City of Darebin Heritage Study Volume 1 Draft Thematic

VOLUME 2: THEMATIC ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORYThe boom that accompanied Victoria’s gold rushes in the early 1850s brought new optimismand a demand for farm land close to Melbourne. Much of the Preston district was occupiedfor farming. Thomas Goodwin, who purchased Allotment 139 Parish of Jika Jika from theoriginal grantee in the early 1840s, subdivided most of his 385 acres into 5 acre farms andmore than quadrupled his original outlay. He built his 17 room house, Oakover Hall, designedby architect John Gill in 1857 (Carroll, 1985:214; Ward, 2000: db 10). Some of the landholdersin the Northcote area made speculative subdivisions, but the blocks were too small forfarming and too far from Melbourne for urban settlement. In 1853 the township reserve onthe Merri Creek in the south of the area was surveyed for sale as the Northcote Township, butagain, most of the purchasers were speculators and only a few houses were built prior to the1880s. The area is now known as Westgarth.Figure 8 Plan of Northcote, 1855,showing the area later knownas ‘Lower Northcote’ and nowWestgarth[Darebin City Council]During the 1870 and 80s, Melbourne experienced a period of unprecedented prosperity,growth and development, known as the land boom. The urban boundaries were pushed out aspeople sharing in the general prosperity sought new residential lands in which to build homes.Darebin had many acres of vacant land, held, as we have seen, by speculators waiting for theright time to sell, however, the area was disadvantaged by a lack of good transport facilities.Even so, the boom took hold in Darebin, where many estates were subdivided and offered forsale, using creative marketing techniques. In 1885 the St George’s Park Estate, betweenCharles and Union Streets Northcote, was advertised showing a yet to be built bridge acrossthe Merri Creek at St George’s Road. The bridge had been proposed by a group of land-27