Wave Five: The Modern Suburb

One of the first responses of Frankston council to the housing shortage was to approach the Housing Commission of Victoria (HCV) to ask that Frankston be included in plans for country public housing quotas. The deputation was told that they would have to present the Housing Commission of Victoria with a housing and population census through which they could demonstrate shortages.1

Frankston also approached the Forestry Commission to ask that 400 acres of their local pine plantations could be handed over and used for housing. At first the Forestry Commission was unwilling to part with land given that around the plantation there were broad areas available for new housing at relatively low land values. However by the end of 1950 the HCV had gone ahead with plans for the building of concrete homes on the new estate, formerly controlling a part of the Pine plantation in 1956. Frankston council requested brick homes facing the main roads and by 1956 the estate also included units for the elderly.2

In 1957 the HCV presented plans for a second stage development in the Pines.3 Other public agencies were involved in the extensive building of the 1950s. A Frankston Co-operative Housing Society was formed in May 1946 and within a. year had more than 100 members.4 One year later the co-operative had commenced work on 38 houses in Frankston.5 Supported by the CBA bank which provided finance the co-op went on building houses throughout the decade. War Service Homes were also built in Frankston around Cranbourne Road.6 These and other schemes raised the gross value and number of buildings throughout the 1950s (see Fig. 25).

More noticeable over the period was the valuation rise and the increasing concentration of building activity in the southern coastal areas of the Shire rather than inland or around Hastings. Perhaps the most extensive single development in the suburb of the 1950s and 1960s was by a private developer, A.V. Jennings, whose initial proposals were approved in 1960.7

25 Figures which illustrate clearly the suburbanisation of a once semi-rural bayside town.

26 Mewton and Ground's first Henty house in Frankston (Plummer Avenue): the sort of publicity which made the city desirable for a bayside home [RVIA Journal 3, 1936].

Jennings eventually commenced building on land at the corner of Skye Road and Karingal Drive for the Karingal Estate in 1966.8 This development with its extensive plantings and wide street verges as well as its move away from a strict suburban grid of right-angled streets is thought to be one of the prototype estates on which much of the suburban subdivision of the later - 1960s and 1970s was based.

These and other large-scale private subdivisions lay behind the massive rise in building in the suburb in the late 1950s and 1960s. By 1966 when Frankston issued more than 2000 building permits in one year, it ranked amongst the leading six municipalities in Victoria in number of dwellings and value of works.9 Frankston's house-building was most dramatic during the 1960s. Frankston by the middle of the decade was one of the fastest growing suburban zones of Melbourne, after Doncaster and Templestowe, Waverley and Moorabbin and for a time Broadmeadows and Dandenong. With few flats (suburbs like St Kilda or Caulfield had more than ten times the flat-building of Frankston) it was a typical suburban example of the building boom of the 1960s (see Fig. 27). Then more readily available materials, more stringent regulation and new expectations about numbers of rooms and comfort altered the appearance but not necessarily the fundamental form of the suburban house. In Frankston this new, better-regulated and serviced suburb contrasted sharply with the remnants of the nineteenth century fishing village, the holiday resort of the inter-war years and the unregulated shack profusion of the immediate post-war years.

Many of these new estates were created to appeal to buyers on moderate incomes. Sometimes owner-builders put up small but original homes. One such was built in 1948 to a design by Ross Stahle.10 The innovations in local holiday homes was reflected in some of the commuter homes in Frankston and architects straddled both markets. Godfrey & Spowers [with Hughes, Mewton and Lobb] for example designed two small suburban homes in 1947 in Frankston. These employed several of the modernist interior devices familiar in holiday homes [using timber and natural stone for example] but in exterior appearance the houses were not as striking as the holiday homes of Long Island and Mt. Eliza.11

In Mt. Eliza and on Oliver's Hill in new estates were created with an eye to attracting wealthy buyers. One of the most significant subdivisions was that around Marathon, the home of the Grimwade family. The Grimwades subdivided their landholding into 23 blocks of between one half and two and a half acres in 1951, whilst retaining the home in the former grounds on Oliver's Hill.12

27 Chronicle of the 1960s boom [Source: Commonwealth Dept of Building and Construction], Building Statistics.

In 1956 the original landholding, Davey's Pre-emptive Right at Mt. Eliza was subdivided into six building allotments.13 Over the following years many other large properties in Mt. Eliza and on Oliver's Hill were subdivided for housing. One of the most well-known was Yamala View Estate subdivided between 1957 and 1963 and eventually encroached upon by flats in 1963.14

Prominent in these high points were dramatic engineering and architectural designs many of them distinct in the Melbourne's mostly uniform suburbia. One of the most recognisable buildings was designed by Roy Grounds for Mr Henty of Portland Lodge. This completely round house on Oliver's Hill was one of the most striking modern domestic designs of the 1950s.15 The builder was Norman Echberg who had built more than 500 dwellings on the Mornington Peninsula, completing seventeen buildings in 1952 alone. Echberg had left his mark on "fashionable Long Island" and there was hardly a Frankston street concluded the local paper, which was untouched by his work.16 Similar striking designs by Grounds (with Boyd) were several holiday homes in Mt. Eliza (some outside the shire boundaries).

The best-known amongst these is perhaps the holiday home built for Ken Myer.17 The council maintained a faith in distinctive designs in 1966 when it permitted A-framed design houses in the City.18

Mt. Eliza and Oliver's Hill had been identified since the later nineteenth century with Melbourne's wealthiest families. Many of these influential figures [prominent in charity work as much as in business] had second homes in Frankston and several moved their permanently when their active life in Melbourne finance, industry and the professions diminished. The distinctive cachet of parts of Frankston was firmly established when the former Governor Sir Dallas Brookes, retired to Frankston where he bought a new home off Golf Links Rd.19 This house survives today at the end of a notable avenue of trees (formerly the front drive) along Crathe Court.

Frankston by the end of the 1960s had developed into a major suburban municipality. Along the Mt. Eliza waterfront and on Oliver's Hill were some examples of large houses built for Melbourne's elite. On Long Island were smaller holiday homes, although still occupied by influential families such as the Smorgans, and in the north of the city were the remnants of the smaller houses dating from the mostly unregulated inter-war suburban growth. In the east were broadacre public and private estates.

Of the distinctive building types of Frankston the one to have disappeared most completely is the small pre-suburban shack. From all of these types of housing, the two most significant domestic building types in Frankston are those large homes associated with principal figures in Victorian history and the many modernist holiday homes especially those of Mt. Eliza and Long Island. The style of holiday home seen in Frankston from the 1930s onwards inspired the appearance of seaside resorts around the entire coast of Victoria. The holiday mansions of Mt. Eliza form a unique enclave, matched in Victoria by perhaps Portsea and parts of Sorrento, by some parts of Queenscliff and in some aspects by Mt. Macedon.

28 Frankston township c 1886 [Jones, p.23 cites 'Illustrated Australian News' 12/12/1886]

The more recent suburban building of Frankston, especially the larger private estates developed by the Jennings company and the public housing on the Pines are more difficult to assess since they are so recent and appear to share characteristics with suburban estates in may other parts of Melbourne. Yet any detailed account of post-war suburban building would have to make substantial reference to these seminal estate designs. Although now looking very much like any fringe municipality in Melbourne, Frankston includes several examples of distinctive housing. Interesting in design they are also valuable for their links with prominent figures in Victorian and Australian history and for the inspiration which they provided for builders and designers elsewhere in Victoria.