When Maggie Tunaley arrived in Melbourne with baby Billie in December 1911, her husband Tom took her to a house he had rented in Powell Street Yarraville. The family lived there for three years. At that time, the house was surrounded by vacant land and had no number, although there were a few shops within walking distance on nearby Somerville Road (Footscray Council rate books).
This picture shows Tom, Maggie and baby Billie in front of their block-fronted timber cottage, assumed to be 6 Powell Street Yarraville. From the size of Billie (born 21 Jan. 1911), it looks like it was taken within a year of their arrival, sometime in 1912.
The photograph was printed as a postcard and sent to England. It is now in John Tunaley's collection, even though it was not sent to his father, John Charles Tunaley (b. 1909). On the reverse, Tom has written a message below the Christmas greeting, saying "This is our House Mary". We don't know who "Mary" is, but she is most likely Tom's aunt, Mary Thomason Tunaley, by then a Mrs Powditch in her 50s. We also don't know how the postcard ended up in John Charles' possession.
Yarraville lies in the west of Melbourne, about 7km from the CBD. It is on the Maribyrnong River. After a rail line was laid in 1875, it became an industrial suburb with many factories.
Powell Street is a long street and still has many block-fronted timber houses dating back to the Victorian era. A park called Beaton Reserve, home to a Trugo Club, lies at the southern end of the street. The blocks around the park are all large and there are many double-fronted timber houses with ornate lacework that have been beautifully restored.
Tom and Maggie's house was built at the other end of Powell Street, on a much smaller block, in an area for workers' housing, near busy Somerville Road. When the Tunaleys moved there, the Victorian-era cottage was surrounded by vacant land and had no number. It was the only house between Forrest Street and the rear fences of shops facing Somerville Road. As the only Victorian-era cottage built on that section of land, I assume that Maggie and Tom's cottage is the house now numbered 6 Powell Street (pictured below). Although other houses were built in this section of land during the early 20th Century, number six is the only Victorian-era house in that section and looks identical to the house pictured behind Tom, Maggie and Billie in the postcard above. If so, the Tunaleys lived in it for three years.
Why did Tom take Maggie to live in Yarraville in 1911? Perhaps Carpenter Tom had a job in the area. Bill and Harriet Smith and their daughter Dorothy also lived with Tom and Maggie in this house in Yarraville.
In 1914, the Tunaleys and Smiths moved 14km across town to Hawthorn, a suburb about 7km east of the CBD, located on the Yarra River. When their first daughter was born on 11th September 1914, Tom, Maggie, Bill and new baby Pauline were living at 7 Bell Street, Hawthorn, beyond Glenferrie Road (pictured below). The Smiths shared this six-roomed house with the Tunaleys in 1914 and 1915 and their daughter Beatrice was also born in 1914.
The free- standing timber cottage at 7 Bell Street is still there, perched on the high side of the narrow street with some space around it. It is flanked by similar timber cottages, all built for workers in the late 19th Century. The narrow streets around Bell Street are crammed with rows of near-identical workers cottages, in contrast to the other side of nearby Glenferrie Road, where leafy groves of stately homes roll down the hill towards the river.
The Tunaleys stayed in Hawthorn for over eight years. From 1914 to 1921 they lived at 7 Bell Street. Then for one year in in 1922, for they moved around the corner, to a house at 14 Haines Street, after it was vacated by Bill and Harriet Smith (pictured below).
The house at 14 Haines Street is a brick cottage, one of a pair of duplexes (originally a row of six) that share a party wall and a steeply pitched slate roof. It looks different to most of the houses in the area and is a variation on the "Edwardian" or "Federation" style of the early 20th Century. Built in 1916, it was newer than the house at 7 Bell Street, although smaller, with only four rooms.
Maggie and Tom had three more children while living in Hawthorn. In addition to John Charles (b.1909) still in England and Bill (b.1911) who came out with her, Maggie gave birth to Edith Pauline in 1914; then Thomas Stanley in 1916; and Mary Victoria in 1919. By the time their sixth child Geoffrey was born in November 1924, the family had moved back across the Yarra, towards the city, into the heavily industrialised inner city suburb of Collingwood.
Collingwood is one of Melbourne's oldest suburbs. White settlers were there from the late 1830s along with its neighbours Fitzroy and Richmond. All three suburbs were rapidly industrialised during the 1850s after the Gold Rush, when the young city was inundated with labour and capital. Factories and tanneries were built along the Yarra River, on land that had been graced by farms and homesteads a decade before
Collingwood lay on the north-eastern side of the CBD between hillside Fitzroy and Richmond on the flat. Collingwood's eastern border curled around the banks of the river at Yarra Bend. Within Collingwood, a swampy strip of land between Hoddle Street and the Yarra River, was one of the last areas to be subdivided, because it was too wet. By the 1880s, when its drainage issues were finally resolved, this area proved ideal for ambitious civic infrastructure. The Collingwood Town Hall, the Collingwood Football Ground and the new railway line and railway stations were all constructed on large tracts of flat land in the area that came to be known as Abbotsford.
However, like the rest of Collingwood, Abbotsford was densely populated with rows of workers cottages in narrow streets, co-existing with hundreds of factories. Bootmakers and bakers were dotted along residential streets, while large mills and laundries jostled for space along the banks of the Yarra River.
In 1922, Tom Tunaley's name was pencilled into the Collingwood Rate Book (1922-23) as the occupant of a cottage at 282 Langridge Street, Abbotsford, the fourth house from the junction with Nicholson Street.
Langridge street is an extension of Gertrude Street Fitzroy, starting at the Smith Street border and ending at Nicholson street. The majestic Dentons Hat Mills, built on Nicholson Street in the 1890s, looms large over Langridge Street, and is still there today (although it is no longer a factory). When Tom and Maggie moved there in 1922, the few blocks of Langridge Street between Hoddle Street and the Hat Factory, contained a tightly dozens of small houses, along with hotels and shops, and the extremely prosperous Mcalpine's Bakery.
According to the 1924 electoral roll and the 1923-24 rate book (below), Tom and Maggie Tunaley were still living at 282 Langridge Street, Abbotsford in 1924. The single-fronted 2-bedroom Victorian-era brick cottage was one of a row of four owned by the wife of King O'Malley long since demolished and replaced with a block of flats.
In the 1920s, the four O'Malley houses on the north side of Langridge Street numbering 282-288, faced a matching row of four single-fronted brick cottages built in the same era (late 1880s) across the road, numbering 237-243 Langridge Street. The O'Malley houses were valued by the rates assessor at 20% higher than the four houses across the street, which could mean they were slightly bigger.
Around 1926, Tom and Maggie and their five children moved across the road and around the corner to a house at 57 Nicholson Street facing the Hat Factory. Their timber cottage was also one of four and seems slightly larger than their previous house, although like the rest, it only had two-bedrooms.
Although bigger than their previous cottages, I think the Tunaley house at 57 Nicholson Street - second from the right, with a red roof in the picture below - is the ugliest of them all. Maggie later referred to it as a "timber shack", so perhaps she would have agreed with me.
After Tom died in 1929, widowed Maggie and the six children stayed on at 57 Nicholson Street house for three years. In 1932, the Tunaley family moved around the corner to 243 Langridge Street, a two-bedroom brick cottage across the road from 282 Langridge Street, where Tom and Maggie had lived from 1922 - 1926, when they first moved to Abbotsford a decade earlier.
Maggie stayed put at 243 Langridge Street for the next 27 years, during which time all her children grew up, married and had children of their own. To most of her grandchildren, the house at 243 Langridge Street was 'Nanna Tun's House', until she moved out in 1959.
In summary, from information in the electoral rolls (ER) and Council rate books (RB), we know that the Tunaley family lived in at least six two-bedroom cottages around Melbourne at the following addresses:
1911- 1914 6 Powell Street, Yarraville (ER, RB)
1914 - 1921 7 Bell Street, Hawthorn (ER, RB)
1922 - 1922 14 Haines Street, Hawthorn (ER, RB)
1922 - 1926 282 Langridge Street, Abbotsford (ER, RB)
1926 - 1932 57 Nicholson Street, Abbotsford (RB)
1932 - 1959 243 Langridge Street, Abbotsford (RB)