3. Straight Lines
- Aboriginal Views
- Early White Views
- Straight Lines
- The Gippsland Railway
- Civic Pride in Oakleigh
- Land Use and Industry
- Endnotes
In 1853 assistant surveyor Eugene Bellairs was sent off to survey the Parish of Mulgrave, prior to sale of the Crown land. He divided it up neatly with roads running east/west and north/south, one mile apart. Each of those one square mile blocks was then quartered into four lots of 160 acres each. On the western edge, nearest Melbourne, the blocks were 80 acres. Bellairs wrote comments about the landscape on his survey documents. The area south of High Street, between Blackburn and Springvale Roads, for instance, was 'dense stringy bark forest'. Most of the north and east was covered in stringy bark, while further south where the South Eastern Arterial crosses Ferntree Gully Road was 'lovely land, well grassed, gum, shea oak, honeysuckle'.
Bellairs' comments are most detailed for the area south of the South Yarra pound. He proposed a village reserve for what was to be called Oakleigh. Bellairs' density of comments may indicate that he spent longest in this area. He would almost certainly have arrived in the area via what he described as 'the track to Dandenong' and which he proposed to transform into Dandenong Road. His view is therefore possibly skewed towards this southwest corner. Certainly, he doesn't seem to have spent much time along the Dandenong Creek, an area that he described as 'flat with rank swamp grass'. His vision seems to have been settlement in the southwest and grazing between Wellington and Ferntree Gully Roads. The northeast was more forested and he didn't even survey the land north of Waverley and east of Springvale Roads in this first land division.
In fact, many of the blocks were purchased by people who had no intention of farming them. Residents of Melbourne were already very well aware that those with a little capital could buy land at Government sales and turn a profit reselling on terms. In July 1854, John Hughes Clayton, solicitor of Little Collins Street, wrote to his father in England that he had bought land for 22 shillings an acre at a Government sale and sold it for 4 pounds. He was proposing to buy more. [12]
Not all the land in the Parish of Mulgrave was sold at once. The maps of government land subdivisions show the name of the first purchaser at the government land sale, the area in acres and in some cases the date.
Most of the rural allotments were sold on 2 September 1853 and 20 October 1853. The land in the north west corner was sold later, on 20 December 1856. Land along the Dandenong Creek was sold later still. Cumming, for instance, bought the block of land in the north east corner in 1861 and Gallagher and Minogue bought their blocks in 1880.
The blocks in the township of Oakleigh were also sold over a period of time. The first to be surveyed and sold were those between Convent Road (Allen St) and Logie Street. Most of these were sold on 30 August 1853, although some didn't sell until 1854. Christina Atkinson bought the blocks around her South Yarra Inn. However, the earliest blocks of all to go up for sale were the mainly 5 acre allotments between Stamford Road and Box Hill Road, on 26 May 1853. The blocks between Stamford Road and Atkinson Street and south of Logie Street were not put up for sale until very much later. The whole area was marked on an early Bellair survey as a "village reserve" and may have been envisaged as open space. Some blocks were set aside as recreation reserves and others were sold in 1864, 1870, 1871 and 1872. The realisation that the township had shifted south and the subdivision and sale of the tiny allotments of the blocks north of Atherton Road and on either side of Atkinson Street did not take place until 1884 and 1885.
A number of people bought several blocks in the Parish of Mulgrave and resold. Henry De Carte and James Watson went one step further. One of the blocks they bought in October 1853 was in the south west corner of the parish of Mulgrave. They put the 59 acres up for sale subdivided into 369 lots in November of the same year. They called their subdivision 'The Magnificent Township of Bury St. Edmunds'. 'Independent of the excellent quality of the soil, which is eminently suited for Market Gardens and other Agricultural purposes, the large quantity of Timber on the Ground renders this Property doubly valuable. It should also be borne in mind that the Parish Road alone divides Prahran and Bury St. Edmunds, and the Auctioneer does not require to tell the citizens of Melbourne how valuable land in Prahran has now become.' [13]
Even the auctioneer appears to have had his doubts about the future of Bury St. Edmunds as a township, but West Gate, Hatter Street, East Gate, Abbey Gate and School Hall Street remain as a monument to this early example of land speculation in the area.
Another speculative subdivision was made in 1853, to the north of the Creek and the township. Collings bought land at the 1853 sale. One of the blocks ran south from Collings Street towards the Creek. He had it mapped out complete with a reserve for a market square and a national school. [14]
Although few of the lots were built on straight away, Oakleigh did begin to acquire some buildings and a semblance of a street or two between the Creek and the Dandenong Road. Like the main rural grid in Mulgrave, Oakleigh's early, streets all ran east/west or north/south. The Dandenong Road alone deviated from this grid. At this stage, however, the streets and roads were mainly streets and roads in theory. In practice they were muddy ruts around tree stumps in winter and wandering dusty tracks in summer. AB Orlebar visited the area in 1854, on behalf of the Commissioners for National Education. He seems to have found more tents and huts than houses and woodcutting was the most important occupation.
'Under the guidance of Mr O'Flaherty, [15] I walked over a considerable part of the parish of Mulgrave, visited forty-five families and found that there are altogether 50 families in the parish within three miles of the school with 60 boys and 34 girls...
They have almost all settled within the year... they take in wood to the Melbourne Market and cart out manure and are thus bringing into cultivation patches of garden ground and in some cases are attempting to raise agricultural produce, by the labour of their own hands and families.' [16]
In January 1857 the Oakleigh and Mulgrave District Roads Board was formed to raise money and turn theoretical roads into practical routes for coaches and carts and drays and bullock teams and horses and pedestrians. In fact no-one could be persuaded to stand for election to the Roads Board until 1860. After that some progress was made in forming roads. Mainly the Roads Board relied on Government grants and income from the toll gates set up along the main roads. [17] Very soon Oakleigh began its first shift south, the focus of the town coming to be the stretch of Dandenong Road between Ferntree Gully Road and the Parish Boundary. known as Broadwood and later as Broadway. It was indeed broad, the thoughtful Central Roads Board having declared the Dandenong Road to be three chains wide (66 yards, or about 60 metres).
In this period between the gold rushes of the fifties and the land boom of the eighties, the area of Mulgrave and Oakleigh was transformed into an egalitarian landscape of small houses and small farms, all private property and mostly owner occupied.
Tales were told of the Bunurong holding corroborees at the junction of Ferntree Gully and Dandenong Roads, or following their tracks from the hills behind Clayton down to the Moody Yallock Creek and the sea. From the 1860s whites seem to have looked upon them as a curiosity. A migratory use of the land had already been firmly replaced by settlement on individual private property. High death rates, low birth rates and a Government policy of evicting the Kulin from their country effectively made room for sheep and cows and vegetables.
Besides, traditional food supplies were rapidly made unavailable following white settlement. As early as 1839, William Thomas noted that sheep stealing increased in winter when the Kulin were hungry. Kangaroo and emu had already retreated from areas of white settlement. In addition, the leaves of the murnong or daisy yam, the traditional staple food gathered by women, were cropped down to ground level by sheep, making it impossible for the women to find and dig up. [18]
As has been noted, where the bush was dense, the new residents made an income chopping down trees and carting the timber to Melbourne for firewood. They planted exotic trees, though especially conifers, and worked diligently to shape their rectangular blocks to fit the dreams they had brought around the world.
Church played an important part in that vision. So did education for the children being born Australian. The community as a whole invested in roads, whether they wanted to or not. The various religious sub-communities also invested on a more apparently voluntary basis, in churches and schools. Individuals invested their money and labour in hotels and shops and houses. Only the roads and hotels were on a grand scale. Most of the other buildings were small with two to five room wooden houses. In 1861 there were only 15 brick or stone houses in the whole Parish of Mulgrave but 167 wooden houses, 8 tents and 25 slab, bark or mud huts. Only 29 of these houses had 5 or more rooms. At that time the population of the Parish of Mulgrave was 1,108, including 278 people in Oakleigh. [19] Community investment in churches was significant and the hotels, churches and schools of this period together represent the architectural priorities of local residents.