John Lang Currie (1818-98) was born at the
village of Yarrow, south-east of Galasheils in the
Scottish Borders, about 30 km south of Edinburgh.
After a local grammar school education, at 21 he
sailed to join his cousins, near Bulla. He saved and borrowed and in 1844 with
school friend Tom Anderson, bought the 13,000 hectare pastoral property
Larra in the shadow of Mt Elephant with 1,500 sheep,
for £750. He began his stud with Saxon merinos from Van
Diemens Land (Tasmania)
and in 1849 added merino rams from Camden
in New South Wales
and was seeking the advice of its owner, Sir William Macarthur. In the 1860s he
established the ‘Larra lustre merino’ with fine
glossy long wool. Currie’s success in developing the Australian merino wool was
widely acknowledged and by 1870 its quality was unrivalled in Victoria.
In London
one bale was declared ‘perfect’.
He sold rams all over Australia,
South Africa
and the USA.
By the mid 1890s, he owned 32,375 hectares and 100,000 sheep, described as the
finest sheepwalk in the world. He extended his interests to pastoral properties
in New South Wales
and Queensland.
He was active in local Western District politics, but never sought election to
the state Legislative Council. He gave substantial donations to OrmondCollege
at the University
of Melbourne,
the Presbyterian Church of which he was an elder and other charities in Victoria.
He was chairman of the Victorian Woollen and
Cloth Manufacturing Co. which was founded in 1865 as the first woollen mill in
Victoria.
In 1879 he became director of Australian Frozen Export Co, which first exported
meat to the United Kingdom.
He was a pillar of the Presbyterian Church in Victoria.
He also owned an extensive collection of Australiana.
He built the Larra
homestead in 1869, designed by Geelong
architects Davidson and Henderson: a sternly romantic Tudor design with canted
bay windows and towers, high bluestone walls and splendid stables. He also
bought the mansion Osborne House in Swinburne
Street, NorthGeelong;
a severe Renaissance bluestone pile designed by another distinguished architect,
Charles Webb of Webb & Taylor architects, in 1857. Twelve years later, Webb
built a neighbouring house to Currie’s in Grey Street.
In 1871 Currie was shipwrecked (as he was
again in 1874!). Clearly these experiences had not alienated him from the sea,
for by 1871, Currie had effectively retired to St Kilda. In 1871, he
commissioned the most prolific Melbourne
architects, Reed and Barnes to design his house, Eildon.
Indeed, John Currie’s three houses were
designed by some of the most distinguished of Victoria’s
nineteenth century architects, but Reed & Barnes were the most remarkable.
Still flourishing today as Bates Smart, in their 150th year of practice, the
firm founded by Joseph Reed in 1852 is probably Australia’s
oldest architectural practice. There have been nine name changes, but only 25
directors. They have made a significant contribution to architecture and
development in Australia
over that time, but particularly in Melbourne.
Their works include: ICI (Orica)
House (1958), the Royal Exhibition Building (1880), the Trades Hall
(1873-1926), Melbourne Town Hall (1867-70 & 1887), Federation Square (2002), the
State Library (1854-1911), and Freshwater Place (2002-03), but few nineteenth
century houses. The Gothic Clement Hodgkinson
House, 157 Hotham Street, East Melbourne (1861), The Palladium Virginia, 116
Wellington Parade, East Melbourne (1864), the polychrome brick Carnally
(Moorina), 160 George Street, East Melbourne (1864), the fantastic Euro-Raku, St
Kilda (1886, demolished), Ripen Lea (1869), the Classical Culture House (1874),
NW corner of Gimps and Owlet Streets, East Melbourne and the picturesque Kolora,
south of Penshurst (1868-69) and the Emus, Kirrawee.
Eildon,
51 Grey Street,
St Kilda, 2002
Eildon remains one of the largest houses in St
Kilda and one of the larger surviving nineteenth century houses in
Melbourne.
It is double-storied and its seven-bay facade faces the sea, yet the rear
elevation to Grey Street is also grandly architectural yet carefully detailed in
the Baroque manner, with a continuous balustrade parapet. It has a
double-storied arcuated and pilastered loggia
derived from the designs of Bramante and
Vignola of the Italian High Renaissance. It is
flanked by pavilions with Palladian windows over canted bay windows. It remains
intact, very near to where Frederick Barnes’s own house stood.
It is clear from the 1871 tender notice that
Currie’s Eildon formed major additions to the earlier Barham House, now consumed
within it, designed for Edward Bernard Green (1809-1861) by John Gill
(c1797-1866), and out for tender in August 1850. After Wattle House, Barham
House is the second earliest substantial building in St Kilda. Barham is a
village in Kent,
midway between Canterbury
and Dover.
Gill was the architect of Banyule in Heidelberg
(1846), The Hawthorns (1846-47) and Invergowrie (attributed 1846). Each of these
houses, still very much Regency in manner, have asymmetrical Picturesque Gothic
composition and Tudor details.
Other Gill buildings include Collins Street
Baptist Church (1845), St John’s Anglican Church, Heidelberg (1849-51), and the
severely Classical Royal Terrace (1853-58) and Goldsborough
Mort Woolstore, 574-528 Bourke Street (cnr
William Street, 1862). Interestingly in relation to Eildon, the BaptistChurch
offers another link between Gill and Reed. Gill’s church was thought to survive
behind Reed’s portico, but it has now been proven that it was entirely
demolished in 1861 and replaced by Reed’s existing building.
Green was a prominent Melbourne
city land owner and Honorary Secretary to the MelbourneHospital.
When he died in 1861, his executor was his neighbour, William Nicholson
(1816-65), the Melbourne
grocer who became alderman and then Lord Mayor of the City of Melbourne;
then entered parliament in 1859 and immediately became Premier of Victoria
(1859-60).
For the remaining four years of his life.
Nicholson continued to manage Green’s estate for his widow, who had returned to
live in England.
He owned the property immediately adjacent to the north in Grey Street,
Fernleigh, with whose history it then became intertwined. Fernleigh in turn
shared a boundary with Samuel Jackson’s Wattle House (23). After becoming
premier, Nicholson himself moved into Barham House, as it was much grander than
Fernleigh.
When he died, his widow Sarah married Richard
Twentyman and remained at Barham House until June
1870. A year earlier (August 1869), the Green Estate had been sold to Barham to
Currie, subject to their tenancy. But Sarah still owned Fernleigh. During 1869,
the Twentymans commissioned Charles Webb (1821-98),
to remodel and extend Fernleigh as a twenty (!) room mansion. They moved in and
renamed it Mittagong. Within two years, Reed and Barnes had completed
remodelling Barham for John Currie and he had renamed it Eildon. The
Twentymans lived at Mittagong there for a decade
until Richard’s death in 1880.
Currie died at Eildon, eighteen years later,
widely mourned. He left an estate of almost £500,000 to his wife Louise and his
eight children. His sons John Lang and Charles Sibbald
took over Larra. Mrs L. Currie continued to live at
Eildon into the twentieth century. In the 1920s, Eildon was subdivided, by
formation of Eildon Road,
off Church Square
and from about 1930 it became a guesthouse. A second storey was added to the
house. The colonnade still clearly overlooked the bay, the stables still
survived to the side and the gardens still swept down to Church Square.
In the 1930s, Mittagong the only Charles Webb
house in St Kilda, was demolished. Its subdivision formed Eildon Court
and extended Eildon Road
up to Grey Street.
References
Australian
Dictionary of Biography.Vol 3.
Melbourne
University
Press, Melbourne. pp.510 & 511.
Cantlon,
Maurice. Homesteads of
Victoria
1836-1900. Georgian House
Melbourne.
1967. pp60 & 61. (For
Larra illustration).
Goad, Phillip.
Bates Smart, 150Years of Australian Architecture.Thames & Hudson, Fishermans
Bend, 2004.pp57-59
Goad, Phillip.Melbourne
Architecture.The Watermark Press.
Sydney
1999. p 41 & 240.
Heritage Victoria.Victorian Heritage Register. No.H746. (Gives the
date as 1880).
Kellaway,
C. Research Notes.13 April 1984.
Johnson, Peter.
Additional material, particularly in disentangling Barham
and Fernleigh.
Lewis, Miles.
Melbourne Mansions.
(Database).
MMBW Plan of
Drainage.1900, 1953 &
1966.
MMBW Plan of
Drainage.1900, 1953 &
1966.
National Trust
of Australia
(Victoria).
File No: B5295.
Sands and
McDougall Directories.1866-72.
St Kilda
Historical Society Collection.Photographs of Barham House and Fernleigh.
The Argus.14
& 24 August 1850.
p2. Tender Notices.
