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Doncaster and Templestowe News, Wednesday, July 22, 1992 – Page 3
YESTERYEAR
First gold finds in Victoria
By JOAN WEBSITER
THE first gold to be seen in Victoria was a few specks in a pan held at Warrandyte by Louis Michel and his friend Bill Habberlin on June 29, 1851, at their camp where the main road now crosses Anderson's Creek. Warrandyte was registered as having, on June 30, 1851, produced the first payable gold in the colony of Victoria;
Clunes near Ballarat was just behind on July 1; Ballarat on August 25 and Bendigo November 8. Two days after the hole dug by Habberlin was officially declared gold bearing (August 8, 1851), more than 150 prospectors were digging and panning in Anderson's Creek. Towards the end of the year,
both bad weather and news of the enormous amounts of gold found in Ballarat in payable quantities arrived, and diggers deserted Warrandyte.
Lt-Governor La Trobe wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies on November 15: "News of other fields and the flooded state of the Arra caused a complete but probably only temporary abandonment of the Anderson's Creek gold fields".
Stories are told of diggers rowing over the churning river to wash out their mud-flooded tents.
But someone had faith in the field. Three gold commissions stayed on.
In 1854 the Legislative Council accepted Michel's claim to the prize for finding the first payable gold in Victoria and paid him £1000 and the official seal of first gold field was set by naming An-derson's Creek diggings the Victoria Gold Field'.
At the end of 1854, with the publicity given to Michel's prize, diggers returned to Anderson's Creek.
After the Eureka Stockade, John Pascoe Fawkner and Premier Mr J. O'Shawnessy toured there to investigate miners' grievances.
The digging population was scattered over about a kilometre and a half of the river's length.
Some of the dredging methods were unusual.
Diggers spanned the river with coffee dams so they could move right into its bed. To do this they roped together piles of logs to form a square in the river and baled out the water so they could puddle the mud and scrape rock formations on the bottom.
These were precarious holdings and a rise of half a metre in the level of the river could wash them away.
Rewards for all the effort were not great.
However, by 1856 the 'Gold Circular' stated that 100 ounces to the ton was being obtained at Warrandyte and that a gold rush was in full swing.
An miner named James Sloan caused a stir in Melbourne when he got 12 ounces from one bucket of quartz.
From 1856 to 1881 it was fairly quiet on the Warrandyte gold front.
The writer Henry Kingsley tried to make his fortune there, camping at a site next to that of the later Warrandyte Cemetery. Kingsley did not strike it rich but whilst there, worked on his book Geoffrey Hamlyn.
Gold boomed again in Warrandyte in 1870.
That year, the tunnel at Pound Benton was blasted.
This venture, unique in the gold-mining history of Victoria, was led by David Mitchell, father of premier singer Dame Nellie Melba.
Mitchell formed the Evelyn Tunnel Gold Mining Company, the purpose of which was to construct a dam across the bed of the Yarra and divert the water flow through a tunnel. This work exposed the original bed of the river for three miles.
Eight thousand pounds weight of gold in one year was taken from this part of the river bed.
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TRAGEDIES AND TRIUMPHS
Babies died; new families were started; life partners died; new partners found; new lives started; stability found; heritage begun.
This is the story of so many Australian pioneer families, coming as they did to unused climates, unsuited to clothing and cultures;
living as they did in a age before infection and its spread was understood, before nutrition and its needs were cared about. Many came from crowded industrial-revolution slums to wide country spaces; others fresh from village life to new colonial city slums;
still others from genteel life with servants and well-bred society to rough life in a tent on a bush block.
Such a family of tragedies and triumph was that of Joseph Gottfried Uebergang, born the son of Samuel Uebergang on September 9, 1821, at Profen, Silesia, Prussia.
On May 17, 1853 - a year many of our city's first immigrants left their home country - Johann, his wife Charlotte and their three young children Gottfried Heinrich,
Johanne Caroline and Ernst, with his brother Carl, sister Anna and their families, sailed for Australia.
Little Ernst died on the voyage. The ship Wilhelmsburg landed the remaining members of the family at Melbourne on August 25.
Their first home was in Victoria St [then Simpsons Rd] Collingwood. There five year old Gottfried Heinrich died and the small coffin was buried in the old Melbourne Cemetery, over which Victoria Market later grew.
At the close of that year of changes, Gottfried, Charlotte and Johanne Caroline came to Doncaster's German Town and lived in German Lane [George St].
The new move seemed to promise new hope and new joy for the future when early in the new year of 1854, on January 14, the first Uebergang child to be Australian-born arrived - Carl Heinrich Gustav.
Within the year, while Gottfried was away at the goldfields, trying with his Doncaster friend Carl Aumann to better their families' situation, Charlotte died.
Gottfried was left with the toddler Johanne Caroline and the year-old Carl Heinrich.
In 1859, leaving the children with friends, he returned to his home town in Silesia. A wife with his own background was what he sought. He married Christianna Konig and brought her back to the children in Doncaster at the end of that year,
just six years after his first migration.
As the new 1860 began, Joseph Uebergang took his new country completely to heart, became naturalised, bought 20 acres of land in Wilhelm St [King St], built a wattle and daub hut and later,
on land which he turned into a successful orchard, a substantial home which stood for 100 years.
Gottfried and Christianna had two sons and a daughter. The boys, Henry and Charles, established orcharding families here. Charlottes's first Australian-born, Carl Heinrich Gustav, orcharded at St Arnaud and left many descendants in the Western district and Gippsland.
Correct Manuscript [published version has inaccuracies due to editorial changes] JKW
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS, Wednesday, May 6, 1992 — Page 17
YESTERYEAR
The era of cool stores
By JOAN WEBSITER
THE experiment of a few Doncaster orchardists who stored fruit at the Mel- bourne ice skating rink, the Glaciarium, ushered in the refrigerated cool store area. In 1905 Premier Sir Thomas Bent was per- suaded by Tom Petty to build the first govern-ment cool store at cen- tral Doncaster.
Three years later the first fruit-growers’ co-operative cool store in Australia was built by a group of local orchardists who became tired of official red tape at the government cool store that wasted their time in delivering and collecting produce. Behind this move to pri-vately store 36,000 cases of fruit for 36 grower-share- holders were the Pettys, Tully, Lawfords, Thieles, Serpells, Mitchells and Williamsons.
Local growers then bought refrigerated space in a meat ship and became the first to export fruit under refrigeration.
The 1930s saw the peak of Doncaster’s expanding orchard empire. So large was the amount of dessert peaches and pears grown here in that decade that in 1931 the Southern Victoria-Pear Packing Company, later the Blue Moon Co-operative Trading Company, was formed to organise and standardise their export to the United Kingdom.
The old names — T H (Henry) Petty, John Tully, Edwin Lawford and A E Ireland — were among its first directors. But the more who pros-pered, 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 1940s and '50s began the trickle of suburban houses that grew to the present flood. New rating systems helped the decline of the orchard empire. In the 1960s orchards were classified and valued as residential land by the (then) Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works.
The annual rates of a typical 70 ha orchard rose from 69 pounds ($138) to 609 pounds ($1218). Land tax rose from nothing to 483 pounds ($970) and doubled four years later. Merely to keep the land as a family orchard could cost a thousand pounds or more a year, orchardists sold up. They subdivided.
The trees were uprooted and burnt in great pyres on their empty beds. In 1986 there were only 10 orchards in commercial production; in 1992 only two - Petty's and Aumann's. Doncaster's suburbanites are reminded of their beginnings by the orchard museum at Schramms Cottage in Victoria St and by Gottlieb and Phillipine Thiele's home, Friedensruh, in Waldau Court, which is on the Victorian Register of Australian Heritage buildings.
Two hectares of the land Gottlieb first cleared down by Ruffey's Creek was given by his descendants to the people of Doncaster as the nucleus of the Municipal Botanical Gardens. Overlooking it lies the small, fenced graveyard of Waldau Hill, where bare mounds beneath the cypress rise and fall like small waves on a sea of memory.
THE opening in 1905 of Australia’s first government cool store, in Doncaster Rd. Photograph courtesy of ERIC COLLYER.
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Wednesday, May 13, 1992
YESTERYEAR
The names have changed
By Joan Webster
ANYONE who travelled back in a time machine through this district would need a municipal history before asking directions.
Doncaster used to be known as Vermont; West Doncaster was Carleton or Kennedy's Crossing and the north of East Doncaster was Deep Creek.
Box Hill was known as Nunawading; Nunawading was called Tunstall.
A street directory even 50 years old would be no help. Street names as well as district names have had a habit of changing.
Tunstall, the area south of the Koonung Creek and east of what is now Box Hill, was so named because a band of clay there perfect for making pottery.
It was similar to that found in Tunstall, Staffordshire, England. A clay pit was worked there from 1853.
Tunstall Square shopping centre took its name from the road.
The name Nunawading was originally spelt Numphawading, an Aboriginal word meaning ceremonial ground or battlefield.
Croydon was called Warrandyte. Before 1856, the name Warrandyte referred to the whole area from Anderson's Creek to the present Croydon.
In 1882, the present Croydon Station was officially opened as Warrandyte Railway Station, and the adjacent Post Office named Warrandyte Railway Station Post Office.
There was also a Warrandyte Post Office at the area we now know as Warrandyte. This historic building was recently saved from demolition and is now functioning as a community centre.
When what is now the City of Box Hill was proclaimed the Shire of Nunawading in 1872, its council-lors tried to persuade the Templestowe Roads Board (now the City of Doncaster and Templestowe) to merge with it.
Bulleen is the name of a white cockatoo indigenous to the area that is now the Templestowe ward of the City of Doncaster and Templestowe.
In 1875, the Shire of Bulleen — as the municipal district now the City of Doncaster and Templestowe was then called — amalgamated with Nunawading/Box Hill to form the United Shire of Nunawading.
But this lasted only three months.
Mitcham used to be called New Brunswick.
Elgar Rd, which links Doncaster to Box Hill, was known as Crossman's Rd.
Springvale Rd, of course, leads to the City of Springvale, which was named the cause of the many fresh water springs there.
The Mullum-Mullum Creek, which runs through Donvale and forms part of the boundary of what was the Nunawading Roads District (later Shire of Nunawading, later City of Box Hill), was called Deep Creek.
And the area south of East Doncaster, which has controversiality now been changed to Temple Hills, was originally known as Deep Creek.
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YESTERYEAR
Tower Hotel fire re-lived
By Joan Webster
THE Australian Hand Book of 1895 lists four hotels in Doncaster: The Doncaster (Doncaster Arms), Morning Star, Meader's and the Tower. In fact, Meader's was the Tower Hotel, which in 1882 had also been miscalled the Post Office Hotel.
The Tower Hotel superseded the Temperance Hotel which had been built originally on the tower's eastern side to accommodate sightseers, and was built on the western side of the tower. It had 39 rooms, stables for 20 horses and was built of timber.
In 1895, on a typical January day of hot north winds, the Tower Hotel caught alight.
A kerosene lamp, just lit in the lamp room beside the bar, is believed to have started the fire. The barman, after lighting the lamp, had just served a customer when he saw the room ablaze behind him. And the hot north winds only made things worse.
In those days, the fire brigade could only know about an emergency by seeing the fire from afar. There were no telephones then. Struggling horses and a creaking hand pump at a well - there were no speeding trucks and high-powered hoses - were the best facilities available for for trying to save the hotel.
Men and boys pumped the handle of the hotel's big well until it broke while one of the local Petty boys was working it. Down below at Box Hill Fire Station the 'lookout' saw the blaze. The horses which were later to struggle up the hill with the firecart were not, as you might have expected, kept standing by at the ready, harnessed for emergency.
They were not even trained for emergency, nor practised at working together.
Apart from the steep incline, this was another reason for their struggle. Firemen called from their homes by the clanging bell grabbed the first available horses; baker's horses, farm horses, milk horses. They were independant animals, not used to team work.
They pulled against each other up the hill as the flames of the blazing Tower Hotel rose higher. As the horses rose higher up the hill and closer to the fire, they jibbed. A crowd running alongside the freeart urged the horses on and the firemen off the cart. "Get off and walk. They'll go better without your weight", they shouted.
The brigade finally reached the fire but, just as their hoses were let down the well and the freeart's engine-driven pump went into action, the hotel roof collapsed. Kew and Hawthorn fire brigades had also been alerted by their 'lookouts'. No doubt the same process of gathering first men and then horses from their usual work was repeated.
Though too late to save the hotel, the firemen stopped the fire from spreading to adjoining properties, the function room and other hotel outbuildings. William Meader replaced his destroyed timber Tower Hotel with one of brick and of an elaborate style with a curved entrance drive. The saved function room was sold as a private house.
This hotel was delicensed three years after its namesake, the tower, was dismantled in 1914. It first became a grocery store, then a motor-mower sales and service shop, operating at the corner of Doncaster Rd and Tower St until demolished for the 1969 widening of Doncaster Rd.
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YESTERYEAR
Doncaster and TEMPLESTOWE News Wednesday, July 1 1992
All the winds of heaven
By JOAN WEBSTER
MID-20th century commercialism has obscured and shut out from the people what was acknowledged as the best view in Melbourne: the Yarra Valley, Great Dividing Range and Port Phillip Bay from Doncaster Hill.
Mid-19th-century commercialism in Doncaster realised and developed its tourist potential, opened up and advertised its breathtaking beauty, and put Doncaster ‘on the map’ due to its renown for nearly half a century.
The Australian Sketcher of 1880 ran a feature article and artist’s impression of our famous commercially-run lookout tower, then known as the ‘Bea-consfield’ tower. Tower St, one street eastwards along Doncaster Rd from Shop-pingtown, was named for it.
To the right of the illustration, separated from the tower by a fence, is what appears to be a small wooden cottage. This was a Temperance Hotel, the forerunner of the Tower Hotel built later on the western side of the tower.
By the fence dividing tower from hotel is an entrance gate beside a lean-to which was probably where visitors to the tower paid their fee to see the view. Tiny figures can just be made out on a landing stage at the top of the first section of the tower, about half way up, while others below peer up at them.
The Australian Sketcher 1880 wrote: “This tower is an immense wooden structure 200 feet high and was erected by its proprietor Mr Hummell for the sole purpose of obtaining the extensive and magnificent view which it commands.
“Situated at the top of Doncaster Hill, from its upper gallery, the visitor obtains a grand panoramic view of the Dandenongs, the Plenty Rangers, Kew, Melbourne, Mt Macedon, Port Phillip Bay, and on a clear day, Port Phillip Heads.
“From the ground floor to the first gallery (height 100 feet or 33 metres) the steps of the tower are enclosed, and one has the feeling of starting up a shaft instead of down one. “From the first to the second gallery the height is 60 feet (20 metres), the tower is open to all the winds of heaven.
The ascent so far is achieved by means of a strong, wood-en, winding staircase, but after the second gallery is reached, the enterprising excursionist must trust the safety of his neck to a near perpendicular ladder.
“We need not remark that the majority of visitors having achieved the upper gallery, content themselves with the view it offers, and take the rest for granted. “This is the third tower erected on this spot by Mr Hummell, the two others having been blown down.
The present structure cost 1000 pounds. It is a place of reset on high days and holidays, the public being privileged to toil-up its innumerable stairs at the rate of a shilling a head.
“There is a temperance hotel attached to this tower and there are some pleasantly wooded paddocks about for the use of picnic parties. “Cabs run from Kew to Doncaster two or three times a day in the season,
but good pedestrians will find the distance (five or six miles or nine km) a pleasant and exhilarating walk through the grassy, undulating country about.” In 1885 Alfred Hummell and his family moved to Tasmania and another local entrepreneur and estate agent, William Meader, bought the tower and its recreational facilities, changing the name from the ‘Beaconsfield’ to the ‘Tower’ hotel.
When Doncaster Rd was widened in 1969 an Oregon beam plate which had supported the tower was unearthed. A piece of this was sent to Alfred Hummell’s descendants in Tasmania.
THE Doncaster tower and Temperance Hotel ... a picture from the Australasian Sketcher of 1880.
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Page 12 — DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS, Wednesday, January 22, 1992
Unmuddling the Melba story
I AM writing to express my concern regarding the article ‘Nellie: Tomboy of the Orchards’ which appeared in the Doncaster and Templestowe News, November 13, 1991. The article is riddles with inaccuracies. The Mitchell family never lived in Doncaster and Nellie could not, as stated in the article, have arrived in Doncaster in 1858.
She was not born until 1861. If David Mitchell did own land in Doncaster (which would be a startling discovery for this has never been mentioned by Melba’s numerous biographers, researches or by her granddaughter), all evidence that the family actually resided in Doncaster is to the contrary.
The organ referred to in this article (now in our Museum collection) never resided in Doncaster. The organ remained at the family home ‘Doonside’, Richmond (where David Mitchell lived throughout his life) until Mitchell’s death in 1916 after which Melba presented the organ to the Burnley Congregational Church. The organ was later moved to the Arkarnaga Crescent Congregation Church, Black Rock.
If Melba had School friends who resided in Doncaster, she would have met them at the Presbyterian Ladies College, not as Doncaster neighbors. These historical errors should be corrected publicly. School children and other researchers may attempt to use the article as a basis for projects.
Moya McFadzean, Lilydale Historical Museum.
DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS, Wednesday, January 29, 1992 — Page 9
Letters
Setting the record straight on Melba’s Doncaster past
RE: letter from Moya McFadzean, curator, Lilydale Historic Museum.
The sentence, ‘Helen (Nellie) Mitchell and her parents arrived in Doncaster in 1858, after living in Richmond where Nellie was born’ should have been, ‘Helen (Nellie) Mitchell’s parents came to Doncaster in 1858, while living in Richmond where Nellie was born.’
The statement that the Mitchells ‘lived for some years’ on land that is now in the Eastern Golf Links was my wrong understanding of the fact that Mitchell owned land and a house there.
It is correct that in 1858 David Mitchell bought the 30 acre lot of land on Doncaster Rd which in 1886 became Dr Thomas Fitzgerald’s ‘Tullamore’ estate, and still later the Eastern Golf Links. According to Doncaster and Templestowe Historical Society Records (Vol 8, No. 2, November 1974, page 5), Mitchell bought land as a farm and built a cottage there.
Doncaster and Templestowe Historical Society’s former president Irvine Green confirms this.
Mitchell’s purchase of Doncaster land appears in Templestowe Roads Board rate books, Mr Green maintains. It was one of Mitchell’s four farms, at which it was his habit to stay for a week or so at a time. Nellie certainly stayed and played in Doncaster, in the house on her father’s farm in Doncaster Rd.
Doncaster and Templestowe Historical Society’s records (Vol 4, No. 2, November 1970, page 5) relates to the local legend of young Nellie climbing the Bunya Bunya pine which still grows near Mitchell’s former cottage site. The story of Nellie mischievously playing a lively organ polka at Sunday service was told to me 25 years ago by a number of elderly residents to whom it had been handed down as family folklore.
The organ referred to in the article is a different instrument from that in the Lilydale Museum. The article’s reference ‘The Mitchell’s Doncaster house had an organ on which hymns were played each Sunday for Presbyterian church service’ is correct, being that organ in the Doncaster house owned by Mitchell.
Joan K. Webster,
Author, Yesteryear.
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Page 30 – Doncaster Templstowe News, Wednesday, June 10, 1992
The Athenaeum Hall, Main Rd, Doncaster, 1871.
Picture courtesy Eric Collyer.
Hall of learning
by Joan Webster
In the 1890s, Doncaster's Athenaeum Hall housed a library of 1100 volumes which were regarded as one of the finest collection of reference books outside Melbourne.
In 1870, a lively organisation known as the Band of Hope planned to reform the hard-living wood splitters and itinerant workers of the district. They felt their usual meeting place, the Methodist Hall, could be thought too "churchy", and hinder their evangelical efforts. So they suggested the building of a non-sectarian community hall.
The original Athenaeum Hall was built in 1871 on its current site in Doncaster Rd. The generosity of Mr. Alfred Hummel (of Doncaster Tower fame), secured the land for it.
This young Englishman, who had inherited a great deal of money and used it for community purposes, bought three acres from the government and presented one acre to the Athenaeum hall trustees. He also loaned 70 pounds towards the 285 pounds cost of the building. A government subsidy of 40 pounds helped to buy the first 225 books.
Care in the selection of reference material was largely the work and talent of Mr A.O. Thiele, first head teacher of the Doncaster State School. The library lapsed into disuse during World War II chiefly, it was said, through lack of interest. This was probably because the books had become outdated and were not replaced with more modern resources and literature.
Since the advent of modern Doncaster suburbia in the 1950s, the Athenaeum was used mainly for mee-tings, baby injection days and naturalisation ceremonies and an occasional theatrical performance. When it was modernised in the 1960s a concrete slab covered scars where wreckers excised the imposing old entrance and annexes which had been added in 1914.
Later renovation has made its early glory totally unrecognisable. The old Athenaeum was as symbolic of Doncaster's former town life as any Mechanics' Institute. It hosted the halls, meetings and concerts which were the social life of the district. When entertainments were few a ball was a great event. Before the building of the Athenaeum,
balls had been held privately by families who had homes large and grand enough, and dances were held in barns by those who did not. The first public ball was held in the Athenaeum in 1897. This first shire ball was an all-night affair, with dancing to the piano and violin, each dance formally booked by the men in the ladies' programs. After the 1914-18 war, Doncaster-Templestowe RSL balls began a yearly tradition there.
Civic balls differed from others because they were for invited residents who had voluntarily worked for the community during that year. When the first Civic ball was held in 1927, it was an especially proud time for shire president Joseph Albert (Bert) Smith, who had risen from a penniless orphan to the highest position in the community.
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWS NEWS Wednesday, June 3, 1992 Page 29
YESTERYEAR
Born again
CHURCHES have always made converts, but some of Doncaster-Temple-stowe's churches were themselves converted.
The original 1866 Methodist (now Uniting) Church building at the corner of Blackburn and Doncaster roads was converted from a butcher's shop.
St Anne's Park Orchards was converted from an army hut.
A Baptist congregation built what was known as Grant's Chapel in the 1860s on or about the site of the old Shire Hall on the corner of Doncaster Rd and Council St.
This was moved south across the road in 1863 and converted to the Church of Christ.
The pioneers first held religious services in their homes. As more settlers came and money could be pooled for church building, the various denominations erected their different places of worship.
There was usually no need to raise money to buy church land.
Local landowners were notably generous and community-minded and many churches, schools and halls stand today on land donated by early families.
The first church service of any denomination is believed to have been a gathering of Presbyterians in 1842.
It was held in a barn on the property of Scotsman Alexander Duncan in Bulleen Rd, Templestowe. Ironically until recently there was never a large Presbyterian congregation in the municipality.
The main denominations of Doncaster were Lutheran and Church of England, while in East Doncaster the Primitive Methodists reigned.
FROM butcher's shop to church (right).
The Lutherans built their first timber chapel in 1858 on the hill-top site now used by Schramm's Cottage museum.
It doubled as a place of worship for local Anglicans until Holy Trinity Church of England was built in Church St in 1969.
The present brick Lutheran Church in Victoria St was built in 1892.
Christ Church in High St, Templestowe, was originally the municipality's first Anglican Church, a small timber chapel built two years before Doncaster's Holy Trinity and converted in 1900.
The butcher's shop Methodist Church, bought in 1866 from its Warrantyte owner for 50 pounds, was carted to East Doncaster by bullock wagon along the rough, rutted roads which were little better than tracks.
For 18 years it was used as a church and Sunday school, then for 45 more as a Sunday school before being demolished.
St Anne's Park Orchards was not only a converted Army building, but also for 22 years the Temple-stowe Roman Catholic Church before being moved.
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Page 36 – Doncaster Templestowe News, Wednesday August 5, 1992
YESTERYEAR
Hall a ‘vision spendid’
By Joan Webster
ON the site of the old Shire Hall in Council St the first seed of Doncaster civilisation was planted. There, in 1852, what is believed to have been the first building structure in the area was erected — a bark hut, built as a home by Bill Thompson.
On this high ridge track to the Anderson's Creek (Warrandyte) diggings, Bill's bark hut was, said folk historian of 1916 Thomas Robinson, the only house between Richmond and Bulleen.
Bulleen was the name of the whole parish as far east as Springvale Rd. By 1860 Bill's hut was gone and the site boasted Grant's Chapel, a small timber Baptist Church. When this was moved across the road four years later the land was vacant and ready for its destiny. In 1890 the Doncaster Riding of the original Shire of Bulleen committed an Act of Severance from its municipal mother-and in 1892 the Shire of Doncaster was proclaimed.
From the moment of severance there was much discussion and dissension about the location of a home for the new seat of local government. Could it be afforded at all with most roads still muddy bogs?
For a while the management of the newly built Athenaeum Hall boosted its income by renting a room to the council for meetings. Richard Serpell, the man in the middle of so much of Doncaster's development and owner of a variety of properties, was generous and public spirited.
He offered a choice from his blocks of land on which to build a shire hall. Ratepayers in East Doncaster, though doubtless pleased at being spared the cost of the land, would have rather had any available money spent in making travelling conditions from their end of the shire to the hall made easier.
Doncaster Rd east of Church St was almost impassable in wet weather. Build the shire hall in the east, they said. But, with a vision splendid, councillors opted for a site: 'close to the future railway station.' How could they know that for more than a century routes of railway will-o-the-wisps would snake across the hills and valleys,
never to settle at rest? And to touch here again in full circle in 1992? The shire hall was intended to be an imposing building with planned additions to its 'phase one' which would have made its entrance face Doncaster Rd. In 1901, when the self-governing states joined in a federation to become the Commonwealth of Australia, a park created at the southern boundary of the shire hall was named Federation Park.
This park eventually became absorbed into the grounds of the adjacent Doncaster State Primary School.
From 1915, the wider shire — first called the Shire of Doncaster but from 1926 called the Shire of Doncaster and Templestowe — was administered from the Council St building until the forerunner of the present municipal offices was built in 1957.
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YESTERYEAR Aug12 1992 p23
Settler builds a future despite own tragedies
ATOP a hill to the south of Reynolds Rd and west of Blackburn Rd is a fine old brick homestead. From the home owner Richard Serpell could see his land stretch from Blackburn Rd down to Serpells Rd, and enjoy a panoramic mountain view. But ten years ago the home itself could hardly be seen because of the surrounding orchard. Now in place of fruit trees are rows of houses.
The Serpell home, also known as the Jenkins homestead, is at 23 Hemingway Ave near Jenkins Drive. Richard Serpell’s mother Jane brought her Cornish family of a daughter and four sons to Glenferrie where they owned a store. In May, 1853, they bought their first Doncaster land at the corner of King St, at the level of what is now Tucker’s Rd, and walked there often from Glenferrie to plant fruit trees.
By 1855 they had built a two-room bark hut. Richard’s diary of August 18, 1855, tells how: “The boys and mother came up with the dray bringing a number of fruit trees.” By July 1856: “Large piece of land planted. One hundred and eight trees of various kinds, 112 vines, 59 currant bushes and 66 gooseberries.” By 1860 he was able to report: “peaches and fruit trees bearing well.” The family bought more land.
In 1875 Richard married Annie Beeston and started building the homestead in Hemingway Ave, quarrying clay on the site, baking it into bricks in a portable kiln for the first four rooms.
Anne fell pregnant. Later, when she died in childbirth, the baby was named Annie after her.
Drowning
The motherless babe, reared by her grandmother, grew up to become Annie Goodson, wife of the Doncaster State Primary School’s first school master. In 1879 Richard married again — Alice Reid, from Phillip Island — but lived for only a short while on the Blackburn Rd property.
A tragic drowning in the orchard dam brought with it the feeling that this was an unlucky home.
He built again near his mother and little Annie on the eastern side of Williamsons Rd, just north of Doncaster Rd intersection. Richard Serpell was a member of the company formed to run the first electric tram in the Southern Hemisphere along Tram Rd.
EARLYs settler Richard Serpell: Serpells Rd and Serpell Primary School are named after the family.
He helped to establish the Athenaeum Hall and its once famous library; donated land for the Don-caster Primary School and the Old Shire Hall; carted stone to help build Holy Trinity Church of England and built the emporium on the corner of Doncaster
and Williamsons roads that proceeded Doncaster Shoppingtown.
Serpells Rd and Serpell Primary School are named after the family.
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Wednesday, August 19, 1992
YESTERYEAR
Toll gate dispute
THE triangular plot diagonally opposite Doncaster Shoppingtown, the apex of the three-part intersection of Doncaster, Elgar and Tram roads which until built on recently was the J. Thomson Reserve, was once the scene of wild alterations.
A plaque on a stone memorial there tells that this was the site of Doncaster’s toll gate, established in 1865. At the time of the toll gate, Tram Rd did not exist and Doncaster Rd ran only as far as Church Rd.
In all, the district had only six miles (four kilometers) of formed roads: two miles 21 chains in Doncaster Rd; three miles 21 chains in Templestowe; and 35 chains in Thompsons Rd.
A gate was put across Doncaster Rd and a full-time, 24 hours a day, toll-keeper lived on the spot, which was at the time part of the property of Mr Thomas Tully.
The aim of the toll gate was to help the Templestowe Roads District Board to pay for further road construction, by collecting money from every traveller who passed that way, and for every animal with that traveller.
Carts, buggies and their horses were frequently stuck in ruts on the dreadfully boggy, soggy roads and revenue was badly needed to get the roads board out of a financial rut.
But when the toll gate opened it brought more trouble for the board, for a popular new sport came into vogue: evasion of the toll. The players, in three or four horse-drawn carts, would rush the toll gate together so that the keeper was lucky if he caught one of them.
Prices extracted from travellers were: sheep, pigs, lambs and goats, eight a penny; ox or head of beef cattle, a half penny; horse, mare, ass or mule, a penny ha’penny; gig, chaise, coach or chariot or other carriage constructed on springs if drawn by one horse or other animal, threepence; two horses, sixpence, with threepence each additional horse or animal; cart, dray or wagon with tyres not exceeding six inches, sixpence with threepence each additional horse.
Travellers in government service, ministers of religion or residents going to church were exempt from payment.
It was costly to take peaches to such during a dull sermon — the toll keeper declared them marketable goods and demanded full toll for the church-bound vehicle.
Templestowe graziers evaded the toll by driving their cattle across unfenced land.
Needless to say, here the toll keeper’s business ran at a loss. So in 1869 the gate was moved to near the present freeway entrance where Doncaster Rd crosses the Koonung Creek, and the problems of road tax collection was shared with the neighboring parish of Boroondara.
A move by the Templestowe District Roads Board to have a toll at the corner of Thompsons and Templestowe roads was defeated by the petition of residents who pleaded hardship.
To the almost bankrupt board, which only wanted to keep the residents in communication with the outside world, this plea seemed unwarranted.
When a commissioner of roads and bridges requested a report on the amount of road construction carried out, the Templestowe Roads Board had to reply that it did not have any funds.
[Image] THE triangular intersection diagonally opposite Shoppingtown when there was a toll gate in 1865, as it was in 1910.
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‘Tough’ times
IN the early days, women worked hard on farms and orchards. Barefoot, they tucked their long dresses into belts around their waists.
The glimpse of such undergarments in the fields earned the name of Petticoat Lane for that street in Templestowe now known as Anderson St.
On Sundays, Templestowe families travelled by dray to the river and crossed by punt to attend church in Heidelberg, carrying their best shoes. The punt ran until the end of the 1850s; in 1856 the foundation was laid for the bridge later completed in 1858.
These anecdotes, passed on by Mrs J Hodgson (a member of Templestowe’s pioneer Chivers family) speaking at a women’s group, were recorded in 1959 by the then local newspaper, the Reporter.
Mrs Hodgson’s grandparents came to Australia in 1849 by sailing ship in a voyage which took seven months.
Conditional on their receiving an assisted immigrants’ passage was a bond to pay eleven pounds towards the fare, help with the work of the ship and to work on farms for seven years.
The weekly wage of a farmhand was 15 shillings plus rations of flour, sugar, currants, oatmeal and tea.
The family first joined a canvas town at Heidelberg before being helped to a more solid home of packing cases by new friend and carpenter, Ross.
Ross also built coffins. A family of eight children known to Mrs Hodgson’s mother kept Ross sadly busy. For eight weeks, one child a week died from diphtheria. Houses in Templestowe and Bulleen had bars on their windows, partly as protection from bushrangers and partly from fear of the Aborigines.
The Aborigines were known, said Mrs Hodgson in her talk, to be “harmless and gentle, although often thieves’. Children were kept away from them, she said.
She told her mother’s memory of a gathering of the Plenty and Templestowe tribes for a corroboree:
“There was much whooping and yelling as the Plenty tribe swam the river and joined the celebration around a camp fire within a circle swept clean with gum-tree branches.
“The menu was roast possum. After the feast, the women and children, who had been sent away, were allowed to pick the bones,” she recounted.
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS, Wednesday, September 9, 1992 — Page 29
YESTERYEAR
Babies by bike
By JOAN WEBSTER
DONCASTER and Templestowe’s first infant welfare sister pedalled a bicycle up and down the rough tracks of Warrandyte to visit mothers and babies.
Sister Olive Houghton was aged 50 when she began infant welfare training.
She was known never to refuse an appeal for help, whatever hour of the day or night, and continued to live and work this way until she was 70.
This first infant welfare service was begun by Sister Houghton in 1938; the next not until 1952, when Sister Jean Keogh came to East Doncaster.
The centre in Yarra St, Warrandyte, from which Sister Houghton rode her rounds, was demolished in the late 1960s.
Olive Houghton, a former English nurse who married and lived in Warrandyte, had won the esteem and affection of Warrandyte people for many years for the voluntary service she gave the community long before she established this service for mothers and babies.
For many years, the then Shire of Doncaster and Templestowe had had no doctor nor midwife. The nearest doctor was at Kew.
People helped each other through their health crises.
Families had a small herb garden and with pestle and mortar ground home medications. Contraceptives were virtually unavailable.
Women having to get to market to sell their produce despite frequent pregnancies, walked to market at Kew or Collingwood, considering this safer for their condition than a jolting horse-drawn vehicle, and reports exist of babies born on the way.
The unexpected bundle carried home was a ‘bonus profit’ that market day.
Sister Houghton would have had to counteract many generations of so-called ‘old wives tales’.
Here is one such, from a book of advice to mothers published last century:
“The baby’s bedroom should be kept rather dark, particularly for the first week or ten days.
“The infant, during the first month, must not be exposed to strong light or much air, and in carrying it about the passages, stairs, etc it should always have its head-flannel on, to protect the eyes and ears from currents of air.”
Breast-feeding mothers and wet-nurses were advised to drink two pints of stout, or port a day.
Babies’ feeding bottles had long, difficult-to-clean teats made of India-rubber, gutta-percha, caoutchouc (a black artificial substance) or of calf’s teat, in which germs thrived.
These were stored in spirits by retailers pending sale, the mother having to soak them in warm water before attaching them to the bottle.
To do this they were tied securely by means of a fine twine round the neck of the bottle.
Once on the bottle, the teat was never removed except to replace it with a new one — generally about a fortnight later.
One can imagine how germs accumulated around the teat hole, and understand the high infant mortality rate before the advent of trained infant welfare nurses exemplified by Sister Olive Houghton.
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS, Wednesday, September 16, 1992 — Page 35
YESTERYEAR
By JOAN WEBSTER
A SAWMILL once operated on the western side of Williamsons Rd where Doncaster Shoppingtown Hotel now stands. Nearby pine trees were cut into fruit cases for the Lawford Fruit Exchange Pty Ltd and Cool Stores.
Around 1905 Edwin Lawford erected on his orchard a cool store to hold one thousand cases of fruit, and this, in 1911, became the first growers’ co-operative cool store in Australia.
A gravel pit existed in the area now encompassed by Rathmullen Quadrant, and from this was excavated stone crushed to make the grey cement bricks of which Lawford’s elegant house (now demolished) was constructed.
Lawford St runs west from Williamsons Rd, on the southern boundary of Shoppingtown Hotel and Rathmullen Quadrant north in a square off Lawford St.
Edwin Lawford’s parents emigrated from Yorkshire in 1840, the family settling first in Richmond where they opened the first shop of any kind established in that suburb, a general store.
In 1851 the gold rush began and as neither horses nor vehicles could be had for love or money, the elder Lawford and two mates packed all their gear into an iron wheelbarrow and set off for Castlemaine in search of a fortune in gold.
They had no luck with gold, and came home in the same manner.
Lawford next tried sheep farming with his wife and family at Diamond Creek, but was forced off by blacks, bushfires, dingoes and extreme loneliness of the life for a mother with five young children.
They then took up land just south of the Koonung Creek in Box Hill.
The young Edwin Lawford, who was to become one of the leaders of the Australian fruit industry, was not physically strong and his parents decided that fruit growing was too laborious an occupation for him.
So at age 15 he was sent to Scotch College to become fitted for lighter employment and at 17 became a teacher in the Melbourne Deaf and Dumb Institution.
When Lawford senior died six years later, Edwin joined with his brother John Birky Lawford and their mother to buy 20 acres at Doncaster where they started an orchard and nursery business.
Edwin later took over this orchard himself and there developed one of the largest pear orchards.
In the 1890s when pear growing on commercial lines was laughed at by most growers, he induced other shy-bearing varieties to greatly increase their productiveness.
Edwin headed three generations of Lawford Shire councillors.
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS September 30 1992
YESTERYEAR
Woman’s work
PIONEER life in Doncaster-Templestowe began in a humpy made of gum saplings, a wattle-and-daub home with sacking on the floor.
Wattle, as used in ‘wattle-and-daub’ is from the verb, ‘to wattle’, which means to interlace branches and twigs. The ‘daub’ was the mud or clay used to plaster these and fill in gaps.
The kitchen was usually a detached outbuilding, because many houses burnt down when soot in the chimneys of internal kitchens ignited and the-then popular thatched roofs caught fire.
Stone houses were built later from quarries in Ruffey’s and the Koonung Creeks, but shingle roofs stayed for a long time as neither iron nor galvanised iron was available.
The pioneer women of Doncaster used ‘cold power’ for the family wash: the cold water of the nearest creek.
If warm water was needed they would boil a kerosene-tin full at the creek bank.
Women met on the banks of the creeks for wash day, an occasion for the exchange of gossip, helpful information and news from home.
With alarm they might hear how a neighbor, returning from Kew or Collingwood market or from a visit, was chased up a tree by wild dogs, or exchange fears of bushrangers and ‘blacks’.
The pioneer woman had more than so-called housework to do, though that was a full-time job itself, with water for every bit of cooking and washing having to be drawn from creek, or garden well if she was lucky.
For some the adjustment was smooth because they had been used to hard work in the home country.
But for others it was a vast culture shock. Some had been gentry and never even opened a door for themselves “lest it broaden the hands”.
These women had to adapt to self-taught cooking, cleaning, washing, milking and all the other basics of a pioneer woman’s subsistence life.
To keep butter and milk cool and fresh the women of more substantial homes let them down on ropes into enormous underground tanks near the kitchens.
A pioneer woman’s place wasn’t only in the home.
They helped their menfolk in the orchard, often wearing five to six stiffened petticoats and bone corsets.
One of the Thiele sisters drove a newly-bought reaper and binder from Mt Gambier to Doncaster!
[Image] ‘PIONEER Woman’ — painting by M. H. Livingston, 1875.
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YESTERYEAR
WOMAN’S WORK
[COLD POWER AND CANDLES]
[500 words]
by
JOAN WEBSTER.
Pioneer life in Doncaster-Templestowe began in a humpy made of gum saplings, a wattle-and-daub home with sacking on the floor. [‘Wattle’, as used in ‘wattle-and-daub’ is from the verb, ‘to wattle’, which means to interlace branches and twigs. The ‘daub’ was the mud or clay used to plaster these and fill in gaps].
The kitchen was usually a detached outbuilding, because many houses burned down when soot in the chimneys of internal kitchens ignited and the then popular thatched roofs caught fire.
Stone houses were built later from quarries in Ruffey’s and the Koonung Creeks, but shingle roof stayed for a long, long time as neither iron nor galvanised iron was available.
The pioneer women of Doncaster used ‘cold power’ for the family wash: the cold water of the nearest creek. If warm water were needed they would boil a kerosene tin full in the creek bank.
Women met on the banks of the creeks for wash day, an occasion for the exchange of gossip and helpful information and of news from home.
With alarm they might hear how a neighbour, returning from Kew or Collingwood market or from a visit, was chased up a tree by wild dogs, or exchange fears of bushrangers and blacks.
The pioneer woman had more than so-called ‘housework’ to do, though that was a full time job itself, with water for every bit of cooking and washing having to be drawn from creek, or garden well if she was lucky.
For some the adjustment was smooth because they had been used to hard work in the home country: housework at home or serving another family in their village, or the local gentry perhaps work in a cotton mill or on a farm - though work on an established British or German farm was of a different kind.
But for others it was a vast culture shock. Some had been gentry and never even opened a door for themselves ‘lest it broaden the hands’.
These women had to adapt to self-taught cooking, cleaning, washing, milking and all the other basics of a pioneer woman’s subsistence life.
To amuse their children they put honey on their fingers and gave them a feather to play with.
To keep butter and milk cool and fresh the women of more substantial homes let them down on ropes into enormous underground tanks near the kitchens. Others wrapped butter - straight from the churn - in gutta-percha or an animal’s bladder and preserved them in small holes dug in the ground, sometimes lined with zinc. Women made their own candles by setting them in moulds with tallow. Jelly was set by putting it in a billy can which was lowered into the dam to cool. When iron came it was used to line the tanks, and for roofing which now in turn caught rain water with which to fill them.
A pioneer woman’s place wasn’t only in the home. They helped their menfolk in the orchard, often wearing five to six stiffened petticoats and bone corsets.
One of the Thiele sisters drove a newly-bought reaper and binder from Mt Gambier to Doncaster!
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS October 7 1992
YESTERYEAR
Colorful history
“THERE was an earlier, and older publican named Finn [again]
‘His name blew out and then blew in again’.
Finn’s Reserve by the Yarra river at Templestowe nearly lost its historical name in 1973 when Doncaster-Templestowe council wanted to rename it after a councillor.
The family Finn had owned the land for more than 100 years and from it ran the hotel, much glorified in art and mysteriously burnt to the ground in 1967.
James Finn bought it in the early 1860s, being licencee from at least 1863 according to records, if not earlier, and died there in 1908, his descendants managing it until delicensed in the early 1930s.
A smallish, strongly built man, always immaculately but not over dressed, with a quick Irish wit, Jimmy Finn was spoken of as one of the greatest characters of the valley.
Though a devout Roman Catholic, he espoused all local good causes of any denomination.
He arrived in Melbourne in the early 1820s with only a few pence in his pocket, worked in many hotels and saved his money to first buy a beer shop in Templestowe Rd, about two and a half kilometres from the Yarra river punt to Heidelberg.
Fire earlier features in Finn’s area. Down the road were two other beer shops, and bitter rivals they were.
One night in June in 1870 a fire started in the haystack of one and ended with the burning to the ground of the other, with each angry beer shop keeper blaming the other for arson.
Jimmy Finn did things more pleasantly: he married the daughter of his rival, the owner of the Templestowe Hotel. It was said that Jimmy Finn attempted one of the first mergers in the Victorian Hotel business when he married Hanna Sheahan.
As his business grew, Finn bought more land and developed a farm of about 130 acres renowned as a model in the valley.
He bought a squat, two-storeyed brick, stone and timber hotel and added a tall timber extension, creating the quaint split-level design which drew artists from all over Australia.
The historical significance of ‘Finn’s Pub’, the Upper Yarra Hotel, apart from its folk-loric interest, is that it was in this hotel [at the time Mrs Bell’s hotel] that the first meeting was called, on December 8, 1856, to form local government in the municipality of Doncaster and Templestowe in the form of the Templestowe Roads Board.
About 1967, when James Finn’s descendant Ned and his sister Marie lived there, Finn’s Pub was classified ‘D’ by the National Trust. At the same time, it was under demolition order by Doncaster-Templestowe Council to make way for road widening at the intersection of Thompson Rd and Unwin St.
Ned had been for four years a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese and never fully recovered.
Newsmen
When newsmen visited the pub during the time of the demolition controversy, Ned chased them away with a stick. He thought they had come to help Council evict him and his sister.
A public outcry to save the hotel by possible removal and re-erection [as later was done successfully with Schramm’s Cottage] was led by the then newly formed Doncaster-Templestowe Historical Society.
Artists flocked to the doomed building. But its doom actually came in an unexpected way.
On the day the National Trust featured Finn’s Upper Yarra Hotel in an effort to stimulate support for its protection, May 29, 1967, it mysteriously burned to the ground. Thirty firemen from six brigades fought the blaze.
[Image] FINN’S controversial Upper Yarra Hotel which burned to the ground.
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS November 4 1992
YESTERYEAR
Finer things in life
By JOAN WEBSTER
THOUGH life for the Doncaster pioneer woman was almost ceaseless hard toil, making their own bread, vinegar from pears, dried currants from grapes, tending their hens and cows, some managed to find time for fine arts and finery.
They walked to Kew or Collingwood markets with butter and eggs for sale, but some also walked to Hawthorn for music and dancing lessons. Others managed to take art lessons from local teacher Mr Laurie Smith.
For evening ‘relaxation’ the women darned and mended, turning collars and cuffs so that the frayed edges were reversed under a sleeve seam and they sewed by hand new clothes for the family, often with laborious and exquisite embroidery on petticoats or babies’ wear.
It was fashionable to wear a lace ‘fichu’ at the cuff or neck of a frock, detachable
so that it could be easily washed.
During their evening sewing women made fichus, cro- cheted d’oilies, collars and cuffs for sale to shops, but the price paid to them was very low.
One of the Australian-born generation able to develop her talent was Alice Williams, daughter of William Sydney Williams of East Doncaster who on marriage became Alice Zelius and lived in her father’s original house in Leeds St, Alice was a talented artist who, as well as painting on canvas, did miniatures on gum leaves.
Shopping was a social occasion - at Box Hill for Doncaster people and Heidelberg
for those living at Templestowe - shops being open until 11pm on Saturday nights.
A great treat was to visit the theatre in Melbourne, often riding there on a chaff
bag in the cart. From East Doncaster to Melbourne took one hour with the trotter.
Some pioneer women had surprising amenities. Though many did the family wash with a scrubbing board in the nearest creek others had a ‘hot water service’ by pumping up water from the well was onto the roof and down through the wall to the wood stove where it heated.
Entertainment was: letter reading, singing around the piano, playing charades, reading aloud and attending church.
On a clear day you could watch from the hilltops ships entering the bay though the heads. Quiet entertainments.
Sound carried far in that pre-industrialised era so that a man swearing at his horse could be heard from one hillside to another.
Men played cricket if they had threepence to buy a ball. After one match, Doncaster
v Lilydale, the men did not return home for three days, it was said even the horse
came home drunk.
[Image] MITCHELL’S Quality Store in Doncaster Rd
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS November 18 1992
NEWS watch
City’s years of change
By JOAN WEBSTER
THE 1960s were full of excitement and community participation in a metamorphosis that took just one decade to change from the orcharding hamlet of the previous 100 years.
Some gloated over rising population statistics and rate revenue.
Some sighed for the disappearing seas of pink and white orchard blossom, slowly but surely drying out into a lichen of red-tiled roofs.
Others cheered for personal prosperity of pockets lined by subdivisional ventures.
The changes of technology and community facilities were paralleled in my own East Doncaster street.
At the end of the decade there was hardly a vacant building block. At its beginning there was hardly an occupied house.
There was no electricity, no gas, water, telephone, no shops within a kilometre and a half.
The week the builders finished my house with hand tools, the electrical poles and wires went up.
But before we and our one and only neighboring ratepayers could be entitled to this now-basic commodity, every lot owner between us and the last pole two streets away had to be persuaded by me to pay to the (then) Shire Council the sum of 17 pounds.
The roads were clay and undrained.
The early part of that decade is a kaleidoscope of over-the-fence meetings and gutter-clearing working bees; ‘Keep Down Your Speed and the Dust’ road signs; petition for road metal, telephone, public transport, street-lights — and even for the authority to confiscate firearms.
Yes, being on the ‘frontier’ with Nunawading, on the Koonung Creek border, we latter-day pioneers often had to deal with marauding parties of sharpshooters who roamed through the bush, refusing to believe that the area was inhabited.
1962 brought the telephone — one small step for technology, one giant leap for womankind who were ‘hooked on’. No more running half a kilometre to a public phone box for a doctor. 1964, after battles of words and wits, bus services increased, and conditions at our only High School, Templestowe improved.
1965 brought near civil war over municipal severance.
1966 we were granted simultaneously the right to smash in our septic tanks and to elect a fourth clutch of councillors. A new riding. This mid-decade year promised to be the turning point environmentally for the city-elect.
It was the year of the great Town Plan. A blueprint for the municipality’s future, birthed through community travail.
Public meetings were held almost every week in every corner by resident groups, business groups, town planning groups — all attended by councillors who put proposals and listen to proposals, who answered questions, who changed plans to be made in line with the people’s wants and needs... who were made accountable.
The great Town Plan, years in the formulating, the community’s blueprint for a future city to be as the resident community wanted it to be to live in, was never implemented.
About a decade later it was quietly rescinded by a different kind of council. It died without a whimper from a different kind of community.
1967 the Shire became a city and this made its immediate mark on our lives with the making of the roads and footpaths. 1969, instead of a few scattered shops, we had Shoppingtown. By the end of the 60s decade we had moved out of the ‘establishment and survival’ stage to the attainment of culture with the Historical Society, the Arts and Cultural Society and of the municipally subsidised Citizens’ Counselling Service — now Doncare.
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS December 2 1992
YESTERYEAR
German connection
By JANE WEBSTER
The area just south of Doncaster Rd, East Doncaster, was a settlement called German Town.
It was bounded roughly on the east by Blackburn Rd and the west by Victoria St. Through it, west to east, ran German Rd.
More often it was known to its inhabitants as German Lane or Waldau Lane.
A map of December 16, naming a new site for the now Doncaster East Primary School No 2096 as: “Deep Creek School”, marks out the pegs and trenches for the boundary lines of this school site on German Rd.
German Rd is now George St.
During the 1914-18 World War the name was changed from German to George to honor the then King of England, with the hope of releasing the local descendants of German settlers from persecution by the local descendants of Anglo-Celtic settlers, as spies for the Kaiser.
German Town was not a ghetto. The German-born settlers mingled, married, worshipped and worked, entertained and were educated alongside the Anglo-Celtics.
The settled in a close area because three friends originally bought the whole 20 acre (200 hectare) parcel of land which adjoined that of fellow Germans Gottleib and Phillippine Thiele who in 1853 had pioneered settlement in that string-bark neck of the woods — and because Germans sold to Germans.
The three friends: John Friederick Straube, Johann Gotlieb Hilbig and Johann Walther met when they farmed in Victoria’s Western District.
John Straube had arrived in Adelaide with his father Ernest in 1849, then went on to farm in Warrnambool and Hamilton.
Johann Walther arrived about the same time and also started farming in Warrnambool.
Though they opened up a large area of Doncaster to settlement, not a street is named after them and not one stayed long in the district.
The Straubes stayed eight years, the Walthers four. Nothing more is known of the Hilbigs.
When the friends formed a syndicate to buy the land next to Thiele’s, Straube was allocated the western end and another portion. Walther took the eastern end and Hilbig the middle.
They were the German Town nucleus.
But it is by the names of their descendants and later purchasers of the land that the areas they gardened are now known.
Straube’s western land, where he lived, bears the name of the grand-son-in-law of its next purchaser: Rieschieck. Rieschieck’s Reserve.
Walther’s land at the eastern end also bears the name of a Reserve: Zerbe’s.
Zerbe was a next-but-one purchaser who at first bought only a L-shaped piece which included what is now the East Doncaster High School and a strip to the north of this.
At the position of what is now the athletics’ track at Rieschieck’s Reserve, was once a great dam built by the son of Straube’s purchaser, John Finger.
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YESTERyear
Leafy honor
By JOAN WEBSTER
The recently axed row of trees in Blackburn Rd by the East Doncaster Primary School were an ‘Avenue of Honor’.
They were planted in the early 1920s by pupils of the school as a memorial to soldiers who enlisted from East Doncaster for World War I.
The original avenue stretched from just south of George St to Anderson Creek Rd.
Trees were planted initially to honor former East Doncaster Primary School pupils and later for any soldier who had lived or worked in Doncaster.
Then, as several ex-students recalled, when the planting was finished, they still had a few trees left over, so anyone who had had a relative at the war was allowed to plant one for him.
Name-plates in the form of brass crosses were attached to the trees, with each tree having its own student assigned to water and care for it. The children regularly polished the plaques with metal cleaner.
In the depression of the 1930s, the school apparently lacked funds to properly care for its leafy charges.
The Doncaster sub-branch of the RSL noticed this and, in a letter to the school dated July 31, 1934, wrote regarding “the neglected state of the avenue and disrepair of the name-plates”.
A deputation from the school and the RSL approached the shire council and it was arranged that council would pay half of all expenses involved in the upkeep of the avenue and the RSL would pay the other half.
Council also agreed to put telephone wires underground so that they and the trees would not get in each other’s way, interfere with each other.
Working bees to clear up around the trees were recorded in 1934 and 1935, from which time the RSL was custodian of the trees.
Gradually, the brass plaques vanished.
In June 1966, one of the trees was felled by council workman and a furore erupted.
The Doncaster sub-branch of the RSL complained that it was custodian of the Avenue of Honor and that the tree had been felled without its knowledge.
The school committee explained that the tree obscured the view of the school crossing and it had requested felling to make the crossing safer.
Shire secretary Jack Thomson pointed out that all the trees would have to be felled eventually when Blackburn Rd was widened, which he predicted to be “within 10 years”.
Council mollified outrage by planning a replacement avenue, expected to be flourishing by that time in the then just-designed Saxonwood Drive.
[Image]
FLASHBACK: children from East Doncaster State School display name-plates in the Avenue of Honor in Blackburn Rd.
232 ByWays DoncasterMirror
YESTERYEAR
LEAFY HONOR
[AVENUE OF HONOUR AXED]
[500 words]
by JOAN WEBSTER
The recently axed row of trees in Blackburn Rd by the East Doncaster Primary School were an Avenue of Honor.
They were planted in the early 1920s by pupils of the school as a memorial to soldiers who enlisted from East Doncaster for World War 1. The original avenue stretched from just south of George St to Andersons Creek Rd.
Trees were planted initially to honour former East Doncaster Primary school ex-pupils and later for any soldier who had lived or worked in Doncaster. Then, as several ex-students recalled: “When the planting was finished, we still had a few trees left over, so anyone who had had a relative at the war was allowed to plant one for him”.
Name plates in the form of brass crosses were attached to the trees, with each tree having its own student assigned to water and care for it, and the children regularly polished the plaques with metal cleaner.
In the depression of the 1930s, the school apparently lacked funds to properly care for its leafy charges. The Doncaster sub-branch of the RSL noticed this and in a letter to the school dated July 31, 1934, written to the school regarding “the neglected state of the Avenue and disrepair of the nameplates”.
A deputation from school and RSL approached the Shire Council and it was arranged that Council would pay one half of all expenses involved in the upkeep of the Avenue and the RSL would pay the other half.
Council also agreed to put telephone wires underground so that they and the trees would not interfere with each other. Working bees to clear up around the trees were recorded in 1934 and 1935, from which time the RSL was custodian of the trees.
Gradually, the brass plaques vanished.
Later, for many years wooden name plates in the form of crosses stood at the base of each tree but these, too, faded away until in 1966 only two remained, weather-worn and almost indecipherable.
Then in June, 1966 one of the trees was suddenly felled by council workmen and a furore erupted. The Doncaster sub-branch of the RSL complained that it was custodian of the Avenue of Honour and that the tree had been felled without its knowledge.
The School Committee explained that the tree obscured the view of the school crossing and it had requested felling in order to make the crossing safer.
Shire Secretary Mr Jack Thomson pointed out that all the trees would have to be felled eventually when Blackburn Rd was widened, which he predicted to be “within 10 years”.
Council mollified outrage by planning a replacement avenue, expected to be flourishing by that time in the then just-designed Saxonwood Drive. Questions and
All the trees were cut down for road widening in 1993/4.
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS January 20, 1993
YESTERyear
Difficult times for a beautiful giant
— JOAN WEBSTER
Pine trees are distinctive to Doncaster’s appearance.
The introduced pines were planted by early orchardists to protect their growing seedlings once they had cleared the ground of native trees.
Many disappeared with the coming of housing subdivisions and just as many self-seeded and sprang up amongst patches of natural bush along creekways and riversides, most of fairly scruffy appearance.
But one rare pine, the Bunya Bunya, is a beautiful tree and unlike most other pines found in Australia, it is not introduced. However, for two reasons it is often thought of as an introduced exotic. One reason is the association of early German settlers with introduced pines.
The other is the special association of the Bunya Bunya with the German botanist Baron von Mueller.
Von Mueller was the designer of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens and a friend of many of Doncaster’s German families, in particular, the Thiele family of Friedrichs (now Waldau Court).
The Aborigines call the Bunya Bunya pine Bon-Yi Bon-Yi. It was once common throughout eastern Australia when the climate was moist and cool but unlike natives such as the eucalypt, it did not adapt to fire and as the climate got drier, bushfires increased and the species began to suffer.
After white settlement it nearly died out in the south.
It abounds in south-east Queensland and in Bunya Mountains there, grows to a height of 43 metres.
In 1838 a man named Andrew Petri gave samples of the tree to an English naturalist, J.S. Bidwill, who in 1843 took them to England.
In London the Bunya Bunya pine of Australia was named *Araucaria Bidwillii* after the naturalist, and was shown at London’s Kew Gardens, famous for its plants from all over the world, collected at the instigation of Joseph Banks.
A most beautiful and prominent local specimen of the Bunya Bunya once graced the front garden of Doncaster-Templestowe’s municipal offices, but was cut down when Doncaster Rd was widened in 1970.
That tree had been planted in what was the original garden of Schramm’s Cottage, which had been located just west of the municipal building.
One Bunya Bunya can be seen easily from Doncaster Rd, in the grounds of the Eastern Golf Club. Quite close to the roadside, it is east of the clubhouse and just about in line with a building which was the original coach house of that estate.
That pine is at the spot where David Mitchell, father of famous singer Dame Nellie Melba, built a cottage in 1860. Another Bunya Bunya pine planted in the pioneering days can be seen at the Victoria St end of the municipal gardens, down by Ruffey’s Creek.
It was planted by John Finger, an early German settler whose property was on that site.
The Bunya Bunya pine was highly prized by the Aboriginal people of Queensland.
The seeds of the cone, about 4cm long and sweet when young, were eaten raw. Ripened seeds were roasted in ashes or hot coals.
The pale coloured timber of this tree is also said to be suitable for furniture.
[Image]
A beautiful Bunya Bunya once graced the garden of Doncaster-Templestowe’s municipal offices.
234 ByWays DoncasterMirror
DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS February 10, 1993
YESTERyear
Days of orchards and lakes
The area bounded by Weatherby Rd, Cassowary St, Blackburn Rd and Koonung Creek was originally the orchard of William Sydney Williams.
Mr Williams was a leader, a kind and gentle man who never said a nasty word. Except, so his grandson Roy told me, when his eldest son John Sydney put a fire cracker in the outdoor toilet while his mother was in there.
In the 1870s “W.S.” helped campaign for a school in East Doncaster, the children from there having to attend Pastor Schramm’s in Doncaster Rd, just west of where the municipal offices are now — a long walk for those living in the Blackburn Rd/Reynolds Rd area.
To ascertain probable enrolment numbers for a feasibility study, an official of the Education Department visited every home and noted on a map the number of children in each.
After years of campaigning, the tiny Deep Creek school opened on the Andersons Creek Rd-Reynolds Rd corner.
Mr Williams was a Shire councillor from 1884-87 and again in 1893, wrote and lectured on fruit growing and became a fruit judge at interstate shows. He died in 1912.
John Sydney Williams married cousin Amy Toogood from over the creek who bore 11 children — the last when John was aged 60.
As the younger ones grew, John Sydney became too frail to work the orchard and so it fell to his older sons, John Thomas and Roy William, to help support them.
John worked the home orchard while Roy went out to work for “the enemy” — as he called other orchardists.
In the 1920s the Williams family fortunes began to fall and John had to mortgage the orchard.
The eastern hill (within the boundary of Leeds St, Maxia Rd, Blackburn Rd and the creek) and part of the Leeds St (west) land was sold by the bank for two thousand pounds.
Mr William’s eldest daughter Rose had married William Elder and made their family home and orchard on the northern section of the eastern hill.
Now the Beverey Hills Primary School stands on what was their land and when this was first built, the Elder’s fine brick homestead was still nearby. It was demolished in 1959 for the small shopping centre in Rosella St.
When the bank sold the Williams’ land, the largest holding south of Elders’, including the lake that covered the present Renshaw St, was bought by the Gedye family.
The family marketed the water lilies, and from this enterprise grew today’s Gedye Water Gardens and Fountains and the Gedye fibreglass compost bin, the first of its kind.
The dam was demolished when the land was sold in the 1960s for subdivision.
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DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS February 17, 1993
YESTERyear
SHEAHANS Rd, Templestowe, is named for the family of Patrick Sheahan, a licensee of the Templestowe Hotel who ran the pub for 40 years.
Patrick Sheahan arrived in Australia from Ireland with practically no money and came to the Templestowe district in 1861.
For many years he drove a bullock dray in the Yarra Valley and gradually built up his savings until in 1871 he was able to buy the hotel.
He was well known as a step dancer, a typically Irish talent, and contests between himself and visiting dancers were highlights of the local entertainment scene.
His son Ted built the forerunner to Templestowe's St Kevin's Roman Catholic Church.
As a small boy, Ted liked to watch the five-horse coach which stopped at the hotel precisely at 5.45pm each evening carrying passengers for Heidelberg.
And men with tales of fortunes to be won stopped here to quench their thirsts as they streamed past in their hundreds to the goldfields of Warrandyte during the second rush at the turn of the century.
Ted Sheahan became a builder's apprentice on leaving the small Templestowe school and when he returned from World War I became a building contractor.
His work for the then Public Works Department obtained for Templestowe's Roman Catholic community its first church, St Kevin's, in Atkinson St.
Before that, Templestowe Catholics travelled to Heidelberg or held services in the Memorial Hall.
During World War II, Ted built a small chapel for the army through the Public Works Department for the use of the Catholic Welfare Organisation at Melbourne's Camp Pell (now Royal Park gardens).
When the war ended, Father P. Power, Heidelberg's parish priest, bought the chapel and it was taken on a truck to Templestowe.
As Templestowe's population expanded in the 1960s, a new church was built in Herlihy's Rd and Ted Sheehan's chapel moved off again on a truck to become St Anne's, Park Orchards.
In 1943, the year he built the chapel, Ted bought farm land in Templestowe and felt that at 38 pounds an acre he had paid too much.
So he let go an offer to buy adjoining land at forty 40 pounds — and how he later regretted that.
Twenty years later he was paid 4000 pounds an acre for his land, and the parcel he didn't buy was sold for 8000 pounds an acre!
Ted Sheahan was for 40 years an honorary justice of the peace and for 15 of those was chairman of the bench at the Heidelberg Court of Petty Sessions.
236 ByWays DoncasterMirror
DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS February 24, 1993
YESTERyear
SCHRAMM's Cottage is a Doncaster tourist attraction.
Who was Schramm?
Much of the early life of Doncaster was intertwined with the life of this aristocratic scholar, sailor-turned-teacher and first resident pastor of the Doncaster Lutheran Church. Originally, the family name was Schrom.
An ancestor serving in the personal bodyguard of Emperor Maximillian I was given the title ‘von’ for saving the emperor's life and was commanded to change his name to Schramm: meaning ‘scar’.
Maximillian von Schramm received a classical education and spoke six languages, including Greek and Hebrew.
For seven years before coming to Australia in 1852, he served at sea, rising to the rank of mate.
Like most immigrants of the time, he tried his luck on the goldfields, but with little success. Penniless, he walked from Bendigo back to Melbourne and was believed to have worked in a soap factory at Port Melbourne, little suitable work being available for an educated man.
In Melbourne, he was met by fellow countryman Gottlieb Thiele, Doncaster's first German orcharding settler.
Thiele persuaded Schramm to come to Doncaster to teach the children of the German settlers.
Schramm taught in the church in Victoria (then Bismark) St. This tiny church on top of the hill known as Waldau was where Schramm's Cottage is now.
This was the first church built in the district, of wattle and daub, with high pitched roof and gothic windows and tower.
Soon children of all nationalities and faiths were among Schramm's pupils in the Lutheran church and at the end of the first year — 1860 — he had 50.
Three years later, it was gazetted a Common School, subject to the Board of Education.
Schramm was a great force behind the establishment of the once famous Athenaeum Library.
From 1871-1908, he was Registrar of Births and Deaths and for 50 years a regular weekly visitor to the Melbourne Children's Hospital (then in Carlton).
Schramm married Kate Pickering, daughter of Doncaster's first store keeper and a lay preacher of the Church of England, and they had a large family.
After his second cottage was built in 1864, his first home was converted to a school, helped by a government grant.
In 1867, the privately conducted school of Schramm's was taken over by the National Schools' Board. Schramm stayed as head teacher, with his wife Kate assisting him by teaching the youngest pupils.
To be continued next week.
237 ByWays DoncasterMirror
DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS March 3, 1993
YESTERyear
Strict tutor and father
By JOAN WEBSTER
SCHRAMM resigned from the National School and took his teaching to his own (second) cottage when education became “free, compulsory and non-sectarian” in 1872.
There he conducted a congregational school in a large back room.
When the present Doncaster Primary School No. 197 was built, the bluestone National School (Schramm’s former home, converted), was converted again, and became incorporated into a timber constructed E.S. and A. bank.
Maximillian von Schramm had been a Roman Catholic; he married a Church of England woman who was the daughter of an Anglican lay preacher and the brother of an Anglican clergyman, and he was honorary secretary of Doncaster’s Holy Trinity Church of England.
Then, in 1876, he became a Lutheran pastor.
He studied and was ordained in the Lutheran ministry the year he resigned as head teacher of Doncaster National School. His parish was the newly formed Doncaster parish, centered on the tiny church on Waldau Hill, where the remains of its cemetery are beside his relocated second cottage.
He also conducted monthly services at Bayswater and visited Berwick-Harkaway-Narra Warren parish.
Even in his old age Schramm enjoyed reading in Greek and Latin by the evening’s lamplight.
After 1884, until his death in 1908 at the age of 82, Schramm continued to give instruction in his cottage in the German language and bible history and catechism.
An ex-pupil of these classes told me that, despite his being a classical scholar who spoke six languages, Pastor Schramm’s German accent was so thick, it was difficult for his pupils to understand his lessons. It is said that a large ham always hung, curing, over the great open fireplace in his kitchen-classroom, causing a welcome diversion for pupils one day when it fell from its chimney hook into the fire.
Schramm was reputed to be a stern teacher and father.
But to illustrate a kindly and mentally-liberated aspect of his nature, his granddaughter, Mrs Alix Craig, recounted for me this story:
A visitor to the cottage one sabbath was invited to play the piano. With embarrassment, the young lady confessed that she did not know any hymns.
To which the Pastor replied: “My dear, the birds don’t change their tunes on Sundays”.
TOP: Schramm’s first home was converted to a school. A
BOVE: Schramm’s former home, converted to a school, was converted again and became part of the now demolished E.S. and A. Bank.
238 ByWays DoncasterMirror
DONCASTER AND TEMPLESTOWE NEWS March 17, 1993
YESTERyear
None but the brave
By JOAN WEBSTER
ONE of Australia’s first aviators came from Doncaster.
His licence to fly was No 742, granted by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale of the British Empire, in 1914 and he had been flying since 1911.
The son of William and Julisa Stutt, who bought Tullamore (now the Eastern Golf Clubhouse) from surgeon Sir Thomas Fitzgerald, he was known variously as Will, Willie and Billie Stutt.
Will’s schooldays gave no indication of the daredevil flyer he was to become. He obituary in the *Xavarian* describing him as ‘phlegmatic’, with athletics ‘making small appeal to him’.
‘Those who knew him will recall the serious-looking, old-fashioned face, the large grave eyes, the imperturbable calm of the Dux of First Class. Right through his schooldays he remained the same well-loved phlegmatic boy,’ it stated.
But in the book *Early Birds*, author Horris Miller describes him as ‘a ringleader of the wildest pranks’, and press cuttings of the opening of Richmond aviation school, NSW, 1916, show him as a daredevil in the air.
Will Stutt’s exploits would have rivalled those in the film *Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines*.
In fact, Will himself was chief instructor and a trainer of military pilots at the very flying school featured in the film, the Bristol Flying School at Brooklands, England, in 1914.
One of his magnificent mates was Charles Kingsford Smith.
On finishing his education, Will became an engineer. By 1911 he could fly an aeroplane. By 1913 he was convinced of a great future for the aeroplane and went to America and England to study aviation engineering.
When World War I began in 1914, he joined the Royal Flying Corps and became chief tester and later chief pilot for the Farnborough, testing experimental aircraft.
Testing all aircraft before they were sent on active service was perilous. According to Horris Miller in *Early Birds*, no parachutes were worn.
The War Office gave him special permission to do night flying, chasing German zeppelins.
The *Windsor and Richmond Gazette* reported his opening of the Australian Flying School in NSW as its commander.
‘A thrill ran through the crowd of spectators at Clarendon for the opening of the State Government’s Aviation School in 1916 as the chief instructor, Mr W.J. Stutt, nosed-dived through the air with Miss Strickland, the Governor’s daughter, in the passenger seat.’ Pictures show Will’s ‘sensational vertical dives and turns’, and his plane skimming four metres above the heads of the crowd.
Will Stutt was then asked to come to Melbourne to command the Aeroplane Repair Section at the Central Flying School at Point Cook.
There had been many crashes from windswept Point Cook and his mother did not want him to come.
When the schooner ‘Amelian Jane’ was missing, believed drifting in Bass Strait, Will Stutt flew to look for her.
He was never seen again. That was 1920. He was aged 31 and had been married to Stela Redden for only four years.
[Image] CAPTAIN Will Stutt, daredevil pioneer pilot, lived in Doncaster Rd.
239 ByWays DoncasterMirror
Articles enjoyed
SIR, — I go to St Peter and St Paul's school in Grade 4A. Our class has been learning the history of early Doncaster and have enjoyed Mrs Seppings-Webster's weekly articles in the Doncaster Mirror.
I enjoyed all of her articles and hope to get some more. They have been very useful, as we've just been to Schramm's Cottage.
I like the Tower and Petticoat Lane.
I know a lot more than I used to know about Doncaster's history now.
Thank you.
— Catherine Whitty, St Peter and St Paul's Primary School, Beverley St., East Doncaster.
MAY 8, 1981
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Lovers of local history will enjoy Joan Sepping's article, "Where have all the orchards gone?" in the July issue of Walkabout. Mrs. Seppings is an ardent worker whatever job she undertakes and there have been lots of them, kindergartens, schools, transport survey and local history, to name a few. She is also quite an accomplished writer. Her article in Walkabout tells the story of the orchards and is illustrated with an interesting collection of photographs of Doncaster identities.
Box Hill Reporter
Wednesday, 12th July, 1967
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