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At Home on Hotham Hill
Melbourne Age Review
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At Home on Hotham Hill
My first book At Home on Hotham Hill was published in September 2004 by the North Melbourne local history society, the Hotham History Project, supported by a grant from the City of Melbourne. It tells the story a prominent terrace house in North Melbourne (519 Dryburgh Street) through the life of the man who first built it, Robert Langford.
The book is the result of research done over a period of eight years. I had long been curious about the subject house, having glimpsed it through the car window while travelling along Flemington Road with my family as a child. A field trip to China to undertake architectural research in 1996 led to my acquaintance with the owner, and I did a short university assignment on the building later in that year as part of a graduate diploma in architectural history and conservation. It seemed to me there was an interesting untold story associated with the building, and as is so often the case with historical research, I kept wanting to find out a little more.
I joined the Hotham History project in 1997. This put me in contact with a network of other people doing related research, notably Winsome Roberts, and also the local history librarian at the North Melbourne Library, Heather McKay. In February 1999, I begin working at Allom Lovell & Associates (now Lovell Chen) as a research assistant, and over the subsequent six years was fortunate to be able to undertake extensive detailed historic research on many historic buildings across Melbourne. This gave me a deep working familiarity with the key historical sources for researching building histories, and proved invaluable for my research into 519 Dryburgh Street.
The project interested me at a number of levels. It was a fascinating theoretical exercise to try to obtain every single piece of relevant information available in the historical record about this particular building. Working outside the usual professional constraints of time and budget, I was able to check obscure and unlikely possible sources, which sometimes resulted in interesting discoveries as well as fruitless wild goose chases. Some basic things remained unknowable, such as the architect of the building, the appearance of the original rear tower, and the construction of the original front fence. This process was a useful education in applied research, which was invaluable for my professional work.
There was a certain thrill in making discoveries, such as the long forgotten name of the house, Milton Hall, and its association with a number of other buildings belonging to the same family along nearby Curran Street. I was interested in uncovering the relationship between particular personal circumstances and the buildings we see today. What was it that led to a house with that particular set of characteristics being built at that particular time? In this case, a newly affluent market trader come local councillor wanted an ostentatious new home where he could entertain as a newly elected mayor. There are also broader economic and social forces at work in determining the patterns in urban development we see around us and in this study it was important to uncover this context as well. A conversation with Lorraine Huddle brought up the idea of explaining where the money for the house came from, which led to me examining Langford’s career as a salesman and property speculator.
Eight years would seem to be a long time to spend preparing a manuscript of this length (40,000 words). I had little understanding of how to undertake the study when I first started, and didn’t really know how to identify and use various available sources of information. It was a long learning process. As with many things, historical research gets easier the more of it you do. It does take a long time to analyse data, to make connections between things, and deduce where to look next for information. There is no handbook on how to write nineteenth century Australian biography. I was frustrated by the absence of robust primary source data on basic things such as Langford’s financial standing at various stages of his career. I was also working full time during most of this period, and archival research is very time consuming.
The fact that the Langfords did not have any surviving descendants made my research more difficult, as they are usually the most reliable preservers of personal documents and photographs. Descendants of Robert’s siblings (most of whom I traced) did hold some important material, and were very generous in passing this on to me. Fortunately, there was a substantial amount of information about Langford recorded over a 10 year period in the local newspaper the Advertiser, and this led me to make this a more in depth study than it might have otherwise been. These reports chronicled the critical period in which Langford served as a councillor, including the year when he was mayor and built Milton Hall.
In writing the biography of a person who has been dead for 90 years, there a lot you can only speculate about. As a writer you need to constantly keep in view that boundary between the known and the unknown, and makes it clear where there is uncertainty or speculation. Can each statement really be substantiated? I wondered what my subject would say if he was sitting across the table and I was reading out loud. There is that haunting suspicion historical researchers always have, that there may be important evidence in some unknown, unchecked place, in private hands or some obscure file which may yet surface at some future time.
It was hard not to like Robert Langford. His recorded utterances and actions were sufficient to convey a strong sense of his personality, and he was unstoppably energetic, flamboyant, generous and sociable. In his time he was a notable figure in his industry as a prominent trader at the old Melbourne’s old Flinders Street fish markets. He was a community builder as a councillor in four municipalities, and more literally as a property developer who developed most of what is now the Gippsland town of Paynesville. Sadly childless, he and his wife Elizabeth nevertheless shared the generative impulse, and gave much of themselves to their extended families and communities.
The book’s final structure was unresolved until almost the end of the study. It originally comprised of two related but chronologically dissociating narratives, one being the history of the house itself, the other being the life story of Robert Langford. Each needed the other to give the fuller picture, but it wasn’t until near the end of the study did it occur to me to intersperse the stories. Chapters on family history, economic history, social history, urban history and architectural history come together as a series of complimentary panels to give the fuller picture, communicating the interplay between a range of different social and economic forces that leave us with the buildings we see today.
Now the book is complete, I think it illustrates many of the key themes in the history of late nineteenth century Victoria, of immigration, social mobility, of the rise and fall of fortunes made during the land boom. It is a case study showing wider societal trends being played out in the lives of individuals. My research into the building’s physical development will be useful for future restoration works.