Occasional Tales from the Mountain

Memorialising war: how the hills honoured their WW1 Diggers. How Australians memorialise wars and conflicts in a physical sense has shifted over the years and continues to change. In the hills after World War 1, as elsewhere, settling on an…

The Kennons. The Kennon brothers and their families were prominent in the hills in the 1920s and 1930s, scions of a large leather tanning business founded by their father in Richmond. Thomas and Squire Kennon were attracted to the hills…

Tram tracks into the forest (and other shattered dreams). In the boom years of the 1880s, nothing seemed impossible … not even an electric tramline up the side of the Dandenongs. Land speculators descended upon Fern Tree Gully ahead of…

`Driven to a diet of potatoes and water’: A cry for help from the forest in 1896. The Village Settlement Scheme of the 1890s was just one of a range of closer settlement measures adopted in Victoria over more than…

Outs: The Excursionists Guide from Melbourne 1868. In 1868, one of the earliest guidebooks for those seeking an escape from the confines of city life was published in Melbourne. First entitled Outs: The Excursionists Guide from Melbourne, it o@ered a…

Dr Harry Sloggett brought whiffs of sea air and scandal to the hills. The Dandenongs have always attracted their share of sailors and naval types … perhaps it is the need to put themselves at a distance from the sea…

A love letter to the Dandenongs. Towards the end of 1928, Mrs Gwynnivere (Vere) Frazer (1886-1976) brought her large brood of children, aged from four to 15 years to stay in Olinda after her doctor suggested the clear mountain air…