doncaster in 1908. The first co-operative cool store in Australia was built three years later by orchardists who tired of official red tape that wasted time in deliver- ing and collecting their fruit. It stored 36,000 cases for its 36 grower-shareholders. Late last year it was demolished. Empty shelves had borne witness to subdivided orchards. Soon after the cool chamber development, local growers bought refrigerated space in a meat ship, and became the first to export fruit under refrigeration. The 1930’s saw the peak of the expanding orchard empire. So enormous was the amount of dessert peaches and pears grown in this decade that, in 1931, the Southern Victorian Pear Packing Company (now the Blue Moon Co-operative Trading Company) was formed to organise and standardise export to the United Kingdom. But the more the orchards prospered, the closer they moved towards extinction. The more desirable the district became for others to live in the less it could remain rural. In the 1940’s and ’so’s began the trickle of suburban houses that grew to the present flood. New ratings helped erosion and decline. Classified and valued now as residential land, rates of a typical 36-acre orchard rose from £69 to £609. Land tax rose from nothing to £485 and four years later doubled. Merely to keep the land as a family orchard cost many £l,000 a year. Orchardists sold up. They subdivided. The trees were uprooted and burnt in great pyres on their empty beds. Of the remaining 179 orchards in the City of Doncaster and Templestowe, many are being worked by the fifth generation “gardeners’. But even they agree with the Department of Agriculture spokesman that “Doncaster as an orchard area is finished”. Doncaster’s new wave of suburbanites will be reminded of their city’s beginnings by Gottlieb’s home, “Friedensruhe” (rest in peace), which has been classified by the National Trust as worthy of being preserved. Six acres of the land first cleared by him, down by Ruffeys Creek, has been given by his descendants to the people of Doncaster as the nucleus of a botanical parkland, already tentatively cal e “Pioneer Park”. Overlooking it lies the small, fenced graveyard on Waldau Hill, where bare mounds beneath the cypresses rise and fall e small waves on a sea of memory.
Source: Walkabout - Australian Geographical Society. & Australian National Publicity Association. & Australian National Travel Association. 1934, Walkabout http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-566923190. Call Number. Nq 919.4 WAL. Created/Published. Melbourne : Australian National Travel Association, 1934-1978. Issue. Vol. 33 No. 7 (1 July 1967). Images. 60. Notes: Some loss of text in gutter due to page edges stitched into gutter at binding process. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-751962419/view?partId=nla.obj-751973219#page/n29/mode/1up
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