Canterbury History

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Canterbury

Canterbury is situated 10 km East of Melbourne CBD and is part of Boroondara council area. It adjoins Camberwell in the south, Balwyn in the North, Kew in the West and Surrey Hills in the East.

Canterbury was a sparsely settled district of farms and gentlemen’s retreats in 1873 when it was named after Sir John Henry Manners-Sutton, Governor of Victoria, who became Viscount Canterbury in 1869. The landscape of Canterbury was undulating, hilly to the north and East and watered by W Creek, a tributary of Gardiners Creek which flows into the Yarra River.

After the railway was extended from Hawthorn to Lilydale in 1882, suburban subdivision and land speculation followed. The land boom was followed by a severe ‘bust’ so that by the early 1890’s, although much of Canterbury had been subdivided, many blocks lay vacant for the next twenty years. Patches of commercial development occurred along Canterbury Road, particularly near the corner of Balwyn Road and a hotel was built near the station in 1889. An Anglican church, St Barnabas, had been built in Balwyn Road in 1872 as well as Balwyn State School which still caters for children living north of Canterbury Road. The strongly Protestant community also built churches near Canterbury Road in the 1890s: Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational and Baptist.

From 1905 to 1920 many houses were built and more shops to cater for them. In the early 1900’s Canterbury Gardens were laid out with a Library and Bowling Club and the shopping strip along Maling Road was constructed. By the 1920’s, Canterbury was characterised by substantial detached houses, mostly brick.

Canterbury Boundaries

The current postal boundaries of Canterbury 3126 are seen in the map to the right. These boundaries have remained virtually the same since 1928. Before then, there were areas of Canterbury that are now part of Surrey Hills and Balwyn.

The 1905 Sands and McDougall Directories Township of Canterbury map shows that in the North, Canterbury extended to the south side of Whitehorse Road so that Balwyn Primary School and Saint Barnabas Church were in Canterbury.

Canterbury did not appear to have its own classification until the 1892 Directory and it was not until 1895 that the boundaries described in the Township map were adopted. They remained unchanged until 1928.

Don Gibb, Canterbury A History 2nd ed. pp 6-8.

Municipality

Canterbury has been part of the following local government areas:

Boroondara Roads Board 1854-1871

Shire of Boroondara 1871-1905

City of Camberwell 2014 – 1994

City of Boroondara 1994 – Current

Indigenous Canterbury

The two Aboriginal language groups in Melbourne and surrounding area – Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung – were part of the Kulin nation. Their languages were related so they could communicate with each other and there were regular exchanges between them. Each of these language groups comprised of local clans who took responsibility for maintaining their particular tract of land both spiritually and economically. They didn’t ‘own’ land as we know it: they couldn’t dispose of it. Caring for country was the duty of particular family groups who made up the local clan and who knew its sites and knew how to sustain it.

The Woi wurrung language group was made up of four clans, whose estates collectively took in all the area drained by the Yarra River. The largest of these clans, which occupied all the Yarra drainage basin to the east of the Maribyrnong River, was called Wurundjeri. This clan comprised two parilines – Wurundjeri willam (meaning ‘who dwelt White Gum Trees’), and Wurundjeri balluk (who dwelt in wetland areas). The early settlers did not distinguish between these two groups and often referred to them as the Yarra Yarra or Port Phillip Tribe. There were 8 land-owning clans that made up the Wurundjeri, one was the Wurundjeri willam who were custodians of the land which became Boroondara. Early settlers gave the parish area that they had surveyed the name Boroondara, meaning ‘where the ground is thickly shaded’.

The Wurundjeri willam clan was actually split into three ‘mobs’, each with a clan head, or Ngurungæta. The section headed by clan head, Borunupton held the land south of the Yarra from Gardiners Creek upstream to the Yarra flats, including the northern Dandenongs. It is in this estate that Canterbury now stands.
The Wurundjeri willam were hunters and gatherers who lived off the available plants and animals. In a seasonal round, they also carefully managed the natural resources of the area through regular firestick farming. The vegetation coverage of Canterbury consisted of woodlands with open grassy areas, and a number of permanent streams, such as W Creek, flowed through the region, so, although in many parts its soils were sandy, all of these features contributed to Canterbury being reasonably good country for gathering and hunting.

Borunupton, clan head of the local mob, was a signatory to Batman’s treaty in 1835 but the Kulin probably believed they were granting temporary access. Both Borunupton and his younger brother Billibellary, clan head of the area on the northern side of the Yarra, died in the 1840s. Billibellary’s son Simon Wonga and cousin William Barak, son of the Bebejan, Ngurungæta (or clan head) of the third group of Wurundjeri willam, succeeded their fathers as elders. Barak led the Corranderrk community at Healesville until his death in 1903.

Don Gibb with Jill Barnard, Canterbury A History, 2019.
Gary Presland, First People: The Eastern Kulin of Melbourne, Port Phillip and Central Victoria, 2010.

Early Settlers in Canterbury

Access to the east of Melbourne was difficult until a punt was established across the Yarra in 1842.

One of the earliest European settlers in the wider Canterbury district was squatter Arundel Wrighte who found land for his cattle along Koonung Creek to the north, in about 1837. He built a house ‘Marionvale’ perhaps near Faversham and Chatham Roads, in 1839. There were a few tracks through the area, mainly used by timber fellers who carted wood back to inner Melbourne.

From the late 1830s, government surveyors had been slowly mapping the land, measuring it in acres in order to sell it. At the same time, 1841, the British Government was selling blocks of eight square miles, in England, sight unseen, under a scheme of Special Surveys. These blocks had to be five miles from a surveyed town – in this case Melbourne. Henry Elgar, an English merchant bought the Elgar Survey through agents. It covered the area between Burke Road on the west, Elgar Road on the east, Canterbury Road to the south and Koonung Creek and the Yarra to the north. Although he sold his land to the Crown in 1845, his Survey shaped the way land was used and roads were built within this area.

There was very little settlement until the 1850s and even then it was very sparse. Thomas Power bought land from 1846 and owned most of the area of the Survey north of Canterbury Road (originally Delany’s Road) to Whitehorse Road, between Burke and Balwyn Roads. Gwen McWilliam’s map shows the landowners in 1853, superimposed on a modern map. Michael Logan and Patrick Moloney were farming about 150 acres in the area watered by W Creek, south of Canterbury Road (Riversdale Road was called Maloney’s Road). Logan was supplying wood and wattle bark to the city in the 1850s. Sometime later, there were other smaller horticulturalists such as Charles Wentworth, a nurseryman and George Blackburn who grew strawberries and tobacco.

Prices rose after the gold rush and Thomas Power subdivided and sold his land in 1857. A wooden bridge had been built over the Yarra in Bridge Road Hawthorn in 1852, replaced by a new stone one in 1861. That year, the railway also came to Hawthorn. ‘Gentleman settlers’ who worked in the city bought acreages for ‘rural retreats’ on the hilly country of the Survey, north of Canterbury Road. Among them was journalist and newspaper publisher Andrew Murray who bought a 100-acre estate in 1859 where he planted a vineyard and built ‘Balwyn House’ (Fintona site). Ernest Carter, a dentist built ‘Shrublands’ in 1863, acquiring more land and planting a vineyard. Francis Rennick built ‘The Grange’ on 10 acres. Edward Snowden, a lawyer, built ‘Monomeath’ with a vineyard in 1863. In 1865, George Taylor, solicitor, built ‘Mountfield’ in Mont Albert Road (Survey Road) on 10 acres. Others followed this pattern of large houses on large blocks. To work in the city, these aspiring gentlemen needed to be driven by carriage to the station at Hawthorn or into the city.

Many of these early settlers served on the Boroondara District Roads Board which operated from 1854 as the earliest unit of local administration. It cleared land and built roads and bridges. From 1856, they were elected annually and in 1871 became the Shire of Boroondara.

Gwen McWilliam, ‘Boroondara Musing’ Book 1, Mc William Enterprises, 2012.
Gwen McWilliam, ‘Early Canterbury’, Camberwell City Libraries, 1994.
Don Gibb with Jill Barnard, ‘Canterbury A History’, Focus Print Group, 2022.
Geoffrey Blainey, ‘A History of Camberwell’, Lothian Publishing Co., 1980.

Subdivisions

William Tibbits’ painting “Canterbury 1882 – the Machine in the Garden” depicts the construction of the railway line connecting Canterbury to Melbourne, interrupting the rural setting and changing it forever. Contemporaneously with the arrival of the railway and the escalating land prices of the 1880’s land boom, the farms of Canterbury were carved up into suburban allotments and offered for sale in a number of separate estates. As the advertising brochures at the time attest, the release of each estate was frequently by way of auction – sometimes promoted as gala events with free rail tickets a marquee and refreshments available for those willing to take the six mile (12 minute) trip by rail from Melbourne.

Click on the estate below to view it.

1883 Arklow Hill Estate