Eumemmerring Run

Doveton, Hallam, Endeavour Hills and the modern day suburb of Eumemmerring  were originally part of the  Eumemmerring Run. This run was 14 square miles (10,240 acres or 4,100 hectares) and was taken up by Dr Farquhar McCrae (1807-1850) in 1839.  It was described as good sheep country. Dr McCrae was the brother-in-law of Georgiana McCrae (1804-1890) who was married to his brother Andrew. Georgiana kept a journal, later published as Georgiana's Journal.  Later the same year it was taken over by Leslie Foster (1818-1900) or to give him his full name -  John Vesey Fitzgerald Leslie Foster, apparently known as 'alphabetical Foster’. Foster is pictured left.  Foster was, amongst other things, a first cousin of Sir William Foster Stawell (1815-1889) who was appointed Victorian Attorney General in 1851 and became Chief Justice of Victoria in 1857. Stawell Street in Cranbourne was named after him, as well as the town of Stawell. Foster also, in 1843, challenged Dr McCrae to a pistol duel over a land sale, when McCrae refused Foster whipped him and his horse with a horse whip. He was later fined £10 and had to pay £250 in damages. He went on to help draft Victoria’s constitution, acted as the administrator of the Colony between the departure of Governor La Trobe and the arrival of Governor Hotham.

Foster held the run until 1842 when it was taken up by Edward Wilson and James Stewart Johnson until 1846 when Thomas Herbert Power (1801 to 1873)  took it on.  The property then went from around the Dandenong Creek/Power Road all the way to Berwick. Power was a member of the Legislative Council from 1856 until 1864 and had land in other areas including Hawthorn, and is the source of the name Power Road. When he died in 1873 the value of his Estate was over £40,000. He still owned, according to his Probate papers 1,848 acres (747 hectares) in the Parish of Eumemmerring  when he died. Part of his Probate papers are reproduced below. You can see some of alloments  in the Eumemmerring Parish Plan, further below.

Part of  Thomas Herber Power's Probate papers. listing his Eumemmerring land, valued at £6006.  Wills and Probates up to 1925 are digitised and available on the Public Records Office of Victoria website. www.prov.vic.gov.au

 

Eumemmerring Parish Plan (partial) showing some of the land owned by Thomas Herbert Power.

 

It was apparently Power (pictured right) who called his property Grassmere and the Doveton  area was known as Grassmere or Eumemmerring until it was named Doveton in September 1954. On October 30 1888 Munro & Baillieu Estate Agents offered for sale  the Grassmere property of 3,000 acres (1214 hectares) subdivided into lots of between 1 acre and 20 acres (up to 8 hectares), some of which  was land from the Power Estate. It was described as having  extensive views of both mountains and sea and only a few minutes walk from this happily situated and pretty township, so fast becoming a favourite residential estate. The pretty township was Dandenong, pretty it may have been but even Usain Bolt wouldn't have made it from Dandenong to Grassmere in a few minutes. 

This is the plan of Grassmere which appeared in The Argus of October 30, 1888.  Marked on the map is the proposed railway line to Fern Tree Gully, which never eventuated.

It is highly unlikely McCrae, Foster or Power ever lived in the area, however in  the 1850s there were other land sales, especially around the Eumemmerring Creek, of smaller sub-divided blocks and farmers arrived and created a community - the  Eumemmerring, Denominational School started in 1858 and two Inns and  a race course were established and of course, a bit further east was the Hallam Hotel which began as a general store run by William and Mary Hallam, in the 1860s. These settlers didn't (generally) have roads named after them nor are remembered in any other way but Jean Uhl has listed them, on page 97,  in her book, Call back Yesterday: Eumemmering Parish (published by Lowden Press, 1972)  and they deserve to be recognised here.

 

Sources: Call back yesterday: Eumemmering Parish by Jean Uhl (Lowden Press, 1972). The photographs of Foster and Power are from the Parliament of Victoria website www.parliament .vic.gov.au. The Probate record of Thomas Power is from the Wills and Probate Papers digitised by the  Public Records Office of Victoria www.prov.vic.gov.au. The Grassmere plan comes from The Argus, available on Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper.

The information on Leslie Foster comes from the Australian Dictionary of Biography on-line at http://adb.anu.edu.au/ The original article was written by Betty Malone.

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Hallam - Part 1 - Early land owners

Over the next few blog posts we will be looking at the history of Hallam. Hallam is a relatively new name for the area, dating from 1905. Before that, the district was known as Hallam's Road after William and Mary Hallam (you can read about them here) and earlier on it was sometimes referred to as Dandenong or Eumemmering, which covered the area basically from the Dandenong Creek to what is now Hallam Road, on both sides of the Princes Highway.

 Hallam formed part of the 14 square mile Eumemmering Squatting Run, first taken up by Dr Farquhar McCrae (1807 - 1850)  in 1839 and transferred to John Vesey Fitzgerald Leslie Foster (1818 - 1900)  in the same year. He was apparently known as “alphabetical Foster’ and was amongst other things a first cousin of Sir William Stawell after whom Stawell Street in Cranbourne was named, as well as the town. He also, in 1843, challenged Dr McCrae to a piston duel over a land sale, when McCrae refused Foster whipped him and his horse with a horse whip. He was later fined £10 and had to pay £250 in damages. Foster went on to help draft Victoria’s constitution, acted as the administrator of the Colony between La Trobe and the arrival of Hotham and suggested that the licence be abolished and replaced by a gold export tax, this was not accepted by Governor Hotham and he actually more strictly enforced the fee, which as we know led to the Eureka uprising at Ballarat.

Back to the Eumemmerring Run -  Foster held the run until 1842 when it was taken up by Edward Wilson and James Stewart Johnson until 1846 when Thomas Herbert Power (1801-1873) took it on. The property then went from around the Dandenong Creek/Power Road all the way to Berwick.

 The large squatting runs were gradually broken up into smaller farms in the 1850s and early land owners included George Darley Boursiquot, the proprietor of an early Melbourne newspaper, The Port Phillip Patriot. This paper was started by John Pascoe Fawkner in 1839, taken over by Boursiquot in 1845 and renamed the Melbourne Daily News in 1848. Another early landowner was the Reverend Hussey Burgh Macartney, the first Dean of Melbourne.

Reverend Hussey Burgh Macartney (1799 - 1894)

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/macartney-hussey-burgh-4062

The grandly named  Reverend Hussey Burgh Macartney was born in Ireland in 1799 and went to University and became an Anglican Priest.  He married Jane Hardman in 1833 and they had five daughters and three sons. His children were Jane, Frances, Henrietta, Charlotte, John, Hussey and Edward. The family arrived in Melbourne in 1848. He was at various churches then he became Dean of Melbourne in 1852.  The Macartney’s first bought land in the Hallam area in 1852 and in the end they had 417 hectares of land.  You can read his biography here on the Australian Dictionary of Biography website

Another ‘famous’ family connected to the area was the Gunn family after whom Gunns Road was named. Robert Gunn, was an auctioneer and stock agent in the area. His brother Aeneas, was married to Jeannie Taylor, the author of We of the Never Never. Aeneas and Jeannie met in the Hallam area in romantic circumstances.
Jeannie was staying with friends near Narre Warren and driving into the township to attend a concert one night, the horses in the buggy became restless … Jeannie suggested that she climb down and hold their heads…..She was about to take the last step over the wheel and the horses suddenly backed and Jeannie was thrown into the arm of a man who had gallantly rushed forward to assist. That man was Aeneas Gunn who “having had a woman thrown at him in such a manner, felt it his duty to hold on to her”. They married in 1901 and moved to Elsey Station on the Roper River in the Northern Territory. Unfortunately, their married life was cut short by the death of Aeneas in March 1903. You can read more about Jeannie Gunn here, in the on-line version of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

In our next post we will look at other early land owners in Hallam, who may not have been famous, but settled in the area and built the community. In the third post we will look at the history of the Hallam State School, No. 244.

Sources
The picture of the Reverend Macartney comes from the National Library of Australia collection (nla.pic-an9653347). It is an engraving by H.S.Sadd from a daguerrotype by Batchelder.

The account of the meeting between Jeannie Taylor and Aeneas Gunn comes from Call back yesterday : Eumemmering Parish by Jean Uhl. (Lowden Publishing, 1972)

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Place names and their meanings from the Casey Cardinia Region.

On our website, you will now find a list of Place names and their meanings from the Casey Cardinia Region. Most Place names fall into five categories. Many place names come from Aboriginal words. Some of these are Bunyip, Cardinia, Lang Lang, Narre Warren and Eumemmerring. In the early days of settlement, many places were named to honour "important" Government officials, either Australian or British. Beaconsfield, Lyndhurst and Gippsland fall into this second category. The third common source of names comes from the names of local European settlers, examples of these include Bayles, Cannons Creek, Catani, Doveton, Hallam, Officer and Pearcedale. Fourthly, some towns were named by the European settlers after British or Irish towns or places that featured in their lives before they migrated to Australia or because landscape features reminded them of home. Examples of these reminiscent names are Belgrave, Clyde, Iona and Skye. The final group of names are descriptive such as Blind Bight, Bald Hill (an early name for Lyndhurst), Five Ways, Heath Hill, and Mount Misery. To access the list of place names from the Casey Cardinia Region either click on this link http://www.cclc.vic.gov.au/placenames on our website homepage go to Local History then Topics.

If you have an interest in place names then it is worth chasing up Place names of Victoria by Les Blake (published by Rigby in 1976). It is out of print, but may be available in second hand books shops or through Public Libraries. Another fantastic source for Victorian place names is the following site by Eric Bird called Place names on the coast of Victoria at http://www.bcs.asn.au/vic_coast.pdf
Eric has researched all the coastal place names from the South Australian border to the New South Wales border including Port Phillip Bay and Western Port Bay.

The 1845 map, above, shows some of the early place names in the region, such as Baungan Waterhole, from which Bangholme took its name, Dandenong and Eumemmerring. It is taken from Call back yesterday : Eumemmerring Parish by Jean Uhl.

The photograph, below, shows the Sportman's Rest cottage on the foreshore at Tooradin, circa 1900. Tooradin, on Western Port Bay, is one of the many place names described by Eric Bird on his web site.

The people in this photograph have been named as  (left to right) Ateyo girls, Edith Walker, Frederick Atyeo snr, Mr Lemme, Bob Basan, Vic Lemme, Larry Basan. The circa 1900 photograph of Sawtell's Inlet was reproduced in the book Tooradin: a history of a Sportsman's Paradise and the first 100 years of State School No. 1503 by David Mickle, published 1975. This book formed the basis of Tooradin: 125 years of coastal history.

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