Old Melbourne Memories by Rolf Boldrewood — Read

When we came to Melbourne in 1840 we might have bought all the land between Prince's Bridge and Upper Toorak for the merest trifle above "upset price. " As to Sandridge, St. Kilda, and Brighton, they might almost have been "taken up," so low was the estimate of their value by the colonists of the period. Mr. Dendy did pre-empt 5000 acres hard by the city, at Brighton, under the special survey regulations which then obtained, at L1 per acre. We certainly secured a trifle of seventy acres, upon which the viceregal residence of Toorak was afterwards erected. But some frivolous objection to the agricultural properties of the soil weighed with the head of the family, who, after a few unimportant purchases of town allotments -- such as two acres in Flinders Street running back to the lane so named and adjoining Degraves' buildings, a half-acre near to the corner of Collins and Elizabeth Streets, another in Bourke Street, besides a dozen more in various parts of Melbourne -- finally decided to build and permanently reside at Heidelberg.

This romantically-named suburb was seven miles from Melbourne, with an unmade road through black soil of considerable richness, and a tenacity, when resolved into mud, which I have, during much after-experience, rarely seen equalled. It might have appeared to some persons a matter of supererogation this planting one's self so many miles away from an infant settlement, such as Melbourne then was. A matter involving loss of time, too, expense in transit, besides exile from whatever society was then available. But these considerations availed not against the charming prospect of a rural home, a country-house surrounded by an estate of fertile land, bordered by the clear-flowing Yarra, and glorified by a distant prospect of the Australian Alps. But chiefly alluring were the persuasive tongue, the sanguine predictions, and the enjoyable _al fresco_ entertainments of Mr. R. H. Brown, a social celebrity of the day, fashionable and distinguished, generally known, from his reminiscent enthusiasm on the subject of the grand European tour, as Continental Brown.