Telford Family of Ellinbank
ELLINBANK HISTORY from 1874
European settlers began to come to the district of Ellinbank and the surrounding areas of Tetoora Road, Seaview, Bull Swamp, Gainsborough and Cloverlea from 1874 onwards.
Prior to that the Gippsland region was occupied by the indigenous Woiwurrung (Wurunjeri) language group.
Much of the soil in the West Gippsland region is highly fertile. Together with a climate that reliably delivers an annual rainfall of the order of 1000 mm (40 inches) it is ideal for farming, growing a variety of crops, grazing sheep or cattle, and in particular for dairy farming. This has been recognised by the establishment of the Ellinbank Dairy Research Station which commenced in the 1950s and is continuing to contribute valuable advice to farmers to improve yields in a sustainable and environmentally responsible manner. Around 450 Holstein-Friesian cows are currently milked in 3 separate farm units covering a total 217 hectares.
The above photo taken around 1970 shows a group of Jersey cows belonging to Ray Telford, typical of the breed of dairy cattle at the time, Strzelecki Ranges and Mt Worth in the background.
In the Weekly Times of Saturday 21 December 1889, there is an article entitled “A Ramble Round Ellen Bank (South Warragul)” which describes the countryside at the time (15 years after first settlement):
“Bull Swamp is a thriving place situated about 5 miles from Warragul railway station. Cultivation, combined with dairying and pig breeding, is carried on extensively. A substantial butter factory has just been opened at the swamp, and despite the present low price of butter, is in a flourishing state - an average of 1,600 lb. (pounds) of butter per week being turned out for the short time it has been in existence. As the factory gets more widely known large supplies of milk will be received from the Lardner - a rich grass country hard by.
Another march of two miles brings us to the picturesque little hamlet of Ellen Bank. A State-school, church and post-office suffice for the wants of the settlers. The scenery around is very pretty, beautiful sunny hills rising to view on all sides, on which contented looking cattle, as fat as mud, are lazily grazing. Running creeks are plentiful, on which frisky juveniles are to be seen hooking out black fish.
A little further on we pass through a large forest in its natural state, in which we note fern tree gullies of surpassing grandeur, hills of musk and hazel trees, up the stems of which twine gigantic supple-jacks, the blossoms of which scent the air with fragrant perfume, and wild flowers of all colours and shades, all of which make a picture that needs to be seen to be appreciated. The wants of this work-a-day world however are ever at war with the beauties of nature; and so it is here. The fine timber has tempted the saw-miller. The harsh clang of the saw and the steam engine denote that the beautiful forest is on the way to depletion. Thus it is forever, ‘man in his mad pursuit of wealth careth not for beautiful in nature’. Pounds, shillings and pence is his motto. However we must give him a lenient verdict. In the words of a noble writer, ‘We should look with sorrow rather than anger on the thoughtlessness of men.’ Moralising thus, we retrace our steps, and I bring this hastily written sketch to a close.”
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Victoria became a separate colony in 1850, having previously been part of New South Wales. Prior to 1850 large parts of Victoria had been settled including Portland in 1834 (Henty brothers) and Melbourne in 1835 after John Batman declared “This is the place for a village”, northern Victoria around the Murray / Ovens Valley area including Bontharambo station in 1838. Pastoral runs were taken up in the area around Sale in East Gippsland in the 1840s - initially by Scots such as Angus McMillan and Archibald McIntosh, followed by the gold rush to Walhalla in the early 1850s which of course also occurred in the areas of Ballarat, Castlemaine, Bendigo and Beechworth.
In 1866 “Hewitt’s Royal Mail Line of Coaches” commenced a daily (except Sundays) coach run from Melbourne to Sale and Bairnsdale. One of the stops along the way was at Brandy Creek which is a few Km north of where Warragul was established a few years later. Their advertisement in The Age of 29 March 1866 mentions “for further information apply at Cobb’s office, 35 Bourke St. east, Melbourne”. It is not clear what the exact relationship is between Hewitt’s and Cobb’s coaches but a number of later references to the route through Brandy Creek refer only to Cobb and Co.
In 1869 the Victorian government passed legislation enabling potential settlers to purchase 320 acre (1/2 square mile) blocks of land in the West Gippsland area.
Selection of land around Brandy Creek commenced in 1870, the first block being taken up by John Rogers. In 1873 John Lardner subdivided an area of about 10,000 acres south of Brandy Creek, leading to a rush of interested parties. At that stage Brandy Creek had two hotels, a coaching stable, general store, cordial factory, chemist, blacksmith, two churches, police station, courthouse, post office and 2 banks (West Gippsland Gazette, February 5, 1929).
John Lardner was a surveyor employed by the Victorian Surveyor-General’s department with experience of survey work in the Otway Ranges, Mornington Peninsula and suburbs of Melbourne. He was born in Galway, Ireland and came to Australia via New Zealand.
An article in the Weekly Times of 12 January 1929 entitled
COUNTRY CITIES AND TOWNS, Their Rise And Development, No. 21 HISTORY OF WARRAGUL By FRANK WHITCOMBE
describes the conditions encountered by the settlers at the time:
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“About 1873 Lardner was directed to run a base line due south from the main road for intending selectors, who otherwise could have formed no idea of their location when in the dense forest. This line developed into a track known as "Lardner's." The indomitable courage of the settlers who forged their way into this dense and difficult country and literally carved out homes in the forest was nothing short of heroic, and many of the experiences were tragic. Men of all classes, in the language of Mr Reed, caught the fever of settlement and ventured their all in this project, in a country the name of which in the blacks' vocabulary signified "Wild, ferocious, or savage." Many of these men in the front ranks of the Forlorn Hope of pioneering failed and fell to make room for those who succeeded them, and took up the land on which up to a certain stage clearing had been effected. The isolation of the homes accessible for a long time by pack horse only and accentuated by the desolation of the early burning off was appalling. The people of today, who enjoy the beauty, comfort and generous returns of this picturesque district, should gratefully acknowledge the wonderful work accomplished by the pioneers.”
The road running south from Drouin for about 15 miles (24 Km) to Tetoora Road, is still known as Lardners Track. “Blazes Track” was subsequently cut eastward from Lardners Track to what is now Ellinbank.
The country was heavily wooded with tall eucalypts (Messmate, Blackbutt and Swamp Gum) and interlaced with luxuriant growth of jungle underneath -hazel, musk, blanketwood, sassafras, blackwood, wattle and other shrubs, as well as tree ferns in the gullies. In cutting the track it was this scrub which was cleared to enable travel through the forest between the tall trees.
Before the newcomers could begin farming they needed to clear the land, initially of the smaller vegetation and then of the majority of the Eucalypts. A common practice was to ring bark the trees so that they died and lost their foliage, cut them down with a crosscut saw ( 2 men) and then to burn them. From about 1881 a tramway was constructed to the township of Darnum and so the tree trunks could instead be sawn and sent to the market.
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In the West Gippsland Gazette of Tuesday 6 May 1924, one of the early pioneers, Ben Cropley, described his experience of becoming settled at Ellinbank after his arrival in 1876:
"In 1876 we heard from Mr. Harkness, a brother of Mr. Chas. Harkness, about Brandy Creek and three of us drove up in a spring cart to Brandy Creek; put our horses in Mr. Hans paddock, and carried our swags and food on our backs out to a store and post office on Lardner's Track, kept by a Mrs. Symes. We thought they were the longest miles (about five) that we had ever travelled. We stayed the night there, and next day made for the surveyors' camp, which was on Mr. John Hardie's selection.
We wanted five blocks one each for self and brother and three nephews. We borrowed a pocket compass from a man in the camp, and got Mr. Hardie to go with us, and took axes to blaze the track and cut the scrub in the line we went (about two and a half miles), and when it was surveyed our line was but three feet out.
After pegging out the land we had to wait until it was granted to us. In the winter of 1877 we had about 100 acres of scrub cut, costing £1 per acre, and in the following autumn we got it burnt off, and then had to pick up all the small wood and rubbish and burn it ready for sowing with grass seed. But before we could get the seed to the place we had to corduroy two boggy flats about a quarter of a mile altogether, and build two bridges over creeks. It cost about 15 s an acre to pick up and clear the land ready for sowing, and about the same for seed. When it got ready to stock we put on 600 sheep and soon after we got them shorn. Then the caterpillars came and eat up all the grass, and left it as bare as if the land had never been sown, so the sheep had to live on the scrub until we sold them.
When the grass came on again in the autumn we bought some dairy heifers and cows, intending to go in for cheese-making in the spring, but the caterpillars came and eat up all the grass again, so we had to dry off the milkers and put all the cattle out to graze. "We had the same experience four years following. Soon after we bought those heifers the pleuro broke out amongst them, and we lost some of the best of them (we heard afterwards that they came from a herd that was infected with the disease). We got them inoculated, and after a while got rid of the disease.
When the pest ceased to trouble us we thought it a pity to kill any more timber, and put in a sawmill, and laid seven miles of tramway in to Darnum station with 60 lb. iron rails bought from the Railway Commissioners, and we imported a locomotive made by Fowler. of Leeds, England, the whole plant costing about £6000. 'We got no assistance from the Railway Department.”
Below are some photos of the type of native vegetation in the area.
White Supplejack, Hazel Bush and Daisy Bush
The two black & white photos of native bushland and of a blazed track are taken from the publication "The Land of the Lyrebird" by the South Gippsland Pioneers' Association.
The Weekly Times published a series of articles in 1929 describing the experiences of the early settlers; this extract is from the January 12 edition:​
"The only factors in those days of attacking the forest were the man and his axe. At first a clearing was made for the tent, then after exploration, followed the choice of the home site, probably the building of a primitive hut. To render the home reasonably safe, an area of two or three acres had to be cleared of standing timber, and in a setting of fallen trunks and huge stumps, the original home was established. Then followed the widening of the field of view, by cutting the scrub and ring-barking the trees, with the later fiery furnace, when the fallen scrub was burned. A bad burn necessitated much laborious work in handling the charred remains and burning off in heaps what should have been consumed in the first sweeping fire. Cocksfoot and clover seed would be broadcast on the ashes, and pasture would spring up in the spaces between the stumps and the fallen timber. Stock would be required to control the growth of young scrub, threatening to take possession of the clearing. Years of patient effort then followed in nursing the pasture. Clearing away the continually falling debris from the ring-barked trees and stoving the dead tree trunks."
One of the early settlers along Lardner’s Track was Joseph Hardie who came out from Scotland in 1858 on the “Albion” together with his wife Jean Scott and 7 children including John who married Ellen Lees in 1871. Joseph was listed as a “forester” at Hawick (in the Scottish Border country) and as a “farmer” on the ship’s passenger list.
John Hardie and Ellen and their 1 year old daughter Margaret took up their 320 acre block of land a couple of miles further south at the eastern end of “Blazes Track”. There their son Alexander was born in January 1875 and Ellen died a few days later. John Hardie remarried (to Sarah Mills) but named his property “Ellen Bank” in memory of his first wife. A post office opened at his property in 1879 from where mail could be collected and posted, there being no roadside delivery until 1948; this serviced the farmers who had settled to the immediate east of the Hardie property, the district now known as Ellinbank.
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Blazes Track today approaching the original Hardie property (from Google Earth)
William Connell Kingston was one of eight children of John Kingston and Eliza Connell who came to Australia in 1852 on board the “Delta”, both from County Cork, Ireland. They had a market garden at Cheltenham (Melbourne) and William came from there to Ellinbank in 1895 aged 28. He was elected to the Warragul Shire Council in 1922 and served until his death in 1949. In 1920 he married Catherine Murdie, daughter of Henry Murdie who had come to Ellinbank in 1897; Henry’s parents were from Jedburgh, Scotland. The Kingston property now forms part of the Ellinbank Dairy Research Station and a portion of that adjacent to the Primary School was donated to the community by William Kingston as a recreation ground / football oval.
The Kingston property was originally settled by David Smith from Wales. The Ellinbank primary school was opened in 1879 on an acre of land donated by David Smith; the building was replaced in 1906 with a single classroom (i.e. grades 1 to 6 all studied side by side) and a second room added in 1960. Ellinbank primary School no. 2189 continues to operate in 2025 with a reduced number of pupils, down from about 50 to around 20.
David Smith was the first Shire Councillor for Warragul South.
In 1849 and ’50 several immigrant ships arrived at Port Phillip carrying German passengers, particularly from the areas of Silesia and Pomerania in Prussia; these immigrants settled north of Melbourne and created the township of Westgarthtown (now known as Thomastown). Dorothea Maria Schultz married firstly Heinrich Sandmann and then Johann Friederich Topp. Her sons Gustav and John Topp and Ernest Sandmann came to Ellinbank around 1880 and after a period of leasing, bought property just to the east of the Wallace property. They set up as door-to-door butchers, cutting up a beast and selling to nearby settlers but also selling through the Warragul saleyards trading as Messrs Topp and Sandmann.
Gus Topp married Margaret Hardie, daughter of John and Ellen; their daughter Doris, one of 8 siblings, married Hal (Alfred Henry) Gilbert whose son Barrie still lives in the district; 4 of Doris Topp’s siblings died in infancy ( not all that uncommon in the 19th century).
Gus’s brother John Topp served as a Warragul Shire Councillor from 1899 to 1902.
On the 1903 electoral roll for the division of Flinders, there are 2 Gilbert brothers living at Warragul South - Ellis and Basil, both farmers, and Basil’s wife Eva, home duties (as are almost all the females listed for the next 60 years). In about 1905 their brother Lionel with his wife Clara and children Hal and Grace joined them from Melbourne where Lionel had been working a as a post office clerk. All 3 brothers purchased established farms in the vicinity of where the Warragul Presbyterian Church now stands at the corner of the Warragul-Korumburra Road and Hazeldean Rd.
Lionel Gilbert donated the land for St Georges Church of England to be built in 1915; the church building was destroyed by fire in 1968 and a new brick building erected in 1971 which operated as St Luke’s Anglican- Methodist Cooperating Church until its closure shortly after the centenary service in 2015, subsequently purchased by the Presbyterian church.
Basil Gilbert left the district but Ellis and Lionel remained there until their deaths in 1948. From 1926 Ellis Gilbert became the local postmaster. Lionel’s son Hal married Doris Hardie, granddaughter of John Hardie (mentioned above).
Swamp Gum tree and Blackbutt trunk
Other early settlers included:
Ben Cropley, mentioned above, and his brother Effield, and 3 nephews, William, John and Alfred, were from a farming family based in Quadring in Lincolnshire and came out in 1850, initially settling on the Werribee plans and carting goods to the prospectors at the Ballarat goldfields. In 1974 two of the five 320 acre blocks were still in Cropley hands - John and Marshall - and their descendants still live in the district. John and Marshall Cropley, along with the Smiths, initiated the building of the Ellinbank Methodist church in 1881.
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William Wallace, his wife Mary Horner, and son David arrived at Ellinbank in 1886 taking up land a little to the south of John Hardie’s property, and subsequently, in 1886, a second 320 acre property which he named "Elderslie" and which is still run as an organic dairy farm by great great grandson Peter Wallace and family. The Wallaces were from Girvan in Ayrshire, Scotland where they had worked in the local cotton weaving industry, their parents having come over from Northern Ireland to escape the Irish famine. They came out to Port Phillip in 1854, firstly settling at Dunmunkle in the Wimmera before moving to Ellinbank.
William Wallace’s great grandsons Tom and Bill were very active in promoting sporting activities, in particular Australian Rules Football, and Cricket, and in the life of the Church of England which was opened in 1915.
For some of the above information I am indebted to the authors of the 20 page booklet “ELLINBANK 1874-1974” published for the centenary of Ellinbank - Bruce Gaul, Mrs J R W (Noel) Cropley, Mrs M V (Effie) Cropley and Seymour (Sim) Robinson.
In that booklet are listed all the various community organisations that have operated in the district up until 1974 together with the names of numerous active participants and office holders. The organisations mentioned (in order) are:
St Georges Church of England
St Luke’s Cooperating Church
Sunday Schools
Ellinbank Primary School
Ellinbank Primary School Mothers’ Club
Ellinbank Sports Club
Ellinbank Public Hall
Ellinbank Cricket Club
Ellinbank Football Club
Ellinbank Tennis Club
Darnum Ellinbank Rural Fire Brigade
Basketball-Netball
Country Women’s Association
Red Cross
Recreation Reserve
Social Badminton Club
Girl Guides Association
Scout Association
Seaview Rifle Club
Ellinbank State School Past-Students Association
Ellinbank Patriotic Fund
Mail Service
Rowse Bros. Pty. Ltd. Horticulturists
Warragul South Telephone League
Senior Young Farmers’ Club
These two Honour Roll Boards listing the names of those who served in the first and second world wars were displayed in the Ellinbank Public Hall.
Some accounts of the early days mention the presence of dingoes, wallabies and “native bears” (i.e. koalas) after which Bear Creek is named.
There were also venomous snakes, particularly the red bellied black, copperhead and tiger snake, to be contended with; this report in the Gippsland Farmer’s Journal of 20 November 1891 illustrates the very real risk of being bitten.
In later years one of the most common pests was the rabbit. The rabbit was introduced to Australia in 1859 to be hunted for sport. If left unchecked they would devastate the pasture leaving nothing for the cows and sheep to eat. Farmers spent a great deal of effort to control them by shooting, trapping, fumigating burrows and laying baits.
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In the West Gippsland Gazette of Dec 9, 1924 the following report appeared:
Ellis Gilbert was the next defendant. He was charged in respect to not destroying rabbits, and pleaded guilty, he was not represented by counsel The inspector said that defendant had 115 acres in-the South Riding of Warragul Shire. He inspected the place on October 14th, and found rabbits and burrows plentiful. He served the defendant with a notice on October 16th; but on 12th November there was no evidence of any work having been done. On that day, in three-quarters of an hour, He counted 35 rabbits, and saw four burrows. Defendant told him that 'the reason he had not done anything was that he intended to lease 'the property to his brother. Defendant pleaded that he had done all the work possible. At the time he got the notice he was ill in bed and for a fortnight afterward with influenza. Since the inspector had been out he had done a lot of work hut he admitted that he did nothing during the 14 days, as required by the Act. The P M announced that defendant must be convicted, as he admitted having done nothing between October 16th and November 12th. After that he had carried out some work, but not at the time when the Act specified something must be done. He would be fined £1, with costs to be fixed later.
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There were also foxes, again introduced into Victoria from Europe in the 1850’s - they largely preyed on rabbits but not enough to control the population and were a predator for domestic fowls which needed to be kept locked up at night.
In terms of invasive plants, the two which impacted greatest in the early 20th century were the blackberry (introduced) and the native ragwort which is toxic to livestock. Considerable effort was required to keep these in check - ragwort by pulling out individual plants dotted throughout the paddocks, hopefully before the seeds could be spread by the wind, and blackberries by manually slashing each year’s prolific regrowth and in later years by the spraying of herbicides.
The history of Ellinbank cannot be complete without reference to the nearby town of Warragul. For most Ellinbank residents over the past 100 years Warragul has been the place to do the weekly grocery shopping, car servicing, medical services (doctors and hospital), cinema and occasional concerts or theatre entertainment, for their secondary education at Warragul High School or Warragul Technical School (now known as the Warragul Regional College), and to catch the train to Melbourne from the Warragul Railway Station.
A great summary of its history can be found at the Victorian Places website:
https://www.victorianplaces.com.au/warragul
A copy of the booklet ELLINBANK 1874 - 1974 can be accessed from this link to Google Drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/179Ih90Kqw9oogbeohZnkElzYeee_hDWy/view?usp=sharing
Alan Telford
August 2025