The Selection Era

Further south, in the Langwarrin area, Donald Lanarch (1817-1896), an influential banker and director, became the largest landholder in the 1870s and 1880s. Earlier, at the land auction on 21 December 1860, Lanarch purchased 723 acres for one pound per acre. He increased this by other purchases, which included most of Callanan's Langwarrin run when the licence was cancelled in 1868.2

Under the 1869 Land Act, it was possible to select up to 320 acres for agricultural or farming purposes. This land had to be held for at least 3 years before it could be bought, and improvement had to be made in the form of fencing, housing, and cultivation of crops. If the farmer did not, or could not, purchase straight away, a 7-year lease could be arranged.3 Selection file numbers are marked on Parish Plans. An examination of these files allows a greater understanding of the nature of many early district farms. Among the Langwarrin selectors was Albert Lloyd, a bacon curer, who built up a big business on W. Henderson's property on the south side of the Cranbourne-Frankston Road. The Langwarrin Public Hall, once on the Langwarrin Military Reserve, was moved to Lloyd's bacon factory in 1944. A photograph in a recent history of the Langwarrin school shows part of the Memorial Hall being moved by Albert Lloyd with his tractor.4 A selection file survives for the Lloyd property.5

The Baxter area was another place where selectors established farms in the 1870s and 1880s. One of the earliest was Carl Feldman, a Frankston labourer. His property on Golf Links Road still had a four-roomed, weatherboard farm house on it when it was purchased by the Lindsay family in the 1920s.6

Of course selection did not stop with the 1869 Act, which was followed by a series of Selection and Settlement Acts, including the Closer Settlement Acts from 1904.

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.7

From the selection era, farming and agricultural properties were established across the eastern parts of the city. These sometimes developed into important local, or even regional, industries. Orcharding, for example, was widespread throughout the district, from the 1880s until about 1910. Dairy farms operated at Skye and Langwarrin in the 1880s and 1890s, while, at a later date, there was some poultry farming. Some district farmers combined these activities with timber-cutting, quarrying, and even brick making. Orchards were once widespread in the Cranbourne Shire, particularly along the Cranbourne-Frankston Road and along North Road at Langwarrin. It has been said that "most of those who settled at Langwarrin in the eighties were orchardists".

11 Some of the rural allotments in Frankston by 1878, including F.E. Liardet's and John Carr's 320 acres each at Ballam Park Cranbourne Road. [from Jones, p.41 cites Public Records Office plan]

This was after 7,000 acres in the Langwarrin East Estate were sold by Larnech in 1889 to the Cosmopolitan Land Syndicate.8

Well-known district orchards included Corlett's 320 acre property on the north side of Cranbourne Road, east of McClelland Drive - Corlett's three sons planted the orchard, sending the fruit to the Melbourne market, via trains from Langwarrin Station. John Corlett Senior was one of a number of Langwarrin residents who helped to form McClelland Drive early this century. An old photograph shows these local farmers working on the road. They included John Corlett Senior, and Steve Corlett, who owned a property alongside what is now the McClelland Gallery.9

Another Langwarrin orcharding family was the Ridouts, who were also involved in market gardening and timber-cutting until the mid-1920s, when they opened sandpits and a brick making business.10 Old photographs of North Road in the years between 1902 and 1910 show orchards "where houses now sprout up like mushrooms".11

Several Langwarrin orchardists turned to poultry farming, particularly in the years after the First World War. Cranhaven Poultry Farm owned by Sydney N. Lloyd provided "free range eggs" and dressed poultry, delivering them throughout the district by the Farm's business van, a familiar district sight.12

There are accounts of dairying at Skye and Langwarrin from an early date. John Alexander Gamble, a Skye farmer, became a successful dairyman. However, according to the historian Gunson, the Mount Tabor property was largely worked by his wife and family.13

By 1960, when there was still some district dairy farming, it was said that one-third of the dairy farms in the Cranbourne Shire were under separate milk contracts and were serviced by Associated Dairies direct to the Melbourne market.14

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.15 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.

13 Mount Eliza architect designed house overlooking the bay as illustrated in building journals of 1889 and showing a Queen Anne style design: one example of this type survives nearby at Mount Martha but this house appears to have gone. [Jones, p.106 cites 'Building and Engineering Journal]

14 Cruden Farm, house designed by noted architect Harold Desbrowe Annear in an adapted American Colonial Revival style, one of the many architect designed houses which set the pace for the peninsula early this century.

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.16

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. The rural landscape and the agricultural lifestyle enjoyed by those who lived at Baxter and Langwarrin, has attracted a number of affluent Melbourne families to the area from the 1920. It was in that decade that the wealthy Lindsay and Murdoch families bought old district properties still containing old timber farm houses from the selection era. The Lindsay's Mulberry Hill at Baxter and the Murdochs' Cruden Farm at Langwarrin were transformed by the fashionable Melbourne architect, Harold Desbrowe Annear, into stylish residences more suited to their sophisticated lifestyle.

Daryl (later Sir Daryl) Lindsay, artist and from 1941 Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, purchased the old farmhouse (later named Mulberry Hill by the Lindsays) in 1924.17 This followed his marriage in 1922 to the writer, Joan a'Beckett.18 Lindsay drew up plans for "a simple wooden house to be incorporated with the existing four rooms". Later, after "suggesting a few minor alterations in Daryl's plans", the architect Annear personally supervised the building at Mulberry Hill. The garden was also remodelled.19 The Cruden Farm property was purchased in 1927-28 by Keith Arthur (later Sir Keith) Murdoch, managing editor of the Herald newspaper. This purchase coincided with Murdoch's marriage on 6 June 1928 to the 19-year old Elisabeth Greene, daughter of a Melbourne merchant.

The Murdochs, who lived most of the year in their splendid city mansion, used Cruden Farm for family holidays. According to their friend, Joan Lindsay, "The Murdochs out riding on Sunday mornings made an unforgettable spectacle - a sort of medieval cavalcade of children, servants, horses and dogs, - along the rough tree-lined roads of Baxter and Langwarrin. At the head ... rides Keith, mounted on a massive charger,..."20

A stables and dairy block was designed in 1930 by the architect, Percy Meldrum. The stone came from the Moorooduc Quarry. In 1929-30 the Cruden Farm garden, which is regarded as notable, was remodelled to the designs of Edna Walling. Walling's plan included two walled gardens, the round lawn, and the avenue of 129 Lemon Scented Gums along the main driveway to the house. This distinctive avenue, planted by Dame Elisabeth in 1929, although partly destroyed in the 1944 bushfire, remains as an important feature of this significant district property.21

Both Mulberry Hill and Cruden Farm are still notable district properties. Sir Daryl Lindsay of Mulberry Hill was a founder of the National Trust in 1956 and, after Joan Lindsay (the author of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' written at the Baxter property) died in 1984, the house and its contents were left to the Trust for use as a house museum, illustrating the lifestyle of its owners.22

When there was a proposal in the 1980s to develop the Baxter area, in the same way that Langwarrin and Carrum Downs were developed in the 1970s, it was argued that it was important to retain the semi-rural character of this part of the Cranbourne Shire.

16 Former packing and drying shed used by Grimwade for his experiments in rural industry, bridging the gap between the holiday house and farm activity, formerly at Westerfield [now part of Costerton (q.v.)]

17 Burley Griffin's minimum house prototype, Pholiota in Heidelberg, c1919, was the basis for other modest houses in the Frankston area and, with other Griffin designs, served as an inspiration model for the 1950s houses of Chancellor & Patrick [Johnson, 'The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin', p.61 noted as based on working drawings.]

Its "mosaic of small pastures and wooded areas among which trees shelter well-established residences" was the kind of physical environment and visual landscape that had attracted so many commuters, residents, and visitors to the area.23

In all of these important residences, 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, 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.