Our Place Brief History | Our Tooronga Village Community

A Brief History of the Tooronga Village Area

Many residents of Tooronga Village are aware that in recent years, the area at the south-eastern corner of Toorak and Tooronga Roads had been the site of a shopping centre and car park. Some may also remember that Coles’ office building in Toorak Road was built on land formerly occupied by a drive-in cinema. Following is some information about the previous history of the area.

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Looking back to times before colonial settlements, the lowland of the Glen Iris valley where the Wurundjeri people lived and hunted was swampy with a number of shallow waterways. “Tooronga” is said to have meant “scrub or weeds”.

Early plans for the County of Burke dated 1835-55 show the creek (initially known as Kooyongkoot, and later re-named after John Gardiner, a local settler) as a natural boundary, along with the sites of the first squatter homes and land claims in the Tooronga area.
The area opposite Tooronga Village on the south-western side of Tooronga Road retains a remnant of this period in the farmhouse “Maraquita” located at the top of a property sweeping down to the curving creek at the bottom of the hill. Neil McLean, the settler, farmed the site with vegetable gardens and cow paddocks.

An early subdivision of McLean’s land included Kaikoura Avenue which enters Toorak Road near the new Masters hardware store. After the death of the artist Fred Williams, who made Maraquita his home for many years, the upper farm area was also subdivided as it appears today.

On the Tooronga Village site was an estate of 76 acres, where a mansion house named “Tooronga” was built in the 1850s and was apparently still standing in 1926. Its exact location is yet to be determined but most likely it was close to where we live now, on top of the hill, near the road and overlooking its fields extending down to near the creek. Additional buildings listed on a bill of sale for this fine property in 1868 included a dairy, fruit store and greenhouses, carpenters and gardeners workshops, stables and coach house, poultry and pig yards, fruit plantations and a vineyard. After the property changed hands several times, the house eventually fell into disrepair and was demolished. Other farmhouses listed in the immediate area included the De Dollon house and vineyard, built in the late 1850s near the current site of Bialek College. Market gardening continued for many years on the flats nearest the waterway.

A major change to industrial production occurred when, below Tooronga and nearer the creek, a clay quarry and brickworks including kiln towers were started in 1909 by the City Brick Company. Some residents may recall that bricks were still being made there in the 1970s. This area now comprises the large open car parks below Tooronga Village that are soon to be replaced by St Kevin’s College’s new playing fields, alongside the public walking and cycling track that makes its way through the valley.

Mixed development continued in the local area with brick pits at several other local sites, while a remnant of the claybed landscape can be seen in the escarpment between Tooronga and Auburn Roads, opposite the hockey fields. Some residents may also know that on the present Masters site there were located several enormous black cylinders (“gasometers”), used between 1892 and 1980 to store household gas generated from coal for local distribution.

The Cato and Hall Streets area was initially residential in nature, with the Cato mansion (formerly Stephanie Alexander’s restaurant and now Alia College) built in 1890-91. However the expansion of businesses such as Fultons’ garden and landscaping supplies, which started behind the family’s house in Hall Street in the 1950s, saw a gradual change in usage and a recent emphasis on offices and warehousing.

The expansion of roads and public transport in the area around Tooronga and in the Glen Iris valley led to the expansion of businesses and establishment of many residential suburbs further out in the south-east of Melbourne.

The Glen Waverley train line originated in 1859 in a route from Burnley to Darling station, which at the time connected with the former Outer Circle line near Waverley Road in East Malvern. The original Tooronga station was opened in 1890. The link between Burnley and Richmond stations was built in 1861, while the line was electrified in 1920 and extended to Glen Waverley in 1930.

The tram routes that serve our area originated with a cable tramline from the city via Bridge Road opened in 1885 by the Hawthorn Tramways Trust, with an extension to Auburn Road via Riversdale Road in 1889, and electrification following in stages between 1916 and 1927. Originally based around the location of depots for various routes, tram services on Malvern Road and High Street were started in 1910 by the Prahran and Malvern Tramways Trust. All these local Trusts later amalgamated with others into the city-wide service of today.

The Monash (formerly South-Eastern) Freeway for many years lacked a link between Toorak Road and Warrigal Road, with traffic using Waverley Road, but the freeway section that now passes below Tooronga Village was eventually constructed and opened in 1988, later becoming part of CityLink.

[Our Thanks to Dr Julie Shaw who has prepared this for our Tooronga Village Community – published March 2014]

Residents are invited to contribute their personal stories and reminiscences to … website editor enquiries@otvc.com.au