Mountain Tales: Issue 06

September 2025 No.6 The Mount Dandenong & District Historical Society aims to collect, preserve and share the rich history of the district. The society is especially interested in the communities of Mount Dandenong, Kalorama, Olinda, Sassafras, Ferny Creek and Tremont. These are the ridgetop villages on the mountain range clearly visible from metropolitan Melbourne. The society welcomes new members with an interest in local history and meets each month. It maintains a small collection of significant local history material. We have some limited volunteer capacity to assist with private research. Many of the stories here have previously appeared on the society’s Facebook page. If you would like to learn more, please contact the society’s Secretary via email at mtddhs@gmail.com Schools Fox’s Point Scenic Railway, a funicular system powered by a 1927 Oldsmobile engine, that ran up the hillside at Kalorama for a few years in the 1950s. Originally built to convey building materials to a house site, the track ran just 200 feet (60 metres) but up a 30-degree slope rising 110 feet (33 metres). Its owner Neil Foxcroft turned it into a tourist attraction before authorities deemed it unsafe around 1960. The railway and Mr Foxcroft’s house were destroyed in the 1962 bushfires. The site was later bought back by the Forests Commission. (Image: SLV collection) Celebrating 130 years of education on One Tree Hill A depiction of the old schoolhouse painted by local artist Doug Miller in 1965 to mark the 70th anniversary. (Private collection) Last month was the 130th anniversary of the opening of the Ferny Creek Primary School, an occasion previously marked by a “Back to Ferny Creek” in 1965 and centenary celebrations in 1995. Plans were afoot to celebrate the school’s 125th anniversary in 2020 when COVID-19 intervened.The school was known as One Tree Hill State School No.3228 until 1937, when it was renamed Ferny Creek to bring it into line with the name adopted for the locality by the local community in the early 1900s. The original school building, which stood opposite the current campus in what is now a carpark, came from Sandy Creek in the Macedon Ranges and was carted up the hill by bullock dray. Sadly, it was destroyed by fire in 1983.Agitation for a school to serve the growing needs of the early settlers, and especially the impoverished village settlers, was famously led by the indomitable Jane Murphy whose family had lived at One Tree Hill since 1878. * The first 100 years of the school’s history was recorded in The Little School by John Schauble, published in 1995. September 2025 No.6 Pioneers Hannah Tutt: A woman of the Hills Some family names resonate through the history of the hills. One of these is Tutt, perhaps best remembered through the association of Tutt and Storrie, early pioneers of passenger transport and later proprietors of a motor garage in Sassafras. But even earlier, Hannah Tutt (1850-1930) operated the guesthouse Fernhem in Sassafras. Early settlers in the area, William George Tutt and wife Hannah had come to the hills when they were opened more widely for settlement in the 1890s. They arrived as free selectors (rather than assisted village settlers). Choosing land in The Crescent, Tutt, who had apparently run a cycle business in Richmond, became a successful raspberry grower in Sassafras. It was a move which probably came not a moment too soon for Hannah Tutt, who in 1894 had become embroiled in the prosecution of the notorious serial killer Martha Needle (1863-94), convicted of murdering the brother of a fiancée. Needle was also found to have earlier killed her husband and three daughters by arsenic poisoning and claimed life insurance. She was executed in October 1894, becoming the third woman hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol. Hannah Tutt had operated a boarding house in the inner suburbs where the Needle family stayed after arriving from Adelaide in 1885, and it was this connection which led her into the witness box at both the committal and trial hearings. In the more rustic and secluded confines of Sassafras, Mrs Tutt became a founder of the Sassafras Methodist Church. The earliest mention of Fernhem as a guesthouse came when it was advertised in 1908 as offering `accommodation for visitors’ with `bath, piano, croquet’ for 25 shillings a week or 9 shillings for the weekend. Interestingly, an advertisement in The Age in December that year gives W.G Tutt as proprietor, although by early 1910 “Mrs Tutt” is firmly in control and “milk and cream from our own cows” were being provided. Being born Hannah Earney in Hampshire, England in 1850 linked Mrs Tutt with another prominent hills family, which for generations has been involved in a variety of community service across the Dandenongs and surrounds. After the death of her husband in 1916, the management of Fernhem passed to the Tutts’ daughter Emma Louisa Dahllof (1877-1950) and her Swedish-born husband Harry (1870-1932). The Tutt’s son Harry (1886-1965) partnered with Les Storrie, then operating horse drawn coaches, in the creation of Tutt and Storrie in 1913. From one vehicle, a Cadillac, they went on to build a fleet and a reputable business. The Storries, another prominent Sassafras family, originally selected land along the Sassafras Creek. Brian Storrie (1934-2017) continued to run the motor garage on the original location (now occupied by the Sassafras Gully post office & café) for most of his adult life. Fernhem, much renovated, later became a private home. (Image: SLV collection) Up for debate … The One Tree Hill Debating & Mutual Improvement Society was established in the early days of the Scoresby Village Settlement. (One hopes one of the early improvements they sought was spelling!) In 1896, the society sought permission to house a bookcase containing some 200 volumes at the recently opened One Tree Hill State School No.3228. The OTHDMIS pushed for a mechanics institute in Ferny Creek. This was achieved when a hall at the top of Belgrave-Ferny Creek Road was opened in 1905. It remained there (with a lending library) until the building was demolished in 1949. 2 September 2025 No.6 Views Looking down from on high with Airspy Long before Google Maps revealed all our secrets, there was Airspy. William Hansom (1862-1939), who styled himself ‘Airspy’, was a former sports journalist and photographer who saw a niche market for aerial photography soon after World War 1. (Born in England, Hansom’s other claim to fame was being a nephew of the inventor of the Hansom cab.) Teaming up with ex-military pilots including Charlie Pratt (18921968), a talented photographer in his own right, Airspy set about to capture uniquely detailed bird’s eye views of Melbourne and regional Victoria. The Airspy business recorded thousands of views of the city and state from the air. While Airspy survived until after World War 2, Pratt gave up commercial flying in the late 1940s. The Estate of Charles Daniel Pratt donated a large collection of aerial photos to the State Library of Victoria. Even though the Pratt family occasionally holidayed at Sassafras, the hills do not feature particularly in the collection of aerial photos. Some of Airspy’s work was adopted by Rose Postcards including this view of Sassafras, possibly taken as late as the 1950s. Curiously appearing in reverse in the SLV digital catalogue, it shows a section of the Main Road (Mt Dandenong Tourist Road) between Sassafras township and The Crescent (heading south). Starting in the top left are a group of houses along The Crescent. The building in the upper centre of the photo is The Thistle (later Pancakes, The Drunken Duck, Sassafras Tavern, etc). The two houses to the right are facing onto Grandview Grove, which can be seen joining the main road just above The Thistle (there’s a car parked there). Moving back down the road towards Sassafras, the building in the bottom right is an outbuilding/flat attached to Lorna Doone (1904), one of the last remaining guest houses from the early 20th century. Things were a bit quieter back then … if you look closely just below this there are a couple of people standing in the middle of the road! The large home in the bottom centre of the image still stands. `Melbourne from the Air’ was the subject of the 2025 Weston Bate Oration at the RHSV in May delivered by Emeritus Professor Graeme Davison. A version of the lecture will appear in the December issue of the Victorian Historical Journal. (Image: SLV collection) 3 September 2025 No.6 Art Issac Whitehead: a forgotten master During his lifetime, Issac Whitehead (1819-81) was bracketed with contemporaries Eugene von Guerard, Louis Buvelot and Nicholas Chevalier as one of the preeminent landscape painters of late 19th century Victoria. Whitehead’s reputation diminished somewhat after death, only to be resuscitated in the 1970s when his work began to be acquired by major public galleries. While many artists trained in the classic European tradition struggled with the Australian landscape, the Dublin-born Whitehead coped with the “strange” vegetation better than most. But above all, he grasped its scale and successfully conveyed this in his forest paintings. Like his prominent contemporaries, Whitehead travelled widely through the colony. He painted scenes in and around Macedon, Mulgrave, Sorrento, Wodonga, Lilydale, Wilsons Promontory, Fernshaw, Gippsland and the Upper Yarra. But some of his earliest and grandest works depicted the readily accessible forests of the Dandenong Ranges, and particularly the Sassafras Gully. In the Sassafras Valley, Victoria (1875) can reasonably be located in the local fern gully that would become a famous tourist drawcard. A second painting entitled ! Sassafras Gully, Gippsland (1870) could equally be ascribed to a location elsewhere, although Gippsland art expert Simon Gregg has suggested it is equally likely to have been painted in the Dandenongs, then considered the gateway to the colony’s eastern wilderness. In both works, Whitehead captures the giant mountain ash forest and its understorey of ferns and lesser shrubs, juxtaposing these against human and animal figures to give an impression of scale. In the Sassafras Valley, Victoria was applauded for “the characteristic effects of the fern growth and giant eucalypti”. Known to be prolific, other local paintings by Whitehead included One Tree Hill, Sunrise in the Dandenongs (both.c.1872) and Spring Evening Near Lilydale (1875) Whitehead’s paintings of the Dandenongs were among those to be exhibited overseas – at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition (1876) and the Exhibition Universelle in Paris (1878). A large painting entitled In the Dandenong State Forest, Victoria was specifically commissioned for the Philadelphia show. The Argus noted: `The treatment of the ferns is especially good’. At least one Philadelphia-bound work survived a “72 hour salt bath”, dunked when the bark Skeryvore started taking on water mid-Pacific en route to New York. The vessel’s captain was later acquitted of attempting to deliberately sink it. Meanwhile, Whitehead was equally as famous as a picture framer, devising elaborate gilded frames for von Guerard, Buvelot and others. He also created a large gallery space in Collins Street. After 23 years in Victoria, Whitehead died in 1881. The Sydney Morning Herald correspondent noted him to be `a good, kind, amiable man who could bear to hear others praised without being envious or jealous. I know of no one who can quite supply his place. And he is singularly distinguished in that he did not begin to paint until he had long passed the meridian of life. He was comparatively an old man when the desire for art fame came upon him’. In the Sassafras Valley, Victoria (shown above) is part of the M. J. M. Carter Collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide and currently on display. A Sassafras Gully, Gippsland is held by the National Gallery of Australia. Other words are held by the National Gallery of Victoria. 4