Post Cards of Berwick

In this post we will look at three Post Card views of High Street in Berwick. The card, immediately below, shows the north side of High Street in the 1920s, looking east. The Berwick Hotel, also known as the Border Hotel, was established in 1857 by Robert Bain. It was the venue for the first Police Court in Berwick and the Berwick District Roads Board was also formed in this building in 1862. The earliest section of the building, the triangular single storey part, dates from 1857. The double storey sections were added in 1877 and 1887. The Bain family owned the hotel until 1909, with Susan Bain taking over as licensee after her husband's death in 1887. At the time of this photograph, it is advertised as being under new Management, with Byrnes as the licensee.

Further up the hill, you can Loveridge's store, which still operates in Berwick. Alfred Ellis Loveridge and his wife Emma (nee Crean) operated a store in Peel Street from around 1912. This was a continuation of the Crean family store, which had been established by Emma's father, John, in 1877. The store moved to High Street in the 1920s.

This is the back of the Post Card, sent in 1924 from Maxie to
his 'dear Ma'.

The Post Card, above, was recently donated to us by Mrs Audrey Stokes. Mrs Stokes had taken a holiday in the area in 1955 and purchased this Post Card as a souvenir. It shows the north side of High Street, looking west. At the top are the Tudor shops built in 1937 by Sir Sidney Sewell (1880-1949) and designed by architects Ballantyne & Wilson. Sir Sidney was a doctor, and a lecturer on the central nervous system. After World War One he looked after soldiers suffering from 'shell shock'. He later took an interest in the treatment of tuberculosis and established a service to care for patients. With Sir Richard Stawell he established the Association of Physicians of Australasia in 1930, which later became the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. An early tenant of the Tudor Shops was the Blue Plate Tea Room and travelling library. Jan's Tea house occupied one of the shops in this photograph.


This Post Card is from the 1970s or early 1980s. It shows the Hotel, the Tudor shops and the War Memorial, erected in the 1920s.


The information on Sir Sidney Sewell comes from the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

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Sherwood Hotel, Tooradin

The Sherwood Hotel, in Tooradin, was near the corner of the South Gippsland Highway and Tooradin Tyabb Road. It was built around 1870 on land owned by Matthew Stevens, who is listed in the Shire of Cranbourne Ratebooks from 1867. An early publican was John Wilson from 1873-1874. The Sherwood Hotel and 258 acres were put up for a mortgagee auction on March 14, 1878. The advertisement (reproduced below) lists the auction on behalf of the late John Strudwick, and it is thought that the Poole family purchased the hotel at this time. George Poole became publican at the Sherwood in December 1888.

The Argus Thursday March 7 1878, page 2.
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5924137

The Poole brothers, Frederic (1826-1894), George (1827-1909), and Thomas (1837-1906) were early settlers in the Cranbourne area. Frederick was elected to the Cranbourne Road District Board, which became the Shire of Cranboure in 1868, from 1865 to 1872, 1873 to 1874 and 1885 to 1893. He was Shire President in 1887-88. Frederick lived at Triuna, Lyndhurst. Thomas lived at Lang Lang.

George Poole was bootmaker in Cranbourne, in the 1860s. He was elected to the Cranbourne Road District Board in 1866, and remained a Councillor until 1893. He was Shire President on three occasions. George Poole was described as a one of the most forceful personalities in the district and according to Gunson (the author of The Good Country : Cranbourne Shire) he dominated the Cranbourne Council and was very involved in policy making.

We have a first hand report of George and the Sherwood Hotel from a booklet Around Tooradin : the Sportsman's Paradise by Hawkeye. It was published, in serial form, in late 1888 and early 1889 to promote the sale of land around Tooradin. Hawkeye described the journey to Tooradin by train, the fishing, local hospitality. He described the Sherwood Hotel as like an old farm house, with a big dash of liberality and kindliness about it. The front portion is brick, and new weatherboard rooms have just been added. It is built just on the crest of a hill, and is in every respect a most comfortable house to stop at. Hawkeye describes George Poole as a fine specimen of a true Saxon. Big of limb, deep of chest, clear eyed, strong and powerful throughout, he reminds you more of the days when there were giants in the land than of a prosperous publican….. In his early days he visited America and became imbued with a touch of American smartness – with a knowledge of how to be cute and make money. On his return to England he was the first to start a real American bar where the thirsty Britain could obtain any drink from a mint julep to a cocktail. George then decided to try his luck in Australia. Hawkeye goes on to say that in Australia George had settled down quietly and his heart appears to be centered in his farming. George does not like the public house life, he hates drinking and talks of going into the coffee line. "Coffee is the thing", he says, "nothing like coffee, I think I’ll build a coffee palace".

The ground of the Sherwood Hotel had a large stable, a diary and milking shed. The Pooles milked forty cows. George also constructed a race course and bred horses. When the Melbourne Coach refused to stop at his hotel, he built himself a Coach, which met the Cranbourne train and travelled on to Grantville.

We do not know much about Mrs Poole, Hawkeye says she is a most obliging and attentive hostess and that she makes beautiful butter. I had assumed that the obliging Mrs Poole was George's wife, Ann (nee Seymour) whom he married in 1864. They had three children Ann, born 1865, who married William Hardy; Maria, born 1867, who married James Facey and Frederick, born 1870 who married Isabella Kernot. Ann died in 1916, aged 85. Ann had previously been married to Magnus Peterson, who had been born in Sweden. There were two children from this marriage Thomas, b. 1854 and Peter , born 1860. Peter was married to Caroline Kernot, Isabella's sister. You can read more about the Kernot family, here.  Magnus died in 1861.

As I said, I had initially assumed that George Poole's  obliging and attentive hostess  was his wife Ann, however, George had an on-going relationship with Mary Catherine (nee George) the widow of John Legge Strudwicke. Mary had married John Legge Strudwicke in 1871 and had two children Albert (b. 1871) and Louisa (b. 1875) and then John died in 1877.  John had been the owner of the Sherwood Hotel until his death, when the Poole family took it over. Mary's relationship with George Poole produced four children - Kate Poole Strudwicke (b. c. 1881), Richard Poole (b.c. 1882), George Poole Strudwicke (b. 1887) and Amy Poole Strudwicke (b. 1895) (so George was 54 when the first one was born and 68 when the last one was born). I can't find Kate and Richard's birth registration and George and Amy are registered twice, under both Strudwicke and George,  but have no father listed. However, both Kate and Amy have George Poole listed as their father in the Victorian Death Indexes. So the most obliging Mrs Poole referred to by Hawkeye is actually Mary, not Ann. I wonder what Ann thought of this - was she humiliated by George living openly with and having a family with another woman or was she glad to be rid of him and happy to live her own life or was it an amicable split that suited both of them?

The Sherwood Hotel, 1907. The Licensee, whose name is listed over the door, is John Lambell.

George Poole had left the Hotel sometime before 1906 and there were a series of Licensees from 1906 - John Lambell, Robert Porter, James Donohue, David McDonald, Mary Clapperton, Frank Gibbons, Florence Johnson and finally John Hopkins. The Sherwood Hotel was deprived of it's licence on December 31 1917, after a Deprivation Sitting of the Licenses Reduction Board. A amendment to the Liquor Licenses Act of 1906 allowed the Board to systematically reduce the number of Victualler's licences in Victoria, taking into account public convenience and number of other Hotels in the area.

The Sherwood Hotel, 1953

The article reproduced from The Argus Newspaper, has been digitised as part of the National Library of Australian Newspapers Beta project. Around Tooradin : the Sportsman's Paradise by Hawkeye is reproduced in Tooradin : 125 years of Coastal history, compiled by John Wells and the Tooradin Celebrate Together Committee.

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Silver Wells, Gembrook

The Ure family were early settlers in Gembrook. John Ure had selected 213 acres of land in 1874 and moved to Gembrook with his wife, Jane (also called Jean), and their two sons Alexander (b. 1872) and John (b. 1873), who were both born in Scotland.  Another two sons, Robert (b. 1875)  and James Buchanan (b. 1881) were born at Gembrook. The Ures named their property Silver Wells due to the pure water they found when they sank their first well. Silver Wells had a suite of buildings including a number of houses, machinery sheds, barns, a cheese room, dairy and boiler room. It also had a Post Office and a store with a butchers room which served the small mining community, which had come to the area to search the local rivers for gold and silver. The Ures continued to operate the Store, at what was called North Gembrook, until 1901 when the commercial focus of the town shifted to the area around the Railway Station, for the Puffing Billy line.

General Store at Silver Wells

Detail of General Store, showing some construction details.

The Silver Wells property is on the Victorian Heritage Register, which states that the complex is notable for the range of vernacular construction used in the buildings, constructed mainly during the 1870s. For instance, the Stables are constructed in the drop slab method, the original house and Post Office are notched logs, which is a rare form of construction in Colonial Victoria. The dairy extension is built with split weatherboards. The roofs are a mixture of bark or shingles, though they have since been covered by corrugated iron. The four photographs below show some of the buildings and construction details.

The Heritage Register also states that the complex of buildings is located in a most picturesque setting, under mature conifers and with the remnants of a very early garden and orchard surrounding them.

The Silver Wells garden.

John Ure, who died in 1926 aged 85, was a Berwick Shire Councillor. He is pictured below in 1900 outside the Shire Offices in High Street in Berwick. He is the tall chap, sixth from left at the back. According to Genseric (Bill) Parker, author of Forest to Farming : Gembrook an early history, John Ure was six feet two inches. Jane Ure, who was the sister of the Hon James Buchanan of Berwick, died in 1905 aged 69.

Berwick Shire Hall, c. 1900. Photograph reproduced from
The Early Days of Berwick and its surrounding districts.

John Ure owned a bullock team as did his son, John, known as Jack. Jack's two eldest sons, Bob and Dave, also worked bullock teams. Bill Parker has an interesting account in his book of the cartage of a steam engine , weighing eight or nine tons, from a timber mill site to the railway at Nar Nar Goon. Jack and his sons had a team of twenty bullocks and firstly they had to haul the engine up a slope from the Mill site using a block and tackle, and they then had to drag it into Gembrook, a distance of three miles. This proceduere took a whole day. The next day a team of twelve bullocks drove the engine to the Nar Nar Goon station , via Mount Eirene, this journey took another whole day. They then had to return to Nar Nar Goon on the third day to load the engine onto a flat top train truck.

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Endeavour Hills - Farms and Housing Estates

In a previous blog post we looked at the development of the suburb of Endeavour Hills. This blog will look at some of the earlier history of the area.
An early landowner of the area was Thomas Herbert Power who had owned the Eumemmering Run from the 1850s. Power’s land extended from Power Road, almost to Berwick and north to Heatherton Road. Power sold some of his land, known as Grasmere in 1888. The land for sale on October 30 1888 was advertised some of the choicest land in the colony. Other land originally owned by Power had earlier been sold and a purchaser, Dr John Tremearne, built the Four Oaks homestead around 1885. Two of the original four oaks still remain.

Four Oaks homestead (c.1885) and one of the two remaining oak trees. Photograph was taken in 1987.

The suburb was named after Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour. Other suggested names at the time included Pine Hill and Piney Ridge, due to the number of pine trees in the area. The pine trees were also reflected in the names of farms in the area - from 1894 Captain Jules Commans owned land in the area, called The Pines. By the time he sold the land in November 1922 he owned 1330 acres (about 540 hectares) - both north and south of Heatherton Road. Commans was a stevedore and was one of the directors and founders of the Victorian Stevedoring Company. He died in 1937, aged 79. One of Comman's daughters, Ruby, married Frederich Fischer and their grandson is Tim Fischer, the former leader of the National Party, deputy Prime Minister, and now the Australian Ambassador to the Holy See. The Comman's land was later subdivided and sold off and one of the early purchasers, in 1930, was David Brown of the Essex Dairy in Dandenong. He called his farm Essex Park. Brown sold to Edgar and Dorothy Anderson around 1940 who built the house pictured below.

Essex Park homestead (c.1940).

Piney Ridge was the name of a 645 acre (260 hectares) farm owned by Charles & Ellen Hartley from 1942 and managed by Viv Campbell. This land at Crown Allotments 7 & 8, Parish of Eumemmering was also once part of Captain Comman's land and had been originally owned by Thomas Power. It was a Jersey dairy stud and notable for the high boundary fences built to keep out trespassers and to protect the prize cattle. It was also used in the Second War World for manoeuvres by the American and Australian troops camped at Rowville. The Jersey cattle were sold at a Clearing sale in 1950 and the Hartleys then raised beef cattle. The 117 cattle sold for over 8,000 guineas or about 8,400 pounds. To put this in perspective, an average house in the outer suburbs of Melbourne at the time cost about 3,000 pounds. Mr Campbell kept a scrapbook of the newspaper articles related to the Hartley enterprise and the breeding of Jersey cattle, which we have a copy of in our Archive.

The Advertisement for the sale of the Hartley Jersey stud, from the Gippsland & Northern Co-operator of November 2, 1950. This is from the Campbell collection of newspaper articles referred to above.

Another early farm in the area was Mossgiel Park, of 745 acres (300 hectares). This farm was owned from 1904 until 1943 by the Winter family and called Danderago. Later owners, Robert and James Picken, called their farm Mossgiel Park and this become the name of the housing estate, though according to the Shire of Berwick Rate books the Pickens only owned the farm from 1950 until 1954. Mossgiel Park was named after a farm of the same name leased by the Scottish poet, Robert Burns.

The Mossgiel Park Housing Estate off Heatherton Road was conceived in 1974. The plan above shows the 'conceptual layout' showing parks, schools and shops and the 'density of persons per acre'. The developers were Development Underwriting Limited. Another Housing Estate north of Heatherton Road was Chalcot Lodge Housing Estate. This was an A.V Jennings Estate, and started around 1974.

 

A photograph from the Chalcot Lodge development brochure produced by A.V Jennings. The photograph was captioned The Avenue, and shows some of the Endeavour Hills pine trees.

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Narre Warren and District Family History Group

National Family History Week takes place from Saturday, August 1st until Sunday, August 9th 2009. We have our own Family History Group based in Casey Cardinia, the Narre Warren and District Family History Group. The Group has just celebrated their 20th anniversary and are still going strong.

The members of the 20th anniversary sub-committee, cutting the birthday cake. Left to right - Faye McCoubrie, Pam Lowther, Lorraine Taylor, Wendy Goodwin, Lynne Bradley and Eileen Durdin.

The first meetings of the Group were held in Lorraine Taylor’s living room at her house in Sweeney Drive in Narre Warren on May 10th 1989. Resources were owned personally by the members and shared with others at each meeting. In June 1989 the Group affiliated with the Genealogical Society of Victoria and in July they produced their first newsletter, Spreading Branches. The Group fund-raised to purchase resources, and from October 1990 the meetings moved to the Presbyterian Church meeting room in Narre Warren. When the Narre Warren Library opened on November 21st 1992 they moved into a room there, and have been with the Library ever since.

The Family History Group has a well resourced Research Room staffed with knowledgeable, helpful and friendly volunteers. The Group also produces valuable research about the Casey Cardinia area – they have transcribed registers and created Indexes to the burials at Harkaway, Berwick and Pakenham cemeteries. Another great and on-going project is their Casey Cardinia Index, a combined index of every local history book written on a town, organisation or person in the Casey Cardinia area.


They have also produced a history of their first 20 years, called
Kindred Spirits.  It is an interesting account of the Group from the first meeting in May 1989 to the successful group they are today, with over 100 members.

If you have been involved in Family History research you will know how much change there has been in genealogical resources over the past twenty years - index cards have been replaced by microfiche which in turn have been replaced by on-line resources, such as Ancestry database. In fact, it has got to the stage now where people expect to find their whole family tree complete and sitting there on the Internet waiting for them. One of the early projects which the Group undertook was transcribing the Shire of Berwick Rate books, by hand, onto individual index cards. The City of Berwick and the Cardinia Shire have since microfilmed the Rate books and they are available on CD-ROM.

The Shire of Berwick Rate Cards. Each rate-payer had their own Index card. It was a labour of love and dedication to produce these cards.

The Group were based at the Narre Warren Library until September 2017 when they shifted to rooms in the Cranbourne Library Complex (65 Berwick-Cranbourne Road). Check out their website for opening hours, meetings and other information. http://nwfhg.org.au

Come along to check out their resources, get some advice and find out for yourself what a supportive friendly group they are.

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B.J Wallis Gardens and the Lily Pond at Pakenham

Near the Cardinia Shire Offices, in Henty Way, at Pakenham are the B.J. Wallis Gardens, created from an old quarry, and the Lily pond, which is off Duncan Drive. The B.J. Wallis Gardens were officially opened on May 30th 1993 by the Shire President, Cr Bill Ronald.

The old quarry before the gardens were complete. The Lily pond is on the right, towards the top of the photograph.

The gardens were named in honour of the Shire Secretary, Barry John Wallis. Mr Wallis was Shire Secretary of the Shire of Berwick from 1966 until 1973 and the Shire of Pakenham from 1973 until 1982. A report in the Pakenham Gazette of June 2nd, 1993 which covered the opening of the Gardens mentioned that Barry Wallis grew up in Pakenham and regularly visited the quarry as a child and that during the construction of the Shire Offices (officially opened July 28th 1983) he recognised the potential of the quarry to become a landscaped garden. The Gardens now include a rotunda and a series of walking tracks.

The B.J Wallis Gardens, shortly after completion.

The gardens were created around a quarry, originally owned by Thomas Henty of Pakenham Park. Thomas was the grandchild of Thomas and Frances Henty, who with their children James, Charles, William, Edward, Stephen, John, Francis and Jane had arrived in various Australian colonies from 1829 to 1832.

Thomas Henty was born in Launceston in 1836 to James and his wife Charlotte (nee Carter). Thomas purchased the property Pakenham Park from Dr James Bathe in 1865. Henty was a member of the Berwick Shire Council from 1866, and Shire President on two occasions from 1869-1872 and 1873-74, and from 1884 to 1887 he was a member of the Legislative Council. He married Lucy Pinnock in 1869 and they had eight sons and two daughters. The first regular Church of England services in Pakenham were held at Pakenham Park and Thomas Henty purchased six acres of land in 1871 for the ‘old’ Church of England, on the corner of Main Street and McGregor Road. He also laid the foundation stone for the building on December 7th 1883. He named the Church St James, in honour of his father. The first service at the Church was held in May 1884.

After Thomas Henty died in 1887 the land was taken over by his son, James Reginald Henty, who retained the homestead block until he died in 1929. James Henty enlisted in the Boer War, was a Berwick Shire Coucillor and Shire President 1913-1914. A boulder, near the Shire Offices, marks the place were his ashes were scattered. After Henty died the land was purchased in 1932 by Frank and Evelyn Duncan, after whom Duncan Road is named.

A view of the Rotunda and Quarry walls, taken shortly after completion.

Henty’s quarry supplied stone used for the construction of the Melbourne to Sale railway line. The Oakleigh to Bunyip section opened October 1877. During the construction of the line a canvas town developed on Henty’s hill, with a population estimated at 400. The men worked on the line and worked in the quarry.

The Lily Pond was also part of Henty land and was originally of eight acres (around 3.2 hectres). It is pictured below in 1929.

These photographs were taken in 1929.
The original inscription on the photograph above is The dam at Pakenham.
The original inscription on the photograph below is Seddon gathering lilies, Pakenham Park dam.

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Pakenham in the 1980s and early 1990s.

We have many treasures in our Archive including these interesting photographs of Pakenham, taken in the 1980s to early 1990s. They are interesting because they show Pakenham when it was changing from a country town to the outer suburb of Melbourne which it is today. Our family has a connection with Pakenham over the past fifty years - we all went to Pakenham Consolidated School in the 1960s and early 1970s, we went to the Presbyterian, later Uniting, Church and did our shopping at Pakenham so I do remember Pakenham when it was a country town and have seen the development over the past twenty five years. If, like me, you knew Pakenham as a country town then these photographs will bring back memories and if you have a more recent connection to Pakenham, then these photographs will show you a part of Pakenham's 'modern' history.

Main Street in Pakenham, taken November 1985, looking south to Henty Street, the Safeways complex and the railway line. Click on the photograph to enlarge it. The roundabout is the intersection of Main Street and John Street. On the right is the old Methodist Church. This was built in 1914, though the Pakenham Methodist Home Mission Station had previously catered to the Methodist of the district from 1885. The Church was demolished around 1986-1987. Next to the Church, on the right, are the Erica Place units, apparently the first set of units built in Pakenham. They were constructed around 1982. Heading east down Main Street on the left side of John Street was N.N. Webster Real Estate Agents, pictured immediately below, taken around the same time as the aerial photograph. Continuing down Main Street we come to the Old Pakenham Post Office, with its distictive terra cotta roof, which is also pictured below.

Noel Webster's grandfather had arrived in Pakenham in 1892, and had a butchers shop in the Main Street. Noel purchased the Real Estate business from H. Hogan in 1947. According to this advertisement from the Back to Pakenham Souvenir booklet of March 1951, H. Hogan commenced his business in 1900.

The Pakenham Post Office was built in 1924 in 'Georgian revival' style. This Post Office actually began as the Pakenham East Post Office, as the original town of Pakenham was centred on the Princes Highway and Toomuc Creek and the town that developed around the Railway Station from 1877 was known as Pakenham East. It was still referred to as Pakenham East well into the 1960s. The Railway Station also contained the first Pakenham East Post Office. This Post Office building was demolished in the late 1990s.

As we wander further east down the Main Street we come to Robinsons SSW supermarket, later taken over by Safeways. This wasn't Robinson's first store, they were originally closer to John Street, and the business was also an advertiser in the Back to Pakenham Souvenir booklet of March 1951.

This aerial was also taken November 1985, looking north up Main Street. Click on photograph to enlarge it. If we turn left at the roundabout at John Street you can see the old premises of the Berwick Pakenham Historical Society (pictured below). On the northern right hand side of this intersection is the original Shire Offices, which were extended and partly concealed in a new structure in 1962. The Railway line is on left as is Safeways and the vacant land is the site of what is now Coles and Target.

The headquarters of the Berwick Pakenham Historical Society. Sadly, no amount of creative photography could make this building look attractive. The Historical Society commenced in 1962 as the Historical Society of the Berwick Shire. They moved from this building to space at the Pakenham Library (built 1991) and are now in the re-furbished and re-located Old Shire Offices on the corner of Main Street and the Princes Highway. The original Shire Offices were built in 1912 on the corner of Main Street and John Street and remained virtually intact in spite of their modernisation in 1962. The building was moved it's current location in 2004.

A general overview of the Pakenham Shopping centre area, taken around 1985. If you click on this photograph to enlarge it you will get a good view of the old Shire Offices, referred to above. In the foreground is Henty Street.

In the left foreground of this November 1985 aerial are the current Shire Offices. Behind it is the Pakenham Secondary College. Secondary education, up to Form 4 or Year 10, had been provided in Pakenham until 1966 at the Pakenham Consolidated School. When Pakenham High School was established in 1967 it continued to use the Consolidated School for accommodation, until its own premises were opened in February 1970.

The official opening of the Shire of Pakenham Municipal Offices and Council Chambers by the Governor of Victoria, Sir Brian Murray with the Shire President, Cr Austin Bastow on July 28th, 1983.

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