Coming from Places that Go off the Map

Burleigh, Victoria, Australia, The World, The Universe

Coming from Places that Go off the Map.

I was conceived and raised to maturity in Burleigh, an outlying district in the parish of Wandin Yallock in the Dandenongs-Upper Yarra valley area of Victoria.

Our Knoll family farm is still there in 2007. There is a road there called Knolls Lane

For the first ten years of my life my family picked up our mail from the Burleigh Post Office, at the farmhouse of R.R (Joe) and Eva Parker, on the hill in Wiseman Road, Burleigh. This was always a friendly and kind place to visit. Going there set the default for me in how welcoming I expect a place should be, and how a real neighbourhood community should function. People stood on the roadside out the front, or paused in the driveway, and gathered at the kiosk awning as they met, to talk. I never heard an unkind word there.

I now know that the Parkers' are very distant relatives. Their ancestors were co-pioneers, English cousins of my early family. The relationship links back to a tiny rural village called Widford, in Hertfordshire, north of London. My great aunt told me that when she used to go to the Burleigh post office at the old Albert & Janie Parker House (with shop) before 1951, she went in past the property nameplate on the gate that read ‘Widford”. The post office moved a half a mile up the hill to the then younger Parkers in 1951, before I was born.

From the time I started primary school I walked a detour up the hill, and into the farm drive, to the little kiosk awning on the side of the house that made this post office, with my older brother (and later my sister) on the way home from school, to pick up our mail.

Burleigh consisted mainly of that Post Office at Parkers', and an idea of a place to be identified with, that existed in a circuitous looping network of hill and valley roads, and a village farm spread of finger-gridded properties. The area was all called South Wandin before World War One.

Burleigh had no defined borders and it merged in unnamed places in the east. Then, it was crossed over by Monbulk one way, and by Silvan in the other and more particularly by Silvan South. The un-denominational local church, called the Gospel Hall was clearly in Burleigh but when finally signposted was said to be in Silvan South.

'Burleigh' is prior to Silvan. Burleigh was in existence from 1908, whereas the rest of South Wandin came to be called Silvan in only 1917 after a community vote for a name change.

The children of Burleigh attended the Silvan South Primary school in my day. That was where we wrote on the inside covers of our exercise books after our name: Burleigh, Victoria, Australia, The World, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe.

It was at that school that we were told the old stories of local history and our pioneers, and these were largely tales of my own ancestors. This located our young sensibilities better than any GPS. Four generations of local stories stirred the blood to gel us into intimacy with that locality.

The story about how the name Burleigh came to be that was taught at school was that one of the Wiseman brothers, or their agents, rode up to look at the land selected on their behalf (By my Hollis ancestors) and found many “burrs” (meaning, no doubt, ’bidgee widgee’) growing there. The tale goes that these sticky burrs velcroed themselves to the gentleman’s socks and boots. So he called the place Burr-Leigh, shortened to Burleigh.

This account always struck me, even as a child, as inadequate, especially in terms of naming significance, and as too slight an event or a reason to name a district after.

It was only in September 1999 when I contacted a Victorian post-office history buff and researcher, that I found the Post office archive for Burleigh and became aware of the existence of the early name of Burleigh House. Burleigh House, which shortened and gave its name Burleigh, was further west than where it was in my father's or in my childhood, at a farmhouse site on what is now the main Monbulk Road. There, both the post office and its prototype in the earlier Telegraph Receiving Office were situated.

I have heard no word, and have no record of where the name Burleigh House came from. But it is recorded in the annals of South Wandin ( now Silvan) as a place where trained singers were want to stay, and attend Mechanics Hall functions by carriage.

I believe Burleigh was situated on (or opposite) the property occupied by the well know Tulip Farm of the Tesselaar Family. Burleigh House may have moved later to the England’s house, on the corner of Wiseman Road and the Main road (Later Ceasare’s house).

But in looking at the parish plan and reading the electoral rolls, and histories records, there comes the suggestion that the Buerle family in residence in that area may have leant their name to this heritage. I believe this name comes originally from Germany and would have been pronounced Bueller, (as in Ferris’s day off) but an English reading would soon make Burleigh of that spelling Buerle.

This area features on Map 123 of the Melway Street Directory. For many years it had the district appellation BURLEIGH across that page. But the Upper Yarra Shire (taking a cue from the Lillydale Shire before them] have dropped all references to Burleigh in their conception of local geography. To my knowledge there never have been any road signs pointing the way to Burleigh. And now for the last five years the Melbourne Melway Street Directory cartographers have dropped the name Burleigh off that map.

But in 2007 there is a irrigation and pump business called ‘Burleigh Enginering’ in Monbulk Road, (technically in Monbulk), ‘Burleigh Flower’s in Wiseman Road (Burleigh) and the former Gospel Hall church building, now a private residence of an owner who has talked to the locals and glorified the improved high gabled house with a name “ Little Burleigh”. And if you go to Google Earth you will find Burleigh named there, overwritten across the satellite pictures of this region of the globe.


KNOWING The Place You Come From Is Knowing a Little of Yourself

At the conclusion of her book about the tiny townlet of Lyonville on the Great Dividing Range of upland Central Victoria, near Trentham - ‘Charlie’s Story - The Life and times of a Country Town ' published in 1999 by Melbourne University Press, Lynn Sunderland writes:

“Towns like Lyonville have something elemental in their existence: the ancient pattern of community and shelter and sustenance that draws people together for a time and then releases them to their unknown futures. The nature of such towns is fixed in time and purpose, like the single clear note of a bell. It may be that they have no capacity for metamorphosis, no chance to change endlessly with the times. When a mill closes, workers must go. School numbers and church congregations fall away. Houses stand empty, the fruit falling unheeded in gardens gone wild. Young people move away and the old sit quietly in summer heat behind drawn blinds. Smoke drifts from chimneys on cold, still mornings and leaves blow against empty shopfronts. When someone like Charlie closes his doors on the last General Store in town, that delicate and vital network of human community is damaged in some final way.”

The pattern that knits the Social Fabric is an intricate and fragile skein. Who does love the country itself if those born to it are displaced? Nobody knows it like natives to it. Nobody knows its story like those whose parents and grandparents leave a legacy of generation who have lived and died in a chosen place.

Tiny towns like Lyonville, and indeed, district valley communities without commercial centres like Burleigh even more so, in this consumer society, are a most endangered species. A culture that had come to belong has been marginalised and fragmented. This socially cohesive communities have been divided and so conquered destroying that fabric and that glue of belonging together that was making a nativity in an native spirit of belonging to a place and
its country.

Writing of Burleigh I am holding on tight to the elbows of the good strong roots of my heritage against the tide of this flood of nowhere-being as it rises from the mainstream and tries to engulf and drown out all life at the wings.