Mulberry Hill

Golf Links Road, Baxter

East face of house with mulberry on the right.

Citation:

History
Daryl (later Sir Daryl) Lindsay, artist, purchased the old farmhouse on the Mulberry Hill site from the Baxter farmer, James L. McCubbin, in about 1924.1 This followed his marriage in London on 14 February 1922 to the writer, Joan a'Beckett.2

Joan Lindsay, in 'Time Without Clocks', written at Mulberry Hill, tells of the Lindsays' first view of the McCubbin house, a four-roomed weatherboard cottage at Baxter. It seemed the answer to their dreams of a country home. It was located next to a little wooden school on part of the original McCubbin property. According to Joan Lindsay, after they had purchased the house,

'Daryl was spending hours at his drawing board working out the plans for a simple wooden house to be incorporated with the existing four rooms of the McCubbin cottage. First priorities for the new Mulberry Hill were two items that most people can do without: somewhere to paint and somewhere to stable at least one horse.

West face of house.

Tearing off the flimsy McCubbin verandah and knocking out the walls of the narrow passage gave us light and air and a fair-sized studio facing out over the orchard. The stable, wooden to match the house, had a roomy loft with a little iron horse from Normandy nailed on the door...The kitchen was left in its original white-washed simplicity with its one big window looking into Vince's orchard next door. A semi-circular porch with slender white columns and long wooden shutters gave character to the front elevation and facing onto a small courtyard at the back was the little green door ... shadowed by the mulberry tree.'3

The McCubbins' huge mulberry tree had attracted the Lindsays from the start.4 Like the Murdochs did four years later at Cruden Farm, the Lindsays employed their friend H. Desbrowe Annear to remodel their country cottage. Joan Lindsay describes him as 'at this time the most expensive and most sought after architect in Melbourne - probably in Australia.'5 Joan tells how Annear argued that 'well off people in Melbourne or the wealthy Western District squatters could afford to live in elaborately decorated houses', designed by him. After 'suggesting a few minor alterations in Daryl's plans,' Annear offered to personally supervise the building at Mulberry Hill.6

For the roof of their new home the Lindsays bought from Whelan the Wrecker 'slates the colour of over-ripe grapes', and 'slender balustrades for the balcony porch and somebody's old cedar staircase'.7 At a later date the Montsalvat Artists Colony at Eltham purchased old materials from Whelan.

The Mulberry Hill garden was also remodelled, using the services of the Grimwades' gardener. Daryl always loved to paint in this garden with its 'fuchsias and daisies, lilies and lilacs, phlox and petunias,' but never roses, which Daryl considered unpaintable.8

Cranbourne rate records confirm that extensive alterations were made to the Baxter cottage with its valuation soaring from its original £22, when they took it over, to £110 in 1926-27.9 It remained at that level until the outbreak of the Second World War when it rose to £125.10 At that time it was described as a weatherboard two storey and single storey house of nine rooms.

During the 1930s the Lindsays returned to Europe, letting Mulberry Hill to the Misses Macintosh, three Scottish sisters, who looked after the Lindsay dogs while they were away.11 After their return, in 1939 Lindsay was appointed keeper of the prints at the National Gallery of Victoria and, in 1941, became its Director.12

During the following years, while Daryl painted at Mulberry Hill and Joan wrote 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' and 'Time Without Clocks' there, the house became a place where artists and writers, politicians and diplomats were entertained, including many other Frankston/ Baxter/Langwarrin residents who had become close friends. Guests included the Murdochs, Daryl's brother, the artist Lionel Lindsay; the Grimwades and Bruces, Rupert Bunny, the poet Banjo Patterson and the artist Blamire Young. Politician Robert Menzies often dined at Mulberry Hill.13

Sir Daryl had been a co-founder of the National Trust in 1956. The couple had no children, so, after his death in 1976, and hers in 1984, the house and its entire contents, including paintings, furniture and personal items, were left to the National Trust to be preserved for future generations.14

Sir Daryl Lindsay (1889-1976)
Ernest Daryl Lindsay was born the sixth son and the ninth child of Robert and Jane Lindsay. He joined the English, Scottish and Australian Bank as a junior clerk at 17. Later he worked as a jackaroo on a number of Queensland properties and became overseer at the historic Ercildoune property and then at Trawalla near Ballarat.

During the First World War, Daryl enlisted as a driver with the Australian Army Service Corps, served in France, and became batman to his brother-in-law, Will Dyson. He was encouraged to make drawings of trench life and portraits of diggers by Dyson. In 1918 Lindsay became friendly with Henry Tonks, head of the Slade School of Fine Art, and subsequently studied there.

Back in Australia in June 1919, Lindsay received a number of commissions for watercolours and drawings. However he returned to London where, in 1922, he married Joan a'Beckett, daughter of Theyre a'Beckett Weigall, barrister. On returning to Melbourne the pair lived at St.Kilda and Toorak before making a permanent home at Mulberry Farm.

In the late 1930s Lindsay became a close friend of Sir Keith Murdoch and encouraged him to collect and take an active interest in art. In 1939, on Murdoch's advice, Lindsay applied for and became keeper of prints at the National Gallery of Victoria and then its director. Under Lindsay the Gallery broadened its general appeal and abandoned its traditional hostility to modern art. Lindsay retired as director in December 1956 and was knighted for his services to Australian art in 1957.

Lindsay was a member of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board from 1953-73 and its chairman from 1960-69 and was co-founder and first president of the National Trust.15

Joan Lindsay (1896-1984)
Born Joan a'Beckett Weigall and educated at Clyde Girls Grammar, she was related to the Boyd family and joined the Lindsay family when she married Daryl in 1922.16 Her experience at Clyde later inspired the notion of Appleyard College in her successful novel 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' which she wrote in 1967 and which was made into a popular film in 1975.

North face.

She went on to study at the National Gallery School but soon turned to writing, with her first book a satirical work, 'Through Darkest Pondelayo' published in 1936. Many years later she wrote the autobiographical works, Time Without Clocks' and 'Facts Soft and Hard'.17

Description
Like other contemporary properties on the peninsula, Mulberry Hill is entered via a curving and notable gum avenue.

The weatherboarded house which is sited to one side of the drive, has a massive pentagonal Colonial Georgian revival porch as the focus of the main elevation, with its similarly Georgian fanlight and multi-paned glazing. The porch has a colonnade in the manner of Miegunyah, the Grimwade Malvern house which used the same architect, Desbrowe Annear (and Stephenson & Meldrum), but in this case supporting a typically American open balcony above. Like Cruden farm, the columns are of Oregon, painted. The symmetrically placed roof gablets are also distinctive.

The house which existed on the property prior to the Lindsay ownership is now absorbed into the main house on the south side where some architrave mouldings and other details such as the 4 panel door, indicate the earlier house. A multi-paned and shuttered Palladian window faces west from this section.

A Bungalow style weatherboard house (1920s?) is located to the south-west of the house and a small stable block (damaged by termites) is to the north-east (complete with metal horse). These were not part of the Annear design.

Major garden elements include an incomplete (burnt 1944?) semi-circular cypress hedge with rockery under (a planting device written about by Edna Walling in the 1920s to cover dry under-growth), the associated brick garden wall with cast cement urns (rebuilt? bricks painted, some urns gone), Italian cypress, pathways and hedges on the south, an axial brick-paved walk focused on a sundial (damaged) with a carved basalt shaft (similar device used in the Walling plan for Durrol, Mt. Macedon) and an enclosing garden wall at the rear (propped) made from slop-moulded bricks plus one brick taken from 'Captain Cook's Cottage' as a gift from Russell Grimwade.

Although the gum entry avenue is a reminder of similar avenues at both Westerfield (Annear for Russsell & Mabel Grimwade, 1924) and Cruden Farm (Walling for the Murdochs), the architecture seen at the former is sharp contrast to the classicism of Cruden Farm and Mulberry Hill both of which have an American Colonial Georgian revival character. However the scale and extent of the Cruden Farm house and out-buildings (particularly the stone and brick stable) and the walled and informal gardens extend well beyond that of Mulberry Hill.

The house and surrounding landscape at Mulberry Hill has been recorded by the National Trust with the following citation:

A house of no architectural distinction but epitomising a phase of Australian culture due to having been frequented by many figures of the local and international art world and still containing a range of Australian paintings selected by or presented to Sir Daryl and Lady Lindsay'.

Garden
Planting in the rear (stable) yard area contains an old hawthorn, tea tree and elm trees. The side drive has white timber angle-rail fencing in poor condition. Planted groups include at the front of the house include mixed species of mature gums, mass planted underneath with agapanthus; a single large 'Eucalyptus citriodora' at the pedestrian entrance gate (white timber picket) near the main road and a tall tea tree hedge along the edge of a brick-edged path.

The front garden has a mature cypress hedge (section missing replaced with inconsistent oleander). There is a 'Cupressus sempervirens' beyond the hedge and an unpainted timber lattice archway at the side, with slender iron vine support for a wisteria. There is a formal semicircular clipped privet hedge at the front porch, a weeping elm, large 'Arbutus unedo' and statuary.

At the side there is a mature clipped privet hedge, large loquat and small mulberry, reputedly planted 5 or 6 years before Mrs. Lindsay died. There are also mature 'Cupressus torulosa' in various parts of garden.

The rear house garden has the old mulberry ('Morus alba' or 'Moms nigra' not in leaf) in the paved garden area which is one of the most individually significant plantings on the property but is in very poor condition and requires urgent assessment by an experienced and qualified arborist. A row of tall 'Camellia japonica' are planted along the side brick garden wall, tubs of privet at the rear of the house, one mature 'Cupressus sempervirens' surrounded by a paved area of red coloured 'crazy-pattern' cement, planted with ferns.

The adjacent house planting includes mature cordyline, lillypilly and 'Viburnum burkwoodii'.

Condition
The house is externally (and reputedly internally) original to the date of the Lindsay's departure. The garden setting also appears little changed since that time although elements and outbuildings are in poor repair or damaged (see above).

Context
The complex is still in a semi-rural environs, aided by the retention of vegetation on its own block and those adjoining. This aids in expressing the property's role as a country retreat.

Significance
Mulberry Hill has State and possibly National architectural and historical significance as one of the notable houses set in equally notable gardens in the Baxter/Langwarrin/Frankston area owned by members of prominent Melbourne families and remodelled by the architect, H. Desbrowe Annear, during the 1920s. The property has significance for its associations with Sir Daryl Lindsay, Australian artist and Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, and his wife, Joan, well-known author, who made their home there. It is significant, also, for the guests entertained by the Lindsays who included many prominent Australian artists, writers and politicians, such as Lionel Lindsay and Blamire Young, Banjo Patterson and Sir Robert Menzies, and the newspaper entrepreneur, Sir Keith Murdoch, a close personal friend.

Architecturally the house expresses the skill of Annear in adapting traditional or popular houses styles towards a distinctive design outcome. The garden and drive planting are also highly complementary to the design as well as having individually notable elements. The garden is of regional significance, given what is currently known of its origin (unless plans show it to be derived from HD Annear's original design or work by Edna Walling).

Boundaries
Extent of current allotment, including the front, rear and side gardens with paving, walling and planting, the sundial and associated walk with planting, all trees and landscape classified by the National Trust of Australia (Vic), the stable, stable yard between it and the house, and the house exterior and interior.