150 1984-04-24 ByWays DoncasterMirror
From clay band to Numphawading
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
24/4/84
by Joan Seppings Webster
BOX HILL used to be Nunawading, Nunawading used to be Tunstall... anyone from this district who travelled back in a time machine would need a municipal history before asking directions.
A street directory even fifty years old would be no help. Street names as well as district names have had a habit of changing about.
Pottery
Tunstall, the district south of the Koonung Creek and east of Box Hill, was so named because a band of clay there was found to be similar to that in Tunstall, Staffordshire, England, which was perfect for making pottery.
A clay pit was worked there from 1853.
Tunstall Road, East Doncaster, led to Tunstall. Tunstall Square took its name from the road.
The name Nunawad-ing was originally Num-phawading, an aboriginal word meaning ceremonial ground or battlefield.
Doncaster used to be known as Vermont, before Robert Wilson named his hotel the Doncaster Arms, after his birthplace in England, in 1854.
Vermont was called ""L. L. Vale", because of the initials of its parliamentary representative, L. L. Smith MLA.
Croydon was called Warrandyte.
Before 1856 , the name Warrandyte referred to the whole area from Anderson's Creek to what is now Croydon. In 1882 the Warrandyte railway station opened at what is now the Croydon station, and the adjacent post office named Warrnadyte Railway Station Post Office.
There was also a Warrandyte Post office at Warrnadyte (as we know it now).
Merger
When the Shire of Nunawading, which is now the city of Box Hill, was proclaimed in 1872, it tried to persuade the Templestowe Roads Board (now the city of Doncaster and Templestowe) to merge with it.
In 1875 the Shire of bullen (now Templestowe Ward of our city) did amalgamate with Nunawading (Box Hill), to form the United Shire of Nunawading.
But this lasted only three months.
Mitcham used to be called New Brunswick.
Springvale Road, which links Doncaster to Box Hill, was known as Crossman's Road.
Forest
The Mullum-Mullum Creek, which runs through Donvale, and forms part of the boundary of what was
the Nunawading Roads District, later Nunawading Shire, later city of Box Hill, was called Deep Creek.
The Koonung Creek, which divides Doncaster from Box Hill and east Doncaster- from Blackburn, was known as Kennedy's Creek. The Dandenong Creek formed part of the boundary of the original Roads Board area of Nunawading (Box Hill).
And to cap it all, Templestowe was once known as Dandenong. Thomas Chivers, one of Templestowe's
first born, had it written on his baptismal certificate that his father's home was in the "forest near Dandenong."
151 1984-05-29 ByWays DoncasterMirror
KOONARRA
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
29/5/84 by Joan Seppings Webster.
IN 1967, the municipality of Doncaster and Templestowe very nearly had its name changed to Koonarra. That was the year the (then) Shire became a city. While preparing to polish up the old brass nameplate "Doncaster and Templestowe" for the new title, someone suggested a new-look name was also needed. The arguments that followed were like those of a family in dispute over naming a baby. Doncaster wanted "City of Doncaster." Templestowe wanted "City of Templestowe."
Bulleen, the first municipal name, was suggested, but this was felt to be old fashioned.
Then came inspiration. Koonarra, the brainchild of compromise, was suggested... a name to immortalise the ancestral borders, the Koonung Creek and Yarra River.
Like relatives before the christening, ratepayers' feelings ran high, indignation seethed, polls and petitions were gathered and everyone had their say.
The first council vote on the naming was deadlocked. But the casting vote of the (then) Shire President, Stan Shepherd, was for Koonarra.
A resident, Mrs L. Hutchins of East Doncaster, telephoned the Minister for Local Government to ask that the naming be deferred until a referendum was held on the matter. A postal referendum was considered.
The Doncaster East Riding Community Development Association conducted its own postal referendum amongst 398 residents and of these, 367 were against Koonarra.
A telephone poll conducted by a local news-paper found 90 percent of people contemptuous of the proposed new name. Some of the reasons were: "No-one will know where it is." "We'll have to explain where we live." "It has no meaning." "It's a silly, made-up name." Asked what they thought of the name, many asked back: "What's that?" The few who approved Koonarra did so with reservations: "It's not so. bad, I suppose." "Worse things can happen." Some said they would prefer to pay rates at the Doncaster Town Hall rather than the Koonarra Town Hall.
In spite of public feeling, the Shire President pushed for Koonarra. Twice, in council, Templestowe and Warrandyte councillors voted for Koonarra, twice East and West Doncaster's councillors voted against it, twice voting was deadlocked, and twice the President (a Warrandyte councillor) settled the matter "once and for all," with his casting vote for the new name.
The significance of the name Doncaster and its wide recognition was eloquently put forward by Cr Les Cameron, descendant of local pioneers. Doncaster was noted for its towers. Doncaster had the first electric tram in the southern hemisphere. Doncaster built the first Government Cool Store. Doncaster still exported its fruit products, acclaimed throughout the world for their quality and keeping characteristics. Doncaster apples were known as such whether they were grown in Doncaster, Templestowe or Warrandyte. So, by inference, should its people.
The people, led by East Doncaster Councillor Russell Hardidge, collected 2434 signatures on a petition and presented this to council and the Minister for Local Government.
It was November, 1966. The proclamation of the city (and its name) was set for February 28, 1967.
The clock struck, the offical pen wrote, and with no time left for counter-petitions, the old "Doncaster and Templestowe" dies were recast.
Medals for school children could at last be struck, letterheads printed and invitations issued for the
"city celebrations." Guests would know where they were going, and ratepayers where they lived.
Maybe if no time limit had been set, some other monikers mooted might have succeeded. We might have lived in Donwarrenstowe or Templedytecaster.
152 1984-06-05 ByWays DoncasterMirror
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
5/6/84 END OF THE ROAD
by Joan Seppings Webster
AT the turn of the century, the intersection of Doncaster and Blackburn Roads, marked "the end of the road." On one corner stood the primitive Methodist Church, then a small, one- oomed building, and opposite it, on the south-west corner, was a blacksmith's smithy. East beyond this point were only rough tracks, and a few huts.
Escaped criminals are said to have hidden out in the surrounding bush.
The land was poor. It was much better in the west of Doncaster, where there were some alluvial deposits. Those who tried to cultivate land in East Doncaster did not fare so well as those in Doncaster. Some failed to make a living at all from it.
The intersection of Doncaster-Micham-Old Warrandyte Roads became known as "Starvation
Corner," and one story goes that an old couple who tried to farm here, starved to death.
A map of 1844 shows Templestowe "moderately timbered with gum, oak and honeysuckle. Good soil;" Doncaster "moderately timbered with gum and oak, good soil," and East Don- caster and Donvale "thickly wooded, stringbark and box." The south of East Doncaster was labelled "Stringbark Ranges." This is how East Doncasterites came to be known as "stringbarkers." Soils below stringy bark trees are typically poor.
There were no shops then at East Doncaster Junction, and no shops at Tunstall Square.
153 1984-06-12 ByWays DoncasterMirror
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
June 12 1984
by Joan Seppings Webster
Our forbears last ??? 60-70 ???? - women in ???? longer today. ???? time has ???? to nearly ???a 35 hour week. ???? The march ???? doesn't ???? forward. We ???? think that time???? automatically???? quality of life ???? step by step ???? the procession of various "revolutions" which culminate in the technological revolution of the 20th century.
If "Progress" is measured by working hours or forebears were certainly worse off than us in their daily routine. But ancient ancestors were better off. And so were the Aboriginals on to whom Europeans foisted the so-called benefits of civilisation.
Hunter-gatherers of over 10,000 years ago worked only a 19-hour week. This is the conclusion of noted anthropologist Richard Leakey.
He has found that hunter-gatherer societies of today work only a 19-hour week, and spend the rest of the time socialising.
They spent less time sharpening stone axes and more time sharpening up communication skills, learning how to win friends and infleunce people, understanding themselves, others, their environment, life- and being more happy and less aggressive.
Today, with more leisure time, there is less communication time. Not only TV and video, but hor-rendous amounts of school homework build walls between the minds of family members. Walls of indifference. Barriers to understanding and em-pathy, tolerance and kindness.
Sundays are as busy as any other day, buzzing about on trips, each group separated from the other in its capsule. Shut off insulted from the lives of others and becoming more and more insular.
Women of today are still "gatherers" for their society. They still collect the food. But as transport for the 19th century pioneers was mostly shank's pony, a shopping trip then, though work, was also a social ac-tivity. Walking meant one went to shop nearwhere one lived, and where those who lived in your vicinty also went.
The market place was a social place, where you met those you knew. Today, a shopping trip by car is expanded over many sub-urbs, suburbs which were once separate townships, and over all that area covered, a woman may not meet a soul she knows to whom to say "hello."
Where a walking shopping trip is possible today, there is not the socialising oppor-tunity of yesteryear. En route, the gardens will be empty of potential chatters, the kitchens not forthcoming of a friendly cuppa to break the erstwhile heavy-laden home journey. Chats and cuppas may not have helped the economic turnover, but they did oil the wheels of social culture.
The human is a social animal. Sociability led our homonoid roots to send out shoots towards homo sapiens. What are the "benefits of civilisation" if they undermine our humanness?
154 1984-06-19 ByWays DoncasterMirror
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
19/6/84
by Joan Seppings Webster
DONCASTER Hill, the most pronounced hilltop in this municipality, and the gateway to the city, was once under the sea.
A small whale-shaped area east of Williamson's Rd. and over both sides of Doncaster Rd. to just before Church Rd., is the only sandy, gravelly soil within the city. The rest is clay.
Between 35 and 50 million years ago when that land had already been low lying for about a further 35 million years, the seas rose. Sandy marine sediments were laid down, which became gravel.
At the time, it wasn't only the Doncaster Hill (Shoppingtown) area which was under the sea.
The continents were not of the shape by which we know them today. When the sands of Doncaster Hill were deposited, the true carnivores such as mice and squirrels, the mastadons, the archaic monkeys and erect apes had begun to ap- pear, along with the first flowering plants.
Then, about four million years ago, when the first one-toed horse evolved, when the land bridge rose between the Americas and transitional pre-human primates may have used stone tools, the land which was to become the city of Doncaster and Temple- stowe also rose. Streams cut through the exposed land, the sands eroded away and remained only on some hill-tops.
So that hilltop along which most of us drive frequently, is very special geologically.
Who knows what fossils may be buried beneath the bitumen?
Later, about one million years ago, at about the timel of the emergence of stone age humans in the last Glacial period, volcanic activity along the Kew, Northcote, Preston, Bun-doora line sent lava flows which dammed the Old Yar-ra River at Kew. This slowed the flow of the river's water and created meanders.
Alluvial deposits up to 12 feet thick were created along the Yarra Valley and in the shallow valleys of its the Koonung, Ruffey and tributary streams such as Mullum- Mullum Creeks.
When quarries were made along Ruffey's Creek in the early days of settlement in the 1850s, the alluvial soil was discovered and carted to the orchards.
In the municipal gardens there is a sunken track running east and west from about the SEC transmission line to Victoria St. This was a right-of-way which gave access from Victoria St. (then called Bismark St.) to the quarries.
155 1984-06-26 ByWays DoncasterMirror
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
26/6/84
by Joan Seppings Webster
THE stone of which many Doncaster buildings are made is older than the hills older than the hills from which it was quarried.
The hilly landscape as we know it, rounded hills sixty metres above broad, shallow valley floors made their last uplifting about 15 million years ago and weathered and eroded between that time, through the last Ice Age of 25,000 years ago to this time. But the attractive stone is 350 million years old.
Its colors were added 15 to 35 million years ago at the last folding up of the mountains, when tronstone. from earlier sand sediments ran red bands through the weathering mudstone mantle. A good example can be seen in the Victoria Street cutting near the Old Lutheran Cemetery and Schramm's Cottage.
Most of this municipality's topography was carved out of this 350 million year old Silurian mudstone and sandstone. (The exception is the top of Doncaster Hill, which is sand). They formed from sediments deposited on a deep sea bed, when the main life forms were crablike creatures, invertebrates.
It was a time, roughly half way through an era of 300 million years, which was marked by a rhythm of ups and downs, of alternating submergences and emergences of land, the Palaeozoic Era. (The Silurian Era, during which our stone was laid down, was named after a Welsh tribe the Silures, which gave much trouble to the Romans during the occupation of Britian). The climate during this time was very
mild.
The first quarry to extract the Silurian mudstone was opened up in the 1850s, mainly to build houses. It can be seen in the municipal gardens, immediately west of Church Rd. In the 1860s
and 1870s the rock was used for roadmaking, but was found to be too soft, and the quarry was abandoned. This is called the Western Quar-ry.
In 1930 it was reopened to rebuild the chancel of Holy Trinity Church of England in Church St. The stone used for the main building in 1869 is believed to have come from another quarry near the
corner of Church Rd. and George St. Another quarry was dug west of Church Rd.
About 100 million years after this Silurian stone was formed, earth movements folded the rocks into slopes about 12 km apart with minor folds within the major folds. These were high peaks weathered down to a plateau and deep valleys which which, with another violent upheaval, tilted the region
towards the southern coastline, 200 to 150 million years ago.
There's been some changes around here and those mottled stones have seen them all.
156 1984-08-18 ByWays DoncasterMirror
Pioneers had a nursing crisis
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
14/8/84
by Joan Seppings Webster
BY 1880, our city had had state education for a few years and a first-rate library.
People could catch a train from Box Hill to Melbourne. But if they were ill, it was self-help.
Melbourne had a hospital from 1848, but no trained nurses until after 1880.
For 120 years, the skilled hands of trained nurses quietly touched their way into all contours of the land: hospital and home, outback and industry.
Europe's hospitals evolved from priories, Australia's from prisons.
From the First Fleet, Australia's hospitals were built on the convict system, for convicts, and managed in the military style by government-appointed surgeons.
"Nurses" were jailers, trusty convicts and later, convalescent male patients and "dirty, frowsy-looking old women, slatternly untidy young ones, all greasy with their hair down their back."
Protege
This was what Florence Nightingale's star protege, Lucy Osburn, found when she arrived in Sydney in 1868 to reform the hospital nursing system. Five years later she had transformed patient care, raised the status of nurses, and obliterated menial "ser-vant" tasks from their duties.
Her "determination, moderation and wisdom," said Sir William Windeyer, QC, brought about a Royal Commission into the administration of charitable institutions. Sir William condemned the old hospital system, and Miss Osburn was given the green light to proceed unhindered with the Nightingale system.
Sparks from the Nightingale lamp spread through the colony like a bushfire, razing tangled undergrowths of mismanagement, cauter-izing apathy and self-interest of authorities, clearing the ground for a new science.
Before Lucy Osburn, "the Lady Nurse from Leeds" and her five Nightingale nurses, Australian hospital patients were frequently locked in at night and left. Medical treatment see-sawed between blood letting and the daily issue of porter. Hygiene was a dirty word.
Patients had lain for weeks without even hands or faces washed because, Lucy found, "the doctors said they were not to be disturbed."
Suffering
When she engaged laundry women, and the bed linen could be changed, patients had to be lifted on to a different bed, as the one in which they had lain rotted away, the mattresses often just the shape of the patient's body from head to foot.
Most doctors had done little to alleviate the hour by hour suffering and degradation of their
patients. Hospital committee members, half-drunk at times, wandered in and out of wards shutting the windows which the Nightingale nurses had opened for ventilation.
Convalescing patients snatched food from the dying. They cooked their food in the ward. Noise and "pranks" were such that the chaos was like bedlam. One day, above the stench of infected wounds and vermin- infested woodwork and the open drains which ran beneath the floors, the smell of singed wool and roasting flesh floated.
In the middle of the ward, "well" patients danced gleefully around a pyre. They were roasting the body of a just dead Solomon Islander.
The only hospitals were for the indigent. Most ill people stayed at home, terrified of being sent to hospital. The sick rich prayed for kindly friends: and the poor, for a quick release to heaven.
(Continued next week.)
157 1984-08-21 ByWays DoncasterMirror
Nurses cleaned the wards
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
21/8/84
by Joan Seppings Webster
Continued from last week:
LOCAL news in 1868 was the laying of the foundation stone of Holy Trinity Church of England. Interstate news, our people would have read,
were headlines that foretold the laying of a new system of care and comfort for the sick. Nightingale nurses had arrived in Sydney, and the Press raved that they were "trained, not only to nurse, but to teach."
Some doctors came to appreciate the benefits to both patient and themselves. Others jealously tried to keep the nurses at the level of servants.
The board of The Sydney Infirmary, which had accepted the new nurses as an experiment, appointed a layman as manager to superintend accounts and servants. And there started the split-status of the nursing profession, perpetuated today, and the root of much of to- day's industrial dispute.
Extremely jealous of the Nightingales' position Superintendent John Blackstone paid the cleaners, and would not al- low them to take orders from the nursing sisters. Proper patient care and thorough reform could only come after a thorough
cleaning of the bug- infested hospital. Blackstone would not al-low the cleaners to do it. It was against Florence Nightingale's principles for her lady nurses to waste their talents on these tasks, but because of Blackstone, the servants would only clean the wards as a special favour to the new sisters. So to get done what needed to be done, they had to do it themselves.
The original nurse women worked in miserable conditions. They slept in cubicles at the end of wards, merely screened from the patients' beds.
"My first endeavour was to reform that crying abuse," Lucy wrote to Florence Nightingale.
Miserable
She found them a dormitory with four-poster beds, wash stands and looking glasses, taught them how to do their hair and to be personally clean, and put them in uniforms - white caps, aprons and lilac dresses- the recognised Australian nurses' uniform until very recent years.
Within six months of this change, the hospital had "a creditable staff of neatly dressed women, cheerful and willing to work, obedient and docile in receiving instruction."
Lucy Osburn began lectures, and the other sisters taught in the wards.
But ward administration was still chaotic. Doctors refused to discuss treatment or write orders. Officials stamped and raged at nurses before their patients until they cried.
The two resident doctors hated Lucy Osburn and tried every trick to be rid of her intrusion. They laid formal charges of interference with treatment against her to the board when a patient was given a medicine they had discontinued.
But Lucy Osburn was a great opportunist. She turned the trap to advantage by using it to explain that the Nightingale system was for the doctor to "express his wishes" to the sister, who in turn took responsibility for telling the nurses and in no way was a doctor to go direct to the untrained nurses.
Politics and religion both came into the nursing controversy. Henry Parkes had invited the Nightingales and "was like a father" to them. James Martin was "bent on squashing improvements at the hospital."
Sisters were a "Popish plot," because of their title and because they wore veils.
Miss Osburn investigated by a Select Committee, on charges of Bible Burning (torn old books infested with lice) and accused of murdering a patient.
But by 1870, the hospital's annual report boasted one colonial-trained nurse, 18 nurses, and six probationers, as well as a housekeeper and 12 servants for 159 patients.
Fractures
It reported "a marked improvement in the condition of the patients due to the introduction of the new system."
By 1873, her nurses "set fractures and put in sutures." That was two years before the Shire of Bulleen was born. A Royal Commission into Miss Osburn's work gave the green light to systematic nurse training.
The idea caught on that patient welfare increased in direct ratio to the skill of the nurse attendant and, though many doctors still condemned training nurses as "a dangerous practice," hospitals all over the country applied for Lucy Osburn's trainees. She did a "roaring trade" in private nurses.
Haldane Turriff, Miss Osburn's most senior Nightingale, became first: matron of Melbourne's Alfred Hospital in 1871, and began Victoria's first school of systematic nursing in 1880. After this, a family could hire a trained live-in nurse to care for a very ill member.
Lucy Osburn died in Harrogate, England, nursing in the slums of London, and left a legacy of 700 pounds to the daughter of Sir William Windeyer, whose high praise at the end of the Royal Commission in 1873 had meant the turning point in her work, and the turning point in Australian nursing up till today. It meant a changed attitude to health for families.
'Free' hospital service
for subscribers only
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
28/8/84
by Joan Seppings Webster
FEW of our city's pioneers were ever like-ly to have been to hospital.
Itinerant workers and gold diggers, poor and without a home, may have been. For many years, the Melbourne Hospital was the only one in the colony, and it was too far away from Doncaster. Orchardists would have a doctor call at home.
Superintendent La-Trobe bolstered the small grant the first Melbourne Hospital received from the New South Wales colonial government by handing to the hospital finances the fines from drunkards and straying cattle.
If that idea could be transposed today to the fines from over .05 motor car drivers, and straying cars which cause accidents, the hospital care-cost crisis might resolve itself naturally.
But, in 1839, before Melbourne had a public hospital, it had the motto of the first sickness benefit society, the Union Benefit Society: "United to Relieve, Not Combined to Injure."
Membership was restricted tomen aged 17 and 37. Women were expected to have a man subscribe for them. Men in safe jobs paid 2 pounds and sixpence on the second Monday of each month; those in dangerous jobs such as gunpowder millers paid three shillings. A surgeon's salary was maintained by society members -one shilling a quarter, in advance. This surgeon would make house calls.
For a woman to be admitted to the Lying-in Hospital (forerunner to the Melbourne Women's Hospital) she had to be approved as worthy by the ladies' committee.
These ladies would go through the tents and hovels where the poor mothers-to-be lived, demanding to see their marriage lines. No husband, no hospital benefit.
But most women were confined at home by a midwife. Around the turn of the century, the local midwife was a Mrs Hakins. (I would like to hear from readers who have had handed down to them, stories of local midwives, local "nurse- women" and of problems of obtaining medical help in pioneering days.)
In 1876, if a stranger to Melbourne struggled ill along to the Melbourne Hospital, he would first be asked: "Where's your ticket?" It was supposed to be a free hospital, but was only free to subscribers, or those recommended by a sub-scriber.
The alone and ailing hospital porter to first find person being told by the his subscriber, wouldn't know where to look for one. Luckier listless ones pub or big store, to ask the management for the use of a subscriber's card.
But, even armed with this, each patient had first to "pass the committee” before being passed on to a doctor. The trials of our jaundiced Job had only just started. His precious card was of little prac-ticality unless someone had also warned him to bring his own empty bottle for medicine.
The doctor might prescribe medicine. The dispensary might make up. the prescription. But the patient could not carry it home without his bottle.
Outside the hospital door, an old Irish woman reaped her own hospital; benefit, selling pre-loved bottles for sixpence.
159 1984-09-04 ByWays DoncasterMirror
Land boom changes face of Doncaster
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
4/9/84 by Joan Seppings Webster
"WHEN we remember Doncaster in the early fifties without a road, a fence or a house, just a dense forest, beautifully undulating, but with no running streams and rather poor soil, and compare it now with its comfortable,
commodious, well-kept homes, fine orchards and flower gardens, we feel we must admire and always honor the men and women who by their energy, industry and thrift made this district such a striking example of independent effort."
John Tully was referring to the 1850s when he wrote this in 1934.
Settlers came in 1854 to 1860, when there was a land boom and the Carlton Estate was subdivided into 20-acre blocks. Between six and ten pounds an acre was paid.
In the next land boom in the mid-1880s, blocks were sold at between 200 and 400 pounds an acre and the first building block subdivisions were made on Main Rd. for up to six pounds a foot.
John Tully wrote of the early pioneers: "Their in-itial activity was to carve out a space in the timber on which to erect their humble homes."
"Practically the whole of the district was heavily timbered with stringybark, messmate, appletree, yellow, grey and red box, peppermint, wattle, white gum and a few she-oaks."
"As many as 80 loads of wood a day left the district, drawn by one-, two-, three-horse teams carrying up to three tons...most of which found its way to the Fitzroy wood. market, for fourpence to one shilling and one pence a cwt.
"Kew was then a half- way resting place for man and beast."
"The evenings were enlivened by the rattle of returning drays and the singing voices of the drivers, for they were a happy band, such favorites as "Annie Laurie," "Ben Bolt," "Kathleen Mavourneen," "Little Brown Jug" and "Bonnie Moon" being popular songs of the period.
"Among the noted songsters were Edwin Wilson (Wilsons Rd., Melways Map 47 B2), H. Crouch, F." Smedley and L. Holden."
Now all we hear of returning drivers is the pounding pandeinonium of peak-hour traffic, the car stereo has taken the
place of happy voices and the "beautifully dulating"" contours of the countryside sheathed in bitumen.
Even its spirit, its magnificent view, as precious to Doncaster as the sea to any beachside suburb, is to be screened from the people by high-rise building development.
160 1984-09-18 ByWays DoncasterMirror
Ghostly rider haunts road to homestead
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
18/9/84
by JOAN SEPPINGS WEBSTER
ARE there ghosts in Homestead Rd.Templestowe?
Homestead Rd. was the track to the homestead of Templestowe's first settler and extensive landowner, Major Charles Newman.
This was his second homestead, Monkton, built in the 1850s and demolished in 1968, his first being Pontville, built further east by the Mul-lum Mullum Creek on a line with Blackburn Rd.
This was built in the early 1840s and still stands.
Alongside the track to Monkton homestead, now Homestead Rd., the Newman family members were buried in their private cemetry. This practice was common in the early days.
When the land was subdivided into orchard blocks of up to 20 acres each in 1906, authorities ordered the graves to be transferred to the Templestowe cemetry.
But were they?
The story goes that the contractors did not bother to dig up the remains and remove them to the cemetry,
says Mrs Hazel Poulter of Templestowe.
"My father told me that only the tombstones and iron railings were removed from the Newman family cemetry graves."
The bluestone base for the tombstones were still visible on their original site until the 1930s, she says.
Mrs Poulter's family of James and Harriet Morrison bought Monkton in 1908, with 13 acres of land, for a holiday home.
It was said that the ghosts of Major Newman rode a white horse around the property at night.
Maybe the sad ghost of his son, Thomas, walks on moonlight nights, longing for his lost love.
Thomas had been his father's acknowledged heir, affirmed in the major's will of 1860. But then Tom fell in love with Victoria Webb.
Major Newman had an enmity for her father, John Webb. He altered his will to stipulate that if Thomas married Victoria, or any daughter of John Webb, he was to be disinherited and Thomas's sister Mary Anne Newman was to have the property.
Tom Newman defied his father and married Vic-toria. But they had only a few short years of hap- piness together. In 1869, he"
died, leaving a distraught and destitute Victoria, with two little daughters. He was buried in the Monkton family cemetery.
Mary Anne Newman was a compassionate woman. She allowed Victoria and the little girls to live at Monkton.
Newmans Rd., the south-western extension of Monkton Rd., was the southern boundary of some of his 10,000 acres.
25/9/84
Pioneer records first history
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
by JOAN SEPPINGS WEBSTER
JOHN Tully, whose name is on J. J. Tully Drive, which leads to Schramms Reserve and the Doncaster Bowling Club behind the municipal offices (Melways map 33 F12), published the first history of Doncaster.
Mr Tully wrote, in 1934, that the first name given to the district was Vermont, but was changed to Doncaster about 1852 on the suggestion of Wil- liam B. Burnley, who in 1847 bought the land bounded by Doncaster, Elgar and Blackburn Rds. to the Koonung Creek, and had come from Doncaster, England.
When John Tully wrote his history, the boundary of Doncaster started "at the Koonung Creek bridge on Main Rd. (border now with North Balwyn) up High St. to Ayr St., thence north to Manningham Rd., east along that road to Williamsons Rd., north along that road to dividing fence between S. Crouch and Thos. Williamson, east along that fence to Church Rd.,
thence north along that road to dividing fence between P. Cashen and W. Jenkins, north along that fence to Reynolds Rd:, east along that road to Andersons. Creek Rd., thence norther-ly along that road to Deep Creek,
then up that creek to southerly boundary of Allotment 138A, along that boundry to Mitcham Rd., along that road. northerly to dividing fence between F. Thiele and F. Corbett, south along that fence to Corbett's south boundary, thence westerly to Koonung Creek, along that creek westerly to starting point at bridge."
Deep Creek has since been renamed as part of Templestowe and Donvale comes into the eastern boundary.
John Tully snr. was born in Doncaster in 1864, four years after his father Thomas, an Irishman, had built a modest home north east of the junction, Doncaster Williamsons Rds.
As an orchardist and a councillor, he contributed much to the fruit growing industry, and to the social development of his community.
Thomas was among the earliest local growers who saw their economic future in fruit, rather than vines or vegetable berries. His fruit was in the first shipment of refrigerated fruit sent to England, in 1882, along with Tom Pet-ty, Alfred Thiele and Richard Serpell.
In 1914, orchardist selected John Tully to investigate methods of handling fruit at British and European ports and markets... His talks with importers, and report to the growers led to many improvements both to orchardists and overseas' importers.
He was one of the first directors of the Blue Moon Fruit Co-operative Limited, which was formed in 1931 and operated in Railway Rd., Blackburn, until recently.
He was elected as a councillor for the newly formed Shire of Doncaster, old. He was three times in 1890, when only 26 years old. Shire president, and served the council for three terms of varying length until 1922.
He was 70 when he wrote his history of Doncaster.
162 1984-10-02 ByWays DoncasterMirror
2/10/84
Kangaroo tracks guided workers in early industry
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
by JOAN SEPPINGS WEBSTER
OUR city's municipal gardens, called grandly the Botanical Gardens were originally to have been named the Ruffey Creek Municipal Gardens, after the creek which runs through them.
But the name of the brothers for whom the creek was christened was not Ruffey. It was Raffey. Mis-spelling by Assistant Surveyor William Wedge in 1837. caused it to be in-correctly marked on maps and the mistake has been perpetuated for 150 years.
The five Raffey brothers had a cattle station between Koonung Creek and the Yarra River, just east of the present Yarra Valley Country Club.
It was one of three such cattle runs in the area They were among the first white persons to make use of the district, but cannot be called settlers, as they simply ran cattle through the bushland.
The brothers had another cattle-grazing run along the Merri Creek at the same time. By 1841, they moved their stock away to Cranbourne. This was the year Unwin bought 5,120 acres between the Koonung Creek and Templestowe, the first man to hold title to the land.
After the cattle came the sawmillers and charcoal burners. Charcoal was at the time the only fuel which would give enough heat for the working of iron, and was much in demand by blacksmiths. Charcoal was obtained from the residue of burnt timber.
In the municipal gardens, on a slope about midway between the north and south boundaries of the park, and just east of Church Rd. (where it used to be called Strip Rd.), was a charcoal burner's site.
A little south of this, where the creek forked east to Church Rd. and south to what is now McCallum Rd., was a ford used by those who needed to travel to or from Melbourne or Kew and Warrandyte. It was then part of the main trunk road. route, called the east-west trunk road.
People such as sawmil-later settlers and miners lers, charcoal-burners and who travelled from Melbourne Town through Hawthorn and passed Kew, crossed the Yarra River on a flat bottomed punt and moved along this east-west trunk road, the first part of which is now known as Doncaster Rd.
At North Balwyn, it forked towards Templestowe. At Williamson's Rd. (then known as Ferguson's Rd.), it again branched off, this and the remnants of this time towards Warrandyte, branch can be seen in the park on the east side of the old ford.
The tracks were glorified by the name ""road."" They were so rough that bullock wagon was the only method of transport. By standing in the park, about 200 yards downstream of Church Rd. a district dip on the land shows where the old bullock wagon track went.
Just west of this, other side of the old ford, is the remains of a quarry.
(Sawmillers are credited with having laid the route for what later became our main roads. But the saw- millers were no surveyors; they only followed kangaroo tracks. Ridge Roads such as Doncaster Rd. were kangaroo tracks.)
Early settlers, whose cultivated land became the park, were the families of Thiele, Crouch, Williamson and Pullen. Crops grown there were first berries, vines, wheat and later fruit peaches, apples, cherries, nectarines, pears, plums, quinces, oranges and lemons. The site of the park was still being used as orchard or pasture in 1974.
When Doncaster-Templestowe Council passed the resolution to create the park in 1966 it was proposed that its design be based on the theme of orchard plantations, with color and blossom in all seasons.
163 1984-08-23 ByWays DoncasterMirror
German people make new life
23/8/84
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
by JOAN SEPPINGS WEBSTER
THE brick homestead at 50-52 Serpells Rd. was built in 1886 by Friedrick Schuhkraft, a first generation Australian of German descent.
Fred Schuhkraft was born on his father's orchard, which was at the level of King St., at the northern end of, and to the east of, Victoria St. At that time, Serpells Rd. did not exist.
Schuhkraft senior, Gottfried, had come from Mutenberg and at first lived in what is now Camberwell. There he married Maria Fankhauser, who had migrated from the Austrian Tyrol in 1849 to escape religious persecution. The Austrian Emperor Francis 1 (1792- 1835), and his successor, the feeble-minded Ferdinand, tried to sup-press all political freedom and in 1848 almost every class and nationality un-der rule of that monarchy broke into revolution.
Austrians had the choice of becoming Roman Catholics or leaving the country as exiles. Maria Fankhauser was in a group of 400 who were so banished from their native land.
On marriage, she and Gottfried settled at East Doncaster, on the King St.-Reynolds Rd. property.
When he was 24, Fred Schuhkraft married Mesina, the eldest daughter of Reinhold Denhert, the "pear king." The Denherts lived on an orchard on the south side of what is now George St., about one third of the way between Victoria St. and Blackburn Rd., near where the Waldau Primary school is now, by Denhert St.
By this time, 1885, Serpells Rd. had been cut through from Williamson's Rd., east on an angle, subdividing the land into irregular shaped blocks. Fred Schuhkraft bought one of these and on it began to build his dream home (see previous article). In 1908, he sold up and moved to Croydon.
The house was bought a few years later by the Rasmussen family, who finally completed Fred Schuhkraft's dream.
Niels Rasmussen, a Dane from Karebek near Copenhagen was a farmer turned sailor who reverted again to farming when he disembarked
at Melbourne in 1884 and found farm labouring work in East Doncaster with German families. He carted bricks for Fred Schuhkraft, little knowing then that he was helping to build the home of his unborn son Charles.
When Niels married Emily Jane Hunter of Doncaster Rd., step-daughter of Patrick D'Arcy, they rented an orchard in King St., but were sold up of all their personal possessions by the bailiff when they could not pay the rent.
They tried again near Ruffey's Creek, in Church Rd., with packing cases for chairs and straw for bedding and made good.
By 1903, Niels Rasmussen not only owned his own orchard, but also rented the former Schuhkraft property.
Nearly 20 years later, his son Charles took his bride Alfrieda Aumann, from Warrandyte, to the house on Serpells Rd., enlarged it, and completed it as its original builder had intended.
164 1984-10-30 ByWays DoncasterMirror
30/10/84
Boggy roads to Shire Hall awaiting rail line
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
by JOAN SEPPINGS-WEBSTER
ON the site of the Old Shire Hall, in Council St., was planted the first seed of civilisation: in Doncaster.
There, in 1852, what is believed to have been the first building structure in the district, was erected. It was a bark hut, built as a home by Bill Thompson.
On this high ridge track to the Anderson's Creek diggings (Warrandyte), Bill's bark hut was said by a folk-historian of 1916, Thomas Robinson, to have been the only house between Richmond and Bulleen. Bulleen was the name of the whole Parish as far east as Springvale Rd.
When the Shire of Doncaster Hall was built there in 1892, this site was expected to be the centre of a busy railway terminus township.
A railway to Doncaster has been held to the nose of Doncaster development, like a carrot, since 1888.
When plans for the Shire Hall were being considered, the railway was expected to come from Box Hill and end at the top of Doncaster Hill. In 1926, it was expected to come from Kew, and end "opposite the Shire Hall,"
Local government began in our municipality in 1856, with the Temple-stowe Roads Board, which governed Templestowe, Doncaster and Doncaster East until 1875, when the area was declared a shire, and chose the name "Shire of Bulleen." The two ridings of Templestowe and Doncaster were administered from Templestowe.
In 1890, the Doncaster Riding committed an Act of Severance, and in 1892 was proclaimed the Shire of Doncaster. From the moment of severance, there was much discussion and dissension about the location of the new seat of local government, and whether it could be afforded at all, with most roads still muddy bogs.
The management of the newly built Athenaeum Hall boosted its rental for a while by renting a room for council meetings. Richard Serpell, the man in middle of so much of Doncaster's development.
and a landowner of a variety of properties, was also generous and community-minded. He offered choices of blocks of land on which to build a Shire Hall.
The East Doncaster ratepayers, though doubtless pleased at being spared the cost of the land, would rather have had any money spent on making travelling to the hall from their end of the Shire made easier.
Doncaster Rd., east of Church St., was almost impassable in wet weather. Otherwise, build the hall in the east, they said.
But the councillors, with their vision splendid, opted for a site "close to the future railway station." How could they know that for a century, routes of railway proposals would snake will-o-wisp- like across the hills and valleys, never to settle at rest?
The Shire Hall was intended to be an imposing building, with planned additions to its "phase one" which would make the entrance from Don-caster Rd. But the building boom burst, and it was never extended.
From 1915, the whole Shire, first still called the Shire of Doncaster but from 1926 called the Shire of Doncaster and Temple-stowe, was administered from Council St., until the forerunner of the present municipal offices was built in 1957.
The site has another historical twist. In 1860 a wooden Baptist Church was built there, Grant's Chapel, but was moved in 1864, to the south side of Doncaster Rd.
165 1984-11-06 ByWays DoncasterMirror
6/11/84
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
by JOAN SEPPINGS-WEBSTER
THE OLD house with elegant bay windows and wide verandas at the corner of Atkinson and Clarke Sts., Templestowe, was designed by the same architect who planned the
Exhibition Buildings, Melbourne Town Hall and Wesley, Scots and Independent churches of Melbourne.
The house is classified by the National Trust, as are nearly a score of other buildings by this architect.
The family for whom Joseph Reed created the house, moved to it from a crowded cottage which had evolved from a red gum and bark hut.
This was the Smith home, built for James and Eliza Smith in 1890. It is constructed of imitation- stone board. There are even "cornerstones" made of thick timber to look realistically staunch.
Its style is described by architectural experts as "elegant, with well proportioned panels placed under windows and on doors and chimneys. Chimney wind-baffles have a motif which repeats that of the elaborate cast iron decorations along the veranda."
The house has six main rooms divided by a centre passage.
The rooms have high ceilings profusely decorated with plaster mouldings. A special feature is a built-in sideboard which has a waterfall painted on it.
James Smith's elder brothers had also living to palatial homes. progressed from primitive
One was well known "Ben Nevis" near the corner of Bulleen and Thompsons Rd.
They had preceeded James and the rest of the family to Australia, having migrated in 1854.
When they saw the opportunities to better themselves, they did what many present-day migrants do, and wrote home urging the family to come.
They wrote glowing reports of the rich grazing land they had found along the Yarra river flats at Templestowe.
James was 18, with younger brothers and sisters. His parents were John and Elizabeth Smith, community minded and capable. They expanded their land holdings, and expanded their family.
Seventy-seven years later, they had at least 450 descendants, who were traced for a family reunion in 1934.
In 1871 James married a daughter of one of Templestowe's earliest pioneers, Thomas and Elizabeth Hicks. James and his Eliza built their hut in Atkinson St, just east of Anderson St. It was strong and simple.
Offcuts from felled and sawn mighty redgums, which had proudly graced the rivers bank, provided the uprights for the walls. Gaps where the uneven split logs did not meet were covered with bark,
nailed firmly in place.
This structure remained as the nucleus of the house and of the family, as both were extended.
Around the walls, the cooking utensils were hung; up the wall were steps to a ceiling store- room. On the floor the growing family played "Concerts".
James Smith started with an orchard but changed to dairying and built up a herd of forty milkers, the chore of Eliza and her two eldest daughters.
It was in 1889, after 18 years of marriage that the man who had come to this new, raw country at 18 years of age, had prospered well enough to build a fashionable home.
166 1984-11-13 ByWays DoncasterMirror
13/11/84
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
by JOAN SEPPINGS WEBSTER
The battle for good roads
THERE are two Serpells Rds. in the municipality. One in Doncaster going into Templestowe, and the other in East Don-caster. They are both named for different properties of the same family.
Jane Serpell was the matriarch of the family which bought its first land-in 1853, in the East Doncaster area. Her youngest son, Richard, played a big part in the development of the community, and owned many parcels of land.
Until late in the century, Doncaster Rd. was only reasonably surfaced as far as the Church Rd. corner (travelling east), and East Doncaster people had great trouble travelling to and from Melbourne, or Kew, for market, especially in winter.
But the road from Heidelberg to Melbourne was macamadised and East Doncaster people began to clamor to the Roads' Board for a route to join their end of the world to the Heidelberg Rd. at Templestowe.
Another im-petus to the second route idea may have been that a Toll Gate was across Don-caster Rd.
The suggestion was to extend Serpell's Rd., East. Doncaster, which flanked the southern boundary of Richard Serpell's land as it straddled Blackburn Rd., and take it west to Foote St., which gave access to the bridge at Heidelberg.
But property holders along this western part of the proposed route were. very concerned that their land
would be cut in two, which meant not only working split lane, but the cost of new fencing."
The controversy meandered on for nearly a .decade, and by the time any action was taken, the Roads Board had progressed to the Shire of Bulleen and the school which East Doncaster children attended had been moved from Reynolds Rd. to George St., and most people had forgotten the original purpose of the through road.
In 1884, the shire announced that the proposed Serpells Rd. route was ready to roll, but it had not been
surveyed right through from west to east Doncaster only as far as the level of Tuckers Rd. To provide land for the access road, some orchardists whose land it would traverse had donated land, and others had donated money.
One such donor was John Read, of Templestowe, who had donated land on the ex- press condition that it was for the purpose of joining east and west. When the road stopped short, at a dead end, he was furious and refused to sign the transfer papers of the land.
Then, the shire looked back over the history of the proposed road and agreed that a connecting road would be built, but not as originally planned. It put in Tuckers Rd., south to King St.
167 1984-11-20 ByWays DoncasterMirror
Toll gate charged a cent a horse
20/11/84
BYWAYS OF LOCAL HISTORY
by JOAN SEPPINGS WEBSTER
ON the land-island between Tram and Elgar Rds., where they intersect with Don-caster Rd., is a small patch of park. In this park is a stone memorial cairn, which few are likely to read.
It is a park SO inaccessible because of traffic flow and lack of car parking space that visitors would be unlikely to drive around to the north-east side of Elgar Rd., to Elgar Ct. (Melways map 47 D1) to find the small area where one may stop a car.
It is also unlikely that many would use this park as a destination for walks, there to sit on the three park benches provided and drink in the traffic spectacular, lulled by the hum of motors and refreshed by their fumes.
Nevertheless, the green patch is a restful site to the sore eyes of drivers, as they enter the gateway to our city, and it is the site of historical traffic battles.
A plaque on the stone memorial there tells that this was the site of Doncaster's Toll Gate, put up
in 1865.
The aim was to collect money from every travel-ler, and for every animal with that traveller, to help pay for road construction.
A gate was put across Doncaster Rd. A horse was tolled one cent, a large cart nine cents and a quarter of a cent a goat, sheep or pig.
Then, as now, vehicles travelled in convoy except that the old con- voys were not"
endless. As they lined up at the Toll Gate, the first in line paying and the rest preparing to charge through free, as connived together, could they ever have imagined the intersection of today? They could scarcely imagine the roads being surfaced!
On the opposite corner of the intersection, the north-west corner of Williamsons Rd., about 20 years after the Toll Gate was moved down the hill to the Koonung Creek where it crosses Doncaster Rd., and the road- tax problem shared with the adjoining municipality of Booroondara, a device to help, rather than exploit, horse-traffic was erected.
It stood for more than 50 years, a memorial to kindness to animals, and at the same time memorial to the apathy towards the plight of horse transports before that time.
Before the erection of horse troughs, just how did hot and thirsty horses fare? Especially after pulling a load up slopes such as Doncaster Hill, dragging drays through boggy valleys, or being galloped post-haste to the pub further up the hill by the 19th century equivalent of a P-Plater on the burn?
George Bills and his wife Anice loved animals and donated enormous sums of money to their welfare. Perhaps their best known charity at the time was George Bills Horse Troughs, which he paid to have placed at strategic spots throughout Australia.
Doncaster and Temple-stowe had seven horse troughs, some of which were George Bills' and amongst the first, in the 1890s, was that on the north-west corner of Williamsons Rd.
168 ByWays DoncasterMirror
BYWAYS OF
LOCAL HISTORY
by JOAN SEPPINGS-WEBSTER
The churches converted!
CHURCHES have always made converts. But two of the churches in Doncaster- Templestowe were themselves converted.
The Methodist church building at the corner of Blackburn Rd and Doncaster Rd was converted from a butcher's shop in 1866. St Anne's, Park Orchards, was con-verted from an army hut.
The first religious services were held in the homes of pioneers, and gradually, as more settlers came and money could be pooled for church building, the different de- nominations erected their special places of worship.
Donated
Often there was no need to raise money for church land, as Doncaster-Temples-towe landowners were always generous and community minded, and many of the blocks of land on which stand churches, schools and halls were donated.
Until recently, there was never a large Pre-sbyterian following in the municipality, yet the first church service is believed to have been held by a group of Presbyterians who gathered in a barn on Alexander Duncan's property in Bulleen Rd, Templestowe, in 1842.
Lutheran and Church of England were the two de-nominations Doncaster, and in East Doncaster were the Methodists.
The Lutherans built their first wooden chapelin 1858 on the site where Schramm's Cottage museum now stands.
They shared this with the Church of En-gland until Holy Trin-ity was built in Church St. in 1869.
The brick Lutheran Church in Victoria St. was built in 1892.
The Methodist Church butcher's shop was bought for 50 pounds from its War-randyte owner and carted by bullock wagon along the rough rutted roads, which were little better than tracks, to East Doncas-ter.
This building was used for 63 years as a church, and later as a Sunday School.
St Anne's, Park Orchards, was not only a converted army buil-ding, but also had been the Templestowe Catholic church for 22 years before being moved east.
The little church was built in 1943 by Ted Sheahan of Temples- towe, then a builder for the Catholic Welfare Organisation, as an army chapel at Camp Pell, the wartime name of the army camp in Royal Park.
It was the only specially built wartime chapel con- tracted for the welfare organisation.
It was bought from the Army in 1946 by the Templestowe Roman Catholic parish and was trundled
along to its new site on a truck. When the Temples-towe Catholics built a bigger church in Her-lihy's Rd, the former Army chapel from Atkinson St. was given to the Park Orchards parish.
Church move
A Baptist congrega- tion bult what was known as Grant's Chapel in the 1860s.
It was on or about the site of the old shire hall at the corner of Council St. and Doncaster Rd. in the 1860s.
But it was later converted to a Church of Christ. In 1863 it was moved over the road, probably by Shank's pony, to the site of the present Church of Christ.
(Acknowledgements to Brian Mullens, D&T Historical Society and Mrs Alice Latimer).
169 ByWays DoncasterMirror
THE HOUSE THAT Ben built
ON the south side of Newman's Rd is a rather dilapidated timber homestead cottage.
Its drab brown facade is almost hidden by an overgrown lemon orchard.
The house had a past, and an owner-builder, as colorful as the ancient trees which light up its
hillside, as if to hold a candle to the faded days gone by. The Aumanns have owned the house since 1928 and the gate bears the family name.
Historically, it is known as the Atkins house, built in the 1860s by Ben Atkins. The timber used in its"
construction is believed to be 200-year-old Indian teak from a wrecked ship. Ben Atkins was a battler. To save money to build a home for his mother, he walked to Queensland and back, droving sheep. He was only 12.
Bad luck and bushfire had brought the family to Templestowe in 1851.
That year was Black Thursday, February 6, when Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania were exten-sively burnt. Victoria then was still part of New South Wales, but the fires ravaged about a quarter of the region which was to become the colony of Victoria that year.
Black Thursday
Black Thursday, 1851, the temperature was 47.2 (116.9F).
"Butter melted into oil, bread when just cut turned to rusk. Meat on the table became nearly black,
as if burnt by fire, a few minutes after being out," the Australian Journal of William Strutt tells us.
A hurricane of hot winds carried burning debris far out to sea.
On that day, the ss Henry Edward was sailing off Lawrence Island. Her captain, Mayban, wrote in the log:
"Large flakes of fire flying above the ship." Flying embers set fire to the rigging "so that the sails fell down on the deck."
In this holocaust, Ben, 7, his sister Caroline, 3, and their parents, Samuel and Eliza, were trapped.
Samuel, the hapless younger son of gentry whose birth-sequence caused him to be ineligi-ble for inheritance, had brought his young family to Australia in 1848 and worked as a farm laborer.
First, he worked at Mt Macedon for 35 pounds a year and keep, then moved to near Lilydale at a place called White Flats. But wherever he went, fires raged.
The children were lucky not to have been dry-roasted in the tin trunk in which they sheltered.
Perhaps they were well covered by clothing or a woollen blanket.
In the effort to protect his wife and children, Samuel was badly burnt, and died a few years later. In
between time, the family moved to Templestowe.
On his father's death, young Ben set out on his epic droving feat. He came back with enough money to
help his mother buy land from Major Newman, on which
they built a slab hut and gradually planted an orchard.
As they prospered, Ben built a three-roomed house with a veranda. Made of timber, it had a shingle roof.
Later he enlarged it with three more rooms and put galvanised iron over the shingles.
Times became bad again for the battlers in the 1890s, during the depression. There was no work, no one could buy their fruit.
Ben and his younger brother, Jack, felled trees and exchanged firewood for food, and tried gold mining at Warrandyte and anti- mony mining at Templestowe.
Ben Atkins died in 1928, aged 84, and Caroline a year later. They were remembered as self-made and self-taught.
Ben taught himself to read and write. He was a great story-teller and a good judge of horses, while
Caroline and Jack were amateur artists.
(Acknowledgments for some of these facts from the
Doncaster-Templestowe Historical Society.)
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