Herds and Orchards

McMahon, Liardet and Carr were among the principal early European landholders and graziers in Frankston. Of the original squatting runs the Long Island run lay along the waterfront (with the station somewhere near the Riviera Hotel).1 Others were on higher ground to the south and west. Best-remembered amongst the first wave of European pastoralists were men like James Davey who arrived in Frankston in 1840 and after holding a grazing and orchard property along the bay from 1840 to 1853 also held other runs, including the lease for the Gardiner's Creek run in 1840. At the time of the Argus visitor's trip to Frankston, Frederick Liardet is believed to have begun building his Ballam Park home between Frankston and Cranbourne. Liardet had arrived in Victoria in 1839, settled first at Port Melbourne (Sandridge) and then moved around the bay to Brighton where W.F. Liardet was the licensee of the Brighton Pier Hotel. After running coaches during the gold rush, Frederick E Liardet built Ballam Park from where he managed a grazing run of eight thousand acres.2 Today the Ballam Park homestead faces Cranbourne Road. Over the years it has acquired additional outbuildings and later extensions and alterations. It is still even with these additions a reminder of the lifestyle of the first pastoralists in the district.

Now owned by the Frankston City Council the central homestead building is the oldest house in the municipality. It is important to the history of Frankston but as well it has few direct parallels within the metropolitan area of Melbourne. There are too, additional elements in its historic character. It was here that Justice H.B. Higgins is thought to have drafted his Harvester Judgment, establishing the existing structure of industrial arbitration and making a "basic" living wage central to social policy in Australia up to the mid-1970s.3

The homestead has another added interest since as well as the building the grounds include much vegetation, planted soon after Liardet arrived in Frankston. Amongst these are a row of olives, thought to have been planted as a windbreak and several fruit trees surviving from the orchard. We can still look at the homestead and see a building which once stood in isolation and in whose top window a lantern was often kept alight as a beacon to shipping in the bay.

In Mt. Eliza the first European pastoralist was James Davey who acquired a pre-emptive right to 640 acres at Mt. Eliza in 1845.4 James Davey purchased the freehold to his pre-emptive right in the following decade and built a cottage on this land [this was near to the present Marathon house]. The site near Marathon, while less immediately distinctive as the site of a squatting homestead than Ballam Park; still serves as a reminder of the municipality's first Europeans and Marathon and Ballam Park are the two major reminders of the squatting era in Frankston.5 Another property with some pastoral connections is Yamala in Mt Eliza. The owner James Madden had a greater interest in Melbourne's business and professional life than in farming. Nevertheless, during Madden's time at Yamala, the property was used for raising cattle, however Madden still had many interests in Melbourne and spent much of his life there. After land sales in the 1850s smaller more intensive farming allotments were carved out in Frankston with an emphasis on orchards. Somerville for example was regularly referred to as "the centre of a magnificent orchard district" from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.6

During the 1920s and 1930s poultry and onion growing again expanded in the shire with many local growers taking produce to Victoria Market each day.7 By then parts of Frankston, especially the farmlands away from the coastal strip had become identified as amongst the leading orchard concentrations in Victoria. Between the wars, several model farming industries were developed in the shire.

Amongst these were Lloyd and Sons bacon curers, Cranbourne Rd, founded by Jack Lloyd from Hampshire. During the 1920s LLoyd took up 30 acres then took over an adjoining poultry farm to create a "commodious and snugly placed factory and residences ... situated upon one of the most pleasant hillsides in the district". The Somerville Annual Fruitgrowers Show still displayed the Shire's apples and berries and continued as a major event on the agricultural calendar. After the Second World War the place of fruit-growing in local life had diminished. Encroaching housing had swallowed up some of the best farmland.

Around Baxter the orchardists continued to plant and prune trees and take produce to the wooden local cool stores or to Melbourne and local markets. But they were fewer in number and only a handful of orchardists survived the building boom of the 1960s.

However, there are some buildings in the eastern parts of the present city which still reflect the importance of orchards and fruit-growing in Frankston. For the most part these are not reminiscent of the small fruit-growing properties but rather were built for some of the wealthier Melbourne families who moved to Frankston, combining agriculture with other interests.

18 Former packing and drying shed used by Grimwade for his experiments in rural industry at Westerfield [now part of Costerton (q.v.].

Most interesting amongst these buildings and grounds is Westerfield, formerly owned by Russell and Mabel Grimwade. Westerfield in Robinsons Road Frankston was designed in 1924 by H. Desbrowe Annear and shaped in a Y-plan with granite base and half-timbering. According to some accounts this pattern is reminiscent of French country houses; it suggests something of the holiday ambience of the Mornington Peninsula and prefigures some of the experimental geometric designs employed later in local holiday houses.8

Westerfield is interesting as much for the plantings on the property as for the house itself. The Grimwades planted their property with eucalypts. In association with his close friend, Charles Lane-Poole, (first Principal of the School of Forestry in Canberra), Grimwade photographed and recorded these eucalypts as in an attempt to combine conservation of native species with productive agriculture. The grounds were also used during the Second World War to planting used in drugs; poppies, lavender, foxglove and belladonna.

There is as well a third social significance attached to the house and grounds. Nearby were the homes of Daryl and Joan Lindsay [Mulberry Hill], the Cruden Farm home of the Murdoch family and Netherplace belonging to the Fairbairn family. In all of these the owners were attracted by the picturesque peninsula landscape. Each of the homes was altered or built to suit the sophisticated tastes of wealthy Melbournians between the wars and as a group they reflect from a unique combination of houses and landscape. Few other such groupings give us so rich an insight into the world of wealthy Melbournians whose social, domestic and professional routines were shaped by the artistic and intellectual circles of the inter-war city.

The Grimwades and their friends the Lindsays attempted to combine an interest in agriculture with a love of the local landscape and pleasure in its holiday character. Over the twentieth century the holidaying attractions grew more significant than agricultural production. Some properties were still farmed intensively after the Second World War but the important years of orcharding and of experiments like those at Westerfield were over. Agricultural occupations declined through the twentieth century, especially when the more rural parts of the shire were separated from Frankston and became the Shire of Hastings.