Wattle Park is one of the few spaces in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs that is slowly being returned to how it must have looked when the Wurundjeri first lived there. Generations of local families, community groups, wedding parties and concert bands have gathered to enjoy the open spaces, hillside wilderness, and peaceful serenity of this suburban hilltop oasis.
In part one of this blog series exploring the history of Wattle Park, let’s examine the creation of Wattle Park with the help of Ray Peace’s 2006 history, Eliza's Vision: a history of Wattle Park 1838-2006.[1]
Wattle Park’s creation involved a battle between city vs country folk, horse carts vs trams, and the murder of an inconvenient peacock.
Early landowners
After the incursions of British colonists forced the Wurundjeri to flee Boroondara towards the Dandenongs in the 1840s, the large block of 137 acres of hilltop land that is now Wattle Park formed the far-eastern end of the allotment the British Crown granted to John Gardiner.
Gardiner and his family lived nearly 7 km away in a house on the present-day site of Scotch College in Hawthorn. It’s safe to assume he did not head out to this remote corner of his property all that often. That said, new settlers did make their way out there. Some went on to create a township called Nunawading (after the Wurundjeri word for 'ceremonial ground') that centred on timber, and later brick and clay production. Early records reveal evidence of rudimentary colonial inhabitation on the Wattle Park land, including a possible dwelling for cattle-minders and shepherds and a rubbish dump on the site.
Gardiner sold off his enormous allotment a decade or so later. Finding a buyer for this corner proved difficult but eventually Walter Craig, a surveyor from Northumberland and James Atkinson bought separate portions of it. The soil quality was not good and despite a relatively reliable water supply coming from a little creek, neither gentleman had any interest in living out there. Instead, Craig leased the land to Frederick Goyder, a gentleman of dubious reputation with a new and very conspicuously pregnant wife. Goyder eventually purchased the 25-acre portion of the land from Craig in 1865.
Goyder was a colourful and intimidating character. He held the license for the Victoria Hotel in Bourke Street, an establishment popular with horse-racing enthusiasts like himself. Goyder used his land for holding and training horses for steeple-chases. If we go by the newspaper articles about him, he seemed to have a penchant for entangling himself in betting scandals and a deep dislike for his neighbours, the Tweedies. The feeling was mutual.
In one notable incident, Goyder accused Hannah Tweedy of drunkenly assaulting his horse. She was fined £5 (later reduced to £2) for it. In another case, Goyder accused the Tweedies of murdering his pet peacock and its mate.[2] The Tweedies argued Goyder let all his chickens and fowl into their property, eating the seed they planted. Goyder countered they had deliberated targeted the errant fowls at a time when they knew he was away. The Court found in his favour, fining John Tweedie £1.
I expect there were not too many peacocks around in those days and that may explain why the case attracted such a long article in the South Bourke Standard.
Eventually, Goyder acrimoniously bought the disgruntled Tweedies out. He then built a small timber mansion on their old land he called Udimore Lodge, planted several large date palms and a small vineyard.
The other major occupier of the land was Denis Delaney, originally from Belfast. Delaney owned a chunk of the land on the southern boundary, around where Wattle Park Primary School is today. He was also a hotel proprietor and had built and operated the Royal Hotel on the corner of Broughton and Canterbury Roads. This was decades before Box Hill turned into a ‘dry zone’ and Delaney had shrewdly placed the hotel just at the point where tired cattle drivers hauling through the area’s hilly terrain needed to rest.
Like Goyder, Delaney also used his land to raise racehorses. To accommodate their horses, both gentlemen cleared the land of any native vegetation and planted pastures with English grasses, including two acres of lucerne for cattle grazing. They seemed to live next door harmoniously enough (no court cases made the news), even teaming up to take on the Nunawading and District Roads Board.
Country vs City: the Nunawading and District Roads Board
Although the Wattle Park land proved relatively hospitable to livestock, the two men’s real problem was transportation, especially to and from Melbourne. The main thoroughfare was Moloney’s Road (now Riversdale Road). Anyone wishing to travel on Moloney’s Road needed to pay a toll to the Nunawading and District Roads Board. With their business interests in the city, Goyder and Delaney had to pay a significant amount to use the road that passed their properties.
According to Ray Peace’s book, toll collecting on Moloney’s Road was a very lucrative enterprise for the Board, pulling in over £2,000 a year. Yet the road was in such a rough and bone-jarring state that travelling along it damaged the horses, carts and drivers trying to navigate it. Wherever that money was going, it was not being invested in road maintenance. This point was not lost on its users.
According to the Richmond Australian, ‘The Nunawading Roads Board appears to be the most remarkable and unfortunate instance of local government that has ever come within our knowledge… a disgrace and a reproach to the locality.’
If the members of the Roads Board had anything to say about this slur on their character, they did not do it on public record. They also did not do anything to repair the road either.
Frustrated, Goyder and Delaney decided to lobby for seats on the Board. Here they succeeded but after only a few years, Goyder decided the corruption was too entrenched and his effort to improve Moloney’s Road was fruitless. He sold up to George Usher and eventually moved to Katoomba in New South Wales. Usher’s untimely death in 1871 meant the land soon turned over to the Colonial Bank.
Desperate to get rid of this chunk of land in the middle of nowhere, the Bank separated Usher’s block into six sections and sold them off at discount prices. Most of the buyers were small-time investors engaging in local land speculation. But one was Orlando Fenwick, an importer based in Flinders Lane and soon to be the incoming Lord Mayor of the City of Melbourne.
Fenwick moved himself and his family into Goyder’s old house, Udimore Lodge and named the land “Phoenix Grange”.
Fenwick’s mayoral business meant he needed to be in the City often but Moloney’s Road was still a nightmare. Frustrated at paying a regular toll to travel on such a terrible road, Fenwick began to leverage his influence by furiously lobbying the Nunawading and District Roads Board for improvements. In one angry letter he even sent them a bill from his doctor for treatment of his sore back and one for damage to his horse cart, with a copy of his letter to his neighbour and solicitor, Arthur Snowden. The Roads Board ignored them both.
In 1872, Nunawading and District Roads Board became Nunawading Shire Council. Denis Delaney, still on the Board, became a Shire Councillor. Although Delaney was an ally in the road improvement cause, he lived on the other side of the block (the Elgar Road end today) so had less use for Moloney’s Road. The Roads Board still refused to budge. For the next ten years, as settlements in Burwood and Box Hill began to emerge in the area and Fenwick invested heavily in land speculation around Melbourne, he never forgot his battle for improvements to Moloney’s Road. But even additional, persistent pressure from Boroondara Shire Council, the custodians of the Boundary (Warrigal) Road side of the block, and an offer to match costs did not incentivise Nunawading Shire Council to cough up the money for improvements.
In Eliza’s Vision, Ray Peace does not speculate on what Nunawading Council’s problem was in holding out on paying for the road’s improvement. I suspect it was a country vs city conflict and the desire of Nunawading to keep independence through a physical distance from the emerging influence of Melbourne City. Alternatively, it could’ve been the councillors’ stubborn refusal to give in to Fenwick’s wealth and influence, or systemic corruption, or perhaps it was sheer incompetence, who knows?
It took until September 1888 for the Nunawading councillors to even travel out to the road to look at what the problem was. By this time, Moloney’s Road was almost impassable in wet weather. Yet still nothing was done.
As Fenwick fumed and Nunawading Council dallied, the Marvellous Melbourne era of the 1880s took the train within a mile of the Wattle Park land to Surrey Hills. The resulting land boom around the Lilydale train line saw the area begin to sub-divide and develop. Fenwick, a big mover and shaker of Melbourne, owned most of the block now. It was dubbed “Fenny’s Paddock” by the sparse but close-knit local community. By Fenwick’s death in 1897, Denis Delaney was long dead and his heirs had sold their portion to the Metropolitan Building Society. Fenwick’s solicitor Alexander Snowdon still owned the Boundary Road/Moloney’s Road corner. This was the configuration of the block when Phoenix Grange passed into the hands of a wealthy philanthropist called Eliza Welch.
Eliza Welch and the creation of Wattle Park
Born in 1844, Eliza Reardon grew up in Collingwood, the daughter of two prominent early settlers. Unfortunately, no image survives of her at any age. At 18, she married a newly migrated merchant named William H Welch. A few months later, her older sister Tabitha married Welch’s uncle and business partner, Frederick “Charles” Ball. The two gentlemen entered a partnership importing silks for Melbourne’s wealthy ladies during the Gold Rush years. Readers of a certain vintage may still remember their business: Ball & Welch department store.
Eliza and William’s marriage appeared harmonious but never produced children. Instead, the couple threw themselves into charitable and philanthropic work. They focused their resources on improving health outcomes for Victorians, subscribing to the funds required to establish and operate the Melbourne Hospital, the Women’s Hospital, the Children’s Hospital and the Alfred Hospital, among other institutions catering to children and the poor.
A 1925 news article on the now prestigious Ball & Welch department store speculated that it was the impeccable taste of Eliza and Tabitha that drove the store’s success. This assumption drew from the respect the two men had for their wives’ business acumen at a time when women were not usually involved in business affairs or able to become directors. But when Charles died in 1876, leaving Tabitha with several children to raise alone, he also bequeathed her his share of the business. Tabitha was still named as a major shareholder twenty years later when William died of Bright’s disease (an anachronistic name for a mysterious kidney ailment) in 1896. He left an estate valued at nearly £54,000. Eliza inherited the bulk of it and joined her sister as a major shareholder and director in the Ball & Welch business.
Ball & Welch went from strength to strength. The sisters also proved savvy real estate investors. Eliza lived with William in St Kilda Road, South Yarra, later moving to Jolimont to be closer to her sister after his death. By then, Tabitha owned a considerable chunk of East Melbourne property.
In 1901, Eliza Welch purchased the section of the future Wattle Park block owned by Metropolitan Building Society. Exactly how the block of land all the way out in Nunawading (as it was then) came to Eliza’s attention is not speculated on in Eliza’s Vision. I have to say, it’s a very frustrating book to read. Perhaps one of her nieces or nephews took her for a visit out there and she merely liked the tranquillity. Perhaps she knew Orlando Fenwick and he recommended it to her. It did not seem to stem from a love of the natural world and green spaces as her charitable work remained committed to the city’s hospitals until she died. She never moved there, preferring to live at the George Hotel in St Kilda, then later the Windsor Hotel in Spring Street. This allowed her to keep an eye on her business interests and be near her favourite niece, Effie Eliza Ball. It most certainly wasn’t because she greatly admired the quality of the roads, since they had not improved much at all. She was willing to speculate on land outside of the city limits as at her death, she owned numerous properties in East Melbourne, Carlton and Kew, but also in Preston. Aside from that, it’s all a mystery how it came to her attention.
She must have liked it or seen some potential in it because three years later, Eliza purchased Fenwick’s Phoenix Grange. Here, Eliza’s Vision pertains that 60-year-old Eliza intended to create a country retreat. Yet the land was rented to other people until her death, so I’m not so sure about that claim. By 1912, a few years before she died, she purchased the final piece of land – Goyder’s old vineyard – and the boundaries of the modern-day Wattle Park were now owned by one person for the first time.
Eliza Welch was not an investor in Melbourne’s tramways but she did have shareholdings in utilities and infrastructure, so perhaps she saw some potential in the property as public space when the Hawthorn Tramways Board called on her to see if perhaps she’d like to sell them the property.
The Tram to Wattle Park
By 1912, housing was firmly established around the train stations of the Lilydale line, including Box Hill and Surrey Hills. But Eliza Welch’s land was a little too far to walk to Surrey Hills station. At this time, Melbourne’s tramway investors were turning their mind to converting the original inner city cable trams to electric, then expanding them along major roads to the east. Building a tram network was not a State Government concern like it is today back then, instead each line was owned and operated by its own company and expected to generate sufficient revenue to support it.
The Burwood Progress Association (an organised group of concerned local citizens) was very keen on tramlines to cater to their rapidly growing population. They began a lobbying effort to the Hawthorn Tramways Trust for one along Riversdale Road (as it was now called), with little success.
But then in November 1914, Mr J E Hunt of Camberwell suggested that perhaps a tramline along Riversdale Road would have more appeal if there was something, perhaps in the shape of a park, to make it an appealing destination for people to visit.
This was not a new concept in tramway development but it revitalised the Riversdale Road tram proposal. David Dureau, the head of the Hawthorn Tramways Board, loved the idea. Especially because, he soon discovered, there was a large, 137-acre block of land sitting at the intersection of Elgar, Boundary and Riversdale Roads owned by a now ailing businesswoman of considerable wealth and charitable persuasion called Eliza Welch.
To the surprise of David Dureau, Eliza readily agreed to sell the block to HTT for the very reasonable price of £9,000. She could have sold it for far more on the open market but perhaps she understood the land had more community value preserved for future generations. Besides, as the probate on her will showed a few years later, she had more than enough money already.
Although the asking price was quite low by the standards of the day, it still took some time for HTT to scramble up some investors to pay for it. Fortunately, the proposal had lots of support from community to government levels.
Meanwhile, Eliza’s health was in rapid decline. With the sale of the future Wattle Park in the balance, Eliza’s niece and heir, Effie Eliza Ball signed a covenant on the property mandating that it remain open space in perpetuity (forever). The deed stipulated that the Hawthorn Tramways Trust could not build on it or make any changes that were not necessary for its enjoyment as a public park.
The document would set off a pile of complicated legal matters for years to come.
Up next: Putting the “Wattle” in Wattle Park.
[1] Peace, Ray, Eliza's Vision: A History of Wattle Park 1838-2006 (Prahran Mechanics Institute Press, 2006).
[2] "Hawthorn Police Court," South Bourke Standard, 30 December 1864.
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