Sydney, NSW 2070 · private history edition
From sandstone bush and nineteenth-century orchards to Crown Ridge, the capital-city avenues and the planned postwar neighbourhood.
Unlinked and excluded from search indexing 1943 aerial: NSW Spatial Services [25]
The short version
East Lindfield grew in layers. Streets were taking shape in the west by the 1890s, Crown Ridge sold strongly in 1920–21, and much of the capital-city grid was occupied before 1943.
The familiar 1950s and 1960s suburb came later, largely through Crown land releases east of Melbourne Road. New streets filled with houses, and the shops and community centre gave the growing neighbourhood a heart of its own. People had been calling the area East Lindfield for decades, although it did not become a separately gazetted suburb until 1994.
Before suburbia
People have lived on this Country for tens of thousands of years. Ku-ring-gai Council commonly refers to Darramuragal or Darug people, while Wallumedegal and Garigal connections may also form part of the story. The names that survive do not fit neatly within modern suburban boundaries. Colonisation disrupted clan structures, and “Ku-ring-gai” itself was a name coined by John Fraser in 1892. The continuing Aboriginal connection is older than any of these labels. [58]
The country was never empty bush. Hawkesbury Sandstone ridges fall through Gordon and Moores creeks towards Middle Harbour. Rock overhangs, creek-side sandstone and sheltered foreshore country offered places for engravings, shelters, art, grinding grooves, middens and other traces of long occupation. Those possibilities belong especially to the suburb's bushland edges and waterways, rather than to any one address named here. [58]
Colonisation brought violence, displacement, clearing, pressure on food supplies and epidemic disease. Aboriginal people still moved through this changed landscape. One local recollection has them travelling up from Middle Harbour to pick fruit at the Archbold orchard, following a path between the harbour valleys and the cultivated ridge long after European settlement began. [59]
Between about 1805–09 and 1819, the government Lane Cove Sawing Establishment worked the wider Lindfield district. By 1816 its camp held roughly 48 convicts. Timber travelled on jinkers to the Lane Cove River and then by water to Sydney. The camp track, later Fiddens Wharf Road, became Ku-ring-gai's first colonial road, so the district's earliest traffic faced west to the river while the steep Middle Harbour country remained hard to reach. [62]
Daniel Dering Mathew's 1819 grant comprised 400 acres from today's Pacific Highway to Archbold Road and from Boundary Street north to Tryon Road. Named Clanville, it covered much of western East Lindfield. Mathew felled timber and ran cattle before selling to Richard Archbold in 1824. [59]
Richard and Mary Archbold established orchards using hired and assigned convict labour. After Richard died in 1836, Mary and the older children kept them operating until her death in 1850. Gerald Archbold built Clanville cottage, and an 1858 plan records its orchard, cultivated paddocks and entrance from Lane Cove Road. Early residents later remembered Aboriginal visitors from Middle Harbour coming to pick Archbold fruit.
The estate remained in trust until the youngest of the Archbolds' eight surviving children turned 21. In 1858 it was divided into eight nominal 50-acre allotments. Family members later reassembled parts, but by the 1880s title notices show the 400-acre holding fragmenting into private parcels. East of Archbold Road, meanwhile, much of the rocky future suburb remained Crown land.
The eastern side of modern East Lindfield entered the market through both real and speculative transport schemes. Parliament authorised the privately promoted Willoughby and Gordon Tramway in July 1887. Its promoters imagined a line from the St Leonards cable tramway toward the Parish of Gordon and spoke of nearby land rising from £120 to £500 an acre. The scheme was amended several times but never completed. [61]
Even so, the July 1888 Government Gazette described future East Lindfield land by its distance from the proposed tramway terminus. The September sale offered large numbered Crown portions, generally several acres each, on a 25 per cent deposit with upset prices mostly from £30 to £70 an acre. Its descriptions already name Melbourne, Wellington, Carlyle, Tryon, Ruskin and Carnarvon roads alongside routes later altered or lost. A substantial group was reoffered in 1890, proving that the transition was gradual rather than an immediate sell-out. [60]
The railway was the scheme that finally arrived. The single-track North Shore line from Hornsby to St Leonards opened on 1 January 1890, with a platform at Lindfield, and reached Milsons Point and the harbour ferry in May 1893. By September 1894 the developing district had more than fifty families. A local progress committee was already pressing for postal facilities at the platform because letters collected by tradespeople could be delayed. It may have been an earlier form of the Lindfield Progress Association usually dated to 1897, although the thread between the two groups is still unclear. [60] [62]
The progress committee did the practical work of a neighbourhood council. In August 1895 it reported that the water supply would be extended, asked for extra trains, including a missing Saturday midday service, and joined other northern groups in pressing for a bridge across the harbour. [63]
In November 1899 residents formed what the Sydney Morning Herald called a “fresh progress association”, suggesting a reorganisation after the 1894–95 body rather than a simple unbroken foundation story. Charles R. Potter became president, with future shire president William Cowan and F. K. Cliff as vice-presidents. Its immediate program covered a recreation reserve, harbour bridge, better telephone facilities and a public school.
By February 1900 the association had secured a second daily mail delivery, a post box and another postal assistant. It was also pursuing a school, park, lower water rates, full telephone service, improvements at Milsons Point station, ashes for local roads and a harbour bridge, while finding time to organise a first-aid class. One proposal reached directly into the future East Lindfield. The association wanted unemployed men put to work opening Tryon Road to Middle Harbour, allowing a large area of Crown land to be sold. [63]
More of this story is waiting in the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society collection. Its catalogue lists an archive box, a folder and microfiche for the Lindfield Progress Association from the late 1890s into the early 1900s. A newspaper report from 1902 also mentions an illustrated annual pamphlet about roads, schools, post and telephone services, parks, drainage, railways, water rates and the harbour bridge. [63]
1894–1962
On the old land maps, East Lindfield lies in the Parish of Gordon, County of Cumberland. This was a surveying district rather than a church parish. The first maps show broad grants and numbered Crown portions. Later plans cut them into estates, streets and house blocks, allowing the suburb to emerge on paper piece by piece.
The State Library's c.1850s Parish of Gordon map records grantees, waterways and the sparse road framework before an East Lindfield street grid existed. An 1888 plan then advertised 195 numbered portions from close to Lindfield station eastward toward Middle Harbour, with dimensions, acreage, roads, reserves and topography.
An 1891 Royal Commission looked back on a Crown land auction near Lindfield platform on 24 October 1888. More than 503 acres sold for an average of £50 11s 1d an acre, with individual blocks ranging from £30 to £210. The surviving plan advertises 25 September, so it may show an earlier stage of the same sales rather than the auction described to the commission.
An 1890 version colours another group of the 195 portions red for auction. Plan 118G goes a step further, writing areas and prices beside individual Lindfield lot numbers. Its date is missing, but it turns the numbered shapes on the map into real pieces of land with contemporary values.
The Archbold family had acquired about 50 acres by 1881 within present Tryon, Melbourne, Woodlands and Sydney roads. Myles McRae held another 55 acres to the west. An 1894 Crown Lands plan offered 195 portions and captures the early road framework before most of East Lindfield's familiar grid existed.
Woodlands Estate was offered in 1906. Nine of its fifty lots brought £630 at the first December auction. The Plateau Estate followed in 1913 around Wellington and Melbourne roads, with residential lots and a reserve for public buildings. Twelve Plateau lots sold for 13 to 18 shillings per foot, totalling £672. The 1920 Woodlands Extension sold 57 of 60 lots fronting Archbold, Woodlands, Carnarvon and Ruskin for £6,300.
Crown Ridge was the decisive subdivision. Its first auction plan of 17 April 1920 already laid out Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne between Sydney and Wellington roads, with Brisbane marked 66 feet wide. Fifty-five blocks sold for £8,300. A second release sold 21 lots despite a violent thunderstorm. The November 1921 reissue promised “level land for building”, garden soil, healthy home sites and Torrens title, on a £5 deposit and 36 monthly payments. Free cars met buyers at Lindfield station. Every purchaser even received a Golden Casket ticket.
Two smaller names fill the gap before the building boom. Arthur Rickard advertised Chimo Estate in 1923: seventeen deep blocks with Middle Harbour views, measuring 66 by 260–332 feet and priced at £55–£85. In April 1939 the Lindfield Heights Estate offered thirteen sites on Tryon and Wellington roads, close to Melbourne Road and nearly opposite the school, with a protective building covenant and five-year terms.
The maps also settle one easy point of confusion. There was no separate “Wellington Estate”. Wellington Road was already named on nineteenth-century plans and later bordered Plateau, Crown Ridge, Chimo, Lindfield Heights and the Highland Estate.
A July 1925 proclamation places Lots 1, 2, 33 and 34 of DP9998, on Sydney Road between Brisbane Avenue and Tryon Road, in a formal residential district. This securely ties DP9998 to Crown Ridge and shows that part of the estate was under residential planning control by 1925.
A 1929 advertisement offered Adelaide Avenue land measuring 66 by 158 feet for £200. By the 1943 aerial, much of Crown Ridge was built up. East of Melbourne Road, however, large areas remained bush until Crown releases in 1958 and 1962.
East of Melbourne Road, much of the land was still bush in 1943. It was released in stages: 31 blocks in 1954, 28 in 1956, 20 home sites in 1958, another eight East Lindfield and East Killara blocks in 1959, then 29 allotments in 1962. The eastern streets filled gradually, sale by sale, rather than appearing in one postwar sweep. [55]
The 1958 sale required a 10 per cent deposit with ten annual instalments at four per cent and limited each buyer to one lot. The 1962 release covered Karoo and Sylvan avenues and Canberra Crescent, with reserve prices printed directly on the blocks and a 20 per cent deposit.
One important map still waits in the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society collection: “Crown Lands, East Lindfield”, prepared by J. E. Green & Co in 1899, accession 973104. Its precise coverage will remain a mystery until the original can be inspected.
Brisbane Avenue was an original entrance into Crown Ridge from Sydney Road, not a later addition. The forked or split form is clearly visible in the NSW Government's 1943 aerial imagery. Ku-ring-gai Council's heritage study identifies splayed road intersections as a characteristic feature of Crown Ridge, which provides a credible explanation for this unusual geometry.
The result was a formal entrance rather than an ordinary right-angle corner. The splay made turning easier, improved visibility and gave Crown Ridge a broader sense of arrival. Its two arms enclose a central island, perhaps intended for planting or estate display, though no description of the original landscaping has survived.
1939–1954
By the late 1930s the lines on the subdivision maps were filling with brick houses, and East Lindfield had become one of Ku-ring-gai's busiest building districts.
In October 1939 architect Adrian Ashton was preparing a two-storey East Lindfield residence. Construction published the completed Adelaide Avenue house in 1942. Native trees had been retained, and Armstrong and Swainson built a single-storey garage wing off the entrance, three round-headed lounge windows and an octagonal two-storey rear wing with a sunroom below the owner's bedroom. The article specified biscuit-coloured brick with raked horizontal joints.
Other notices mention the brick “Mary Alice cottage” in Brisbane Avenue in 1940, a brick residence for J. C. Morrell, and 1941 approvals in Wellington Road, Sydney Road, Perth Avenue and Melbourne Road. One was a two-storey Melbourne Road house and garage for Mrs J. M. Murray. Street numbers are mostly absent, leaving the identity of those houses hidden among the buildings that survive today.
A January 1941 report said East Lindfield had the greatest building activity in Ku-ring-gai during 1940. It linked the expansion to a new city bus service, fresh subdivisions and improved housing finance.
Hobart Avenue appears repeatedly. In July 1936 Construction recorded a brick dwelling in “Hobart Street” for M. J. Knowles and a residence in Hobart Avenue for E. E. Woodley. That December came a brick residence and garage for B. H. Mullaney, followed in January 1942 by a brick bungalow and garage for E. H. Eyre. Without street numbers, none can yet be matched to number 34 or another surviving house.
Council adopted formal levels in April 1941 for Melbourne Road from Adelaide Avenue through the Perth and Hobart intersections. In January and February 1951, Water Board notices announced sewer mains along both sides of Hobart Avenue from Sydney Road towards Melbourne Road.
An architectural archive holds another unfinished puzzle, a house for Mrs F. Morris on Lot 4, Tryon Road. E. Lindsay Thompson and Spooner prepared plans, elevations, sections and details in 1948, followed by wrought-iron details in 1950 and garage alterations in 1955. The catalogue gives no modern street number, so the house has not yet been recognised. [56]
The official aerial record makes the change visible. Crown Ridge is already established in 1943, but bush still dominates east of Melbourne Road. By 1965 the later eastern streets and houses have transformed that edge of the suburb.
A much larger building program arrived in late 1950. Newspapers called it the Highland Estate in “Wellington Street”, almost certainly Wellington Road. L. J. Hooker Ltd, Rex Investments Ltd and Tyler Bros Pty Ltd set out to build 70 houses. More than 20 were finished or nearly finished by November, 70 to 80 men were working continuously, and the whole project was valued at about £300,000.
The group considered about 600 Australian and American plans before settling on three adaptable designs with architects Bridekirk and Vote. Buyers could change the fronts, roofs and finishes or reverse the plan. Prices from £5,350 to £7,500 included landscaping, roads, kerbs and gutters. Every block had at least a 60-foot frontage and about 9,000 square feet of land.
1927–1975
Old photographs bring back the rough roads, young gardens and pockets of bush that written records can only hint at. Some were filed under names so broad that their East Lindfield connection is easy to miss.
Four street scenes from 1927 capture Russell Avenue, Grosvenor Road, Bayswater Road and Middle Harbour Road. There are unsealed roads, open drains, horse-drawn vehicles, newly planted street trees and a mixture of Federation and interwar houses. This was the wider Lindfield district while East Lindfield was taking shape. The State Library of NSW holds the set as Residential streetscenes, Lindfield, N.S.W., PXA 635/505–508.
Three 1942 photographs by Sydney press photographer Sam Hood show Meadow Lea newly finished at 22 Sydney Road. They spent years hidden in plain sight under the catalogue title “Flats (taken for Building Publishing Co)”.
Names on the map
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and Canberra form East Lindfield's capital-city street theme. Around them are older names whose origins reach back to estates, landholders and the first roads across the district.
| Name | How the name fits |
|---|---|
| Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and Canberra | A documented capital-city theme. The streets were not necessarily named in one event: several predate the 1921 Crown Ridge reissue, Perth and Hobart appear in its plan, and Canberra belongs to the later eastern layout. |
| Archbold Road | Named for the Archbold family, major nineteenth-century landholders and farmers. |
| Tryon Road | Heritage NSW says it may commemorate Rear Admiral Sir George Tryon, commander of the Australian Station in the 1880s. The road followed the Mathew–Archbold grant boundary. The personal attribution remains qualified. |
| Middle Harbour Road | A functional geographic name for the route east from the railway ridge toward Middle Harbour. |
| Woodlands Road | Connected with Woodlands Estate; no more specific naming record has been found. |
| Wellington Road | Present on late nineteenth-century plans. No reliable naming record found, so it should not automatically be described as Wellington, New Zealand. |
| Allambie, Crana, Karoo, Sylvan and others | Recorded in the 1958 Crown Lands plan. Modern dictionaries give word meanings, but the exact East Lindfield naming decisions remain unverified. |
The railway stopped at Lindfield, leaving the growing neighbourhood to the east without an easy connection. Private route 183 filled the gap. A Roseville to Archbold Road service was running by October 1926 and reached Lindfield by December. By 1935 it was operated by H. W. (or A.) Driver, the same Mr Driver remembered by early pupils at Lindfield East school.
By 1948 the bus ran through Archbold Road, Owen Street, Sydney Road, Adelaide Avenue and Melbourne Road, returning through Tryon and Middle Harbour roads. It changed owners several times, stopped briefly in November 1955 and resumed in August 1956, later becoming part of routes 556, 557 and 558. Crown Ridge had been sold in 1921 with free cars from the station. The bus helped turn it into a place from which people could commute every day. [24]
From 1921 campaign to 1929 opening
Mrs Grace Sullivan of Tryon Road began campaigning for a local school in 1921. A 1926 application carried 51 names. The Government Gazette called tenders for a new Lindfield East school building in July 1928; the two-classroom school opened on 27 May 1929.
Seventeen children attended on opening day and 49 were enrolled by year's end. Headmaster Warren Brown, who served from 1930 to 1948, made the school famous for roses and dahlias. In 1932 it won a statewide school-garden competition.
Former pupils remembered about 60 children in three composite classes, open fires, gathering wood from the bush, going barefoot in the Depression and spending Empire Day prize money at Mr Mortimer's General Store on Melbourne Road. Mr Driver's private bus linked the neighbourhood to Roseville station.
Brian Manning, who began kindergarten in 1930, remembered bread-and-butter or Marmite sandwiches, the daily Union Jack ceremony, Empire Day bonfires assembled over several weeks, and Warren Brown's skill as both gardener and tennis player. Dick Urlett recalled concertina doors joining classrooms for group lessons, repeated mathematics work in composite classes and the headmaster's firm discipline.
Urlett and classmates grafted and planted the radiata pines that later towered over the playground. Brown's prize rose garden occupied the later tennis-court site, while two sandstone columns visible in early photographs still survived outside the science laboratory when the school history was written. [46]
Many of these memories were gathered for Fiona Garlick's Lindfield East Public School: A Celebration, 75 Years 1929–2004. Ku-ring-gai Library holds the book in its local history collection, alongside a shorter Ku-ring-gai Historical Society booklet about Lindfield and East Lindfield. [52]
Ku-ring-gai Library's photographs follow the little bush school as it became a larger postwar campus. One picture of the library opening carries two dates, 1956 in its title and 1950 in the catalogue notes. The later images need no such explanation. They show outdoor school life, a demountable arriving by truck in 1977, crowded grounds in 1978 and the foundations of a permanent new building in 1979. [53]
A deliberately planned centre
Before Hughes Place, schoolchildren remembered spending their Empire Day prize money at Mr Mortimer's General Store on Melbourne Road in the early 1930s. Nobody has yet placed the shop on an exact block, and it may have stood well away from the later shopping centre.
In April 1949 Council was considering Melbourne Road and Wellington Road sites for an East Lindfield shopping area. Mayor E. Solomon called a public meeting in May 1951, and residents drew up an ambitious “American-type” off-the-street centre for 6½ acres between Wellington Road and Allambie Avenue.
Only part of the scheme was built. Its central ideas survive in the arrangement of shops, off-street parking, park and community buildings. The short link between Pleasant Avenue and Wellington Road was officially named Hughes Place on 27 August 1959 and gazetted on 11 September.
Sydney Ancher designed the completed East Lindfield Shopping Centre for Ku-ring-gai Council in 1958. His name belongs to the shops themselves. No surviving record yet connects him with the community hall.
The early tenants are surprisingly elusive. Local newspapers from the years after the centre opened are patchy online, so a complete shop-by-shop story has not surfaced. East Lindfield Pharmacy says it has served the community for more than 60 years, placing a chemist at 5 Hughes Place by about the mid-1960s even though its exact opening date and first owners remain unknown.
The centre commonly called the Dukes Green shops is the individually numbered retail row on Hughes Place, beside Dukes Green on Wellington Road. Its principal shopfronts run from 1–15 Hughes Place, with service businesses also recorded at 17. Council calls the adjoining public car park 9 Wellington Road, which explains older directory references to the Wellington Road shops.
Advertisements would help fill the gaps, but the suburban papers most likely to carry them are poorly represented online after 1958. One North Shore Times profile of Butcher's Delight survives because Ku-ring-gai Rotary reprinted it in a newsletter.
Ku-ring-gai Library catalogues a particularly important Bill Riley photograph, East Lindfield Shopping Centre, Lindfield [circa 1978]. Its online viewer currently points to an unreachable legacy image server, but the catalogue record provides the details needed to request a copy from Ku-ring-gai Local History. [32]
The photographs pick up the story much later. They show Deli in the Park in December 2014, the supermarket arcade and outdoor tables beneath the trees, Kat and Brad inside East Village Providores in 2023, and the low shop row opening onto Dukes Green.
Sport made by hand
After the First World War, returned soldiers sought a local ground for their children. Council set aside part of a Tryon Road public reserve dedicated in 1904. Volunteers and Council carved the oval from a rocky sandstone ridge and built the Gates of Remembrance. The surrounding 88-hectare reserve became Soldiers Memorial Park in 1922. Cricket began in 1923.
The formal entrance comprises two sandstone arches with wrought-iron pedestrian gates and a matching vehicle gate between them. Architect Henry Lockley designed the gates, which Major-General Sir Charles Rosenthal officially opened on 4 November 1922. Their lintels preserve the original name, Lindfield Memorial Recreation Ground. Four honour-roll plaques carry almost 200 names of local First World War servicemen. [64]
The pavilion was destroyed by an explosion and fire in 1946. A replacement clubhouse, incorporating the relocated upper part of the East Roseville YMCA, was completed in 1960. A second playing field followed in 1968. The whole two-field complex is now variously called Lindfield Oval and Tryon Oval. [65]
Lindfield Soccer Club formed in 1957 and soon needed more space. Council offered the future Wellington Oval on condition that the club clear the vegetation. Parents and players held weekend working bees, then Council top-dressed and seeded the ground. The oval belongs to the great late-1950s and early-1960s growth of junior sport.
The present sportsground remains a single field backed by bushland near Carroll Creek, with cricket and soccer facilities. [65]
East Lindfield Progress Association formed in 1944, meeting in the Church of England Hall on Tryon Road and holding annual gatherings at Lindfield's Masonic Hall. It helped create the co-operative society that restored the 183 bus and the Community Centre Association that developed a permanent local meeting place. [54]
Sport quickly became part of its work. Australian sprint champion John Treloar ran 100 yards in 9.6 seconds at the 1947 meeting. Two years later, children raced at Lindfield Memorial Park while the program moved between gymnastics and a military display. The oval had already drawn famous cricketers. In September 1945, Stan McCabe, Sid Barnes and Bill O'Reilly were named in a combined grade XI to play Lindfield at what the newspaper called Lindfield East Oval. [50]
There were less glamorous battles too. In October 1949 association president H. H. Hilder complained that the Water Board had surveyed East Lindfield for sewerage more than ten years earlier and kept putting the work off. He described a nearly built-out suburb full of young children. Sewer mains finally reached Hobart Avenue in 1951. [50]
After fourteen years of campaigning over buses, shops, community buildings and even paspalum, the association wound up in St Peter's Church Hall on 29 September 1958. Its assets passed to the Community Centre Association, and its minutes and correspondence went into the local archive. [54]
1948 onwards
At 2B Carlyle Road, Lindfield Bowling Club grew from a committee of local men into a busy postwar club with new greens, a substantial clubhouse and a waiting list.
A history by Judith Godden, first published for the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society and reprinted by the club, says local men formed a committee in 1948, the club incorporated in 1950, and its ambitious clubhouse opened in 1952. It quickly developed a waiting list. A Ladies Auxiliary initially supported the men's club, and the women later obtained greens of their own.
Small advertisements let us watch the place being made. In July 1952 plasterers were told to see the builder on the job in Wellington Road. October brought a call to insulate the residence and hall. By December the club was looking for an experienced turf layer, with materials and help waiting on site.
The club history remembers greens cut from long-neglected ground, tiger snakes and lyrebirds in the scrub falling towards Middle Harbour. A lyrebird became the club emblem, while honorary gardener Jack Carr fed a local flock of kookaburras. Early member Norm Tyler also remembered visitors asking about a distant naturist camp near Frenchs Forest. That tale belongs to the club's folklore, not to the land at Carlyle Road.
The Lindfield Women's Bowling Club received adjacent Portion 799 under Special Lease 1958-29: 2 acres and 27 perches for a clubhouse, recreation and a green. Its lease required work on the clubhouse and greens within one year, completion of a clubhouse and one green within three years, and a 33-foot no-improvement strip. An extension in 1985 ran to 1997 over 3,465 square metres for recreation, bowling and parking.
Carlyle Road reserve
The building now identified as Middle Harbour Scout Hall or 1st Middle Harbour Scout Hall stands at 2D Carlyle Road beside the bowling-club precinct. The Crown reserve is called East Lindfield Boy Scouts. In 2020–21, a grant gave Scouts NSW $31,114 for the access road and drainage. The Killara Scout Group was at the site by 1992, while a newspaper had already mentioned a Middle Harbour group in 1983.
Local group history supplied with the photographs identifies the hall as the home of the 1st Middle Harbour Sea Scouts and records its name as Kalang, after the Sydney Harbour steamer and later showboat of that name. The maritime connection is apt: the Powerhouse collection records that Kalang's afternoon excursions passed under the Spit Bridge, travelled through Middle Harbour and continued to Killarney. The group's Facebook community provides a continuing link with former members. [68]
No opening notice, Crown lease or construction advertisement has surfaced under Carlyle Road, East Lindfield Boy Scouts or 1st Middle Harbour. The nearby Girl Guide hall was a different building. Council property files, Crown reserve papers or old Scout minutes may eventually tell us when Kalang opened.
Art Deco, Modernism and remembered residents
East Lindfield's streets hold an unusual mix of interwar Art Deco and postwar Modernism. Some houses sit quietly behind mature trees. Others make a spectacle of steep sandstone sites, split levels, broad glass walls and rooms suspended above the bush.
| Address and house | Why it is notable |
|---|---|
| 15 Damour Avenue Fred Clements House, John James, 1958 · I174 | Recognised by both Council and the AIA as an early house by John James, from the first years of his Sydney practice. James became an important builder-architect and early Sydney School practitioner. A detailed individual Council statement has not yet been located, so the protected fabric should not be guessed. |
| 19 Karoo Avenue Somervaille House, Ancher Mortlock Murray, 1963 | Part of Karoo Avenue's unusual cluster of architect-designed Modernist houses and the work of one of Australia's major postwar practices. It appears in the AIA register, although its present condition and detailed design assessment remain unverified. |
| 21 Karoo Avenue The Moat House, Michael Dysart, 1967 | Dysart and project builder Habitat turned an exceptionally steep block into a five-level, split-level house of sandstock brick and western red cedar. Its tiled entrance moat gave the house its later popular name. Cathedral ceilings, clerestory glazing, a large brick fireplace and an elevated pool preserve its strong late-1960s character. |
| 23 Karoo Avenue Fombertaux House · I175 | Jean Fombertaux used his own steep site to test a grid of 16 exposed steel columns, concrete floor plates spiralling around a central stair, very few internal divisions, large windows and precast wall panels. Its stark black frame and white cubic form deliberately departed from the earthy Sydney School manner. Sources give 1964–66, 1966 and 1970–72 dates. |
| 20 Melbourne Road Unnamed dwelling · I176 | Council identifies it as one of East Lindfield's “high quality” houses and Melbourne Road as a particularly strong streetscape where mature trees survive with substantially intact housing. Its individual architect, date and statement of significance have not yet been found. |
| 29 Pleasant Avenue Rippon Lea · I177 | Council describes a highly intact, late Inter-war Old English house built in 1950 by Tyler Bros: a large two-storey dwelling deliberately given picturesque cottage proportions, steep gables, green Marseilles-tile roofs and prominent chimneys. Its triangular corner garden, garage and sandstone gate piers make it a landmark from Pleasant and Sylvan avenues. It was one of the subdivision's first houses. |
| 28 Sydney Road Green Leaves · I178 | Identified by Council as high-quality housing contributing to the intact, tree-lined Crown Ridge and Woodlands streetscape. Its individual architect, owner, date and full statement of significance remain unresolved. |
| 22 Sydney Road Meadow Lea · I179 | A substantial Art Deco residence whose ballroom, cocktail bar, circular stair, staff flat, pool and large garden survive in the historical record. Its associations with James Armstrong's Meadow Lea margarine enterprise and later owner Azzalin Romano give it commercial and social significance as well as architectural interest. |
| 96 Wellington Road Unnamed dwelling · I180 | The statutory listing confirms local significance, but no accessible individual inventory explaining the selection has yet been located. Its architect, construction date, original owner and significant fabric remain open questions. |
| 72 Woodlands Road Stossel Residence / Linden Residence · I181 | Hugo Stossel's own c.1951 family house is a rare example of his European-influenced, cubist postwar work. Contemporary national features documented its careful control of sun and privacy, indoor-outdoor planning and integrated furniture. It is recorded by both Council and the AIA. |
| 1 Ailsa Close Fogl House, Harvey L Little & Associates, 1970–71 | Notable for an unusually intact period interior rather than a current statutory listing. The sloping-site design was reportedly adapted from Frank Lloyd Wright/Usonian plans, while Paul Kafka supplied extensive built-in and movable furniture. Museums of History NSW documented it before its first sale outside the Fogl family. The Wright link remains a family recollection rather than a Wright commission. |
Some houses have a full architectural story attached to their heritage listing. Others, including 20 Melbourne Road, Green Leaves and 96 Wellington Road, appear on the register with little public explanation of why they were chosen.
John James's early 1958 house makes clever use of a steep, densely planted site. A narrow driveway climbs to an enclosed lower level, while the upper floor reaches towards the street beneath a broad, low-pitched roof. The surviving photograph shows the shape of the house well, though the extent of later alterations is still unclear.
The house is a particularly intact example of the picturesque Old English mode surviving in East Lindfield. Built by Tyler Bros in 1950, it uses steep tiled gables, tall chimneys and deliberately cottage-like proportions on a prominent triangular corner site. A 2016 sale was its first appearance on the market in 43 years, providing a useful modern photographic record of the house and wraparound garden.
James Andrew Armstrong commissioned the large Art Deco house known as Meadow Lea. The AIA register dates it to 1937, yet a newspaper found the house still under construction in March 1941. It was probably designed or begun between 1937 and 1940. The architect and builder remain unknown.
That 1941 report called it a £10,000 “palatial home” occupying four large Sydney Road allotments. Its grounds were to include a £1,000 swimming pool, tennis court, orchid house and even a tiled dog bath. Later reports describe a cream-walled, green-roofed two-storey building of nearly 20 rooms on more than an acre, with a ballroom, cocktail bar, circular staircase, extensive gardens and a self-contained staff flat.
The name joined home and business. Armstrong was sales manager for Oliver Triggs, founder of the Meadow-Lea margarine company, and later became a co-owner until 1945. Armstrong did not establish the brand himself. The house then became a film location, with its pool and garden appearing in the Australian feature A Son Is Born, filmed in 1945 and released in 1946.
Talk of a £23,500 sale appeared in October 1947, but the deal that went through in June 1948 was for £17,000. The buyer was Azzalin Romano, owner of Romano's restaurant in Martin Place and the champion racehorse Bernborough. A newspaper called Meadow Lea one of the North Shore's show places.
The Wainberg family reportedly paid £25,000 in 1955, and Daniel Kalanderian paid $1.415 million in 1996. By the 2015 campaign, the five-bedroom house was described as having about 1,200 square metres inside, a sprung-floor ballroom used as a media room, a private courtyard, tennis court and pavilion, lap pool and a 2,500-bottle cellar. The asking price was $7.5 million for 3,144 square metres after an adjoining 1,162-square-metre lot had been separated from the old 4,300-square-metre holding. These figures come from property reporting rather than the title. [51]
A 2023 planning amendment removed the subdivided and redeveloped side land from heritage item I179. Meadow Lea remains listed at 22 Sydney Road, while adjoining 22A is no longer part of the heritage item.
Even without the architect's name, Meadow Lea has a story few suburban houses can match. Its Art Deco rooms connect East Lindfield with margarine manufacturing, Martin Place dining, horse racing and Australian film.
The ballroom and cocktail bar suggest plenty of entertaining, though no named private party has surfaced. The cinema connection is firmer. The pool and garden were used during the 1945 production of A Son Is Born, whose cast included Muriel Steinbeck, Ron Randell, John McCallum and Peter Finch. The property was certainly a filming location, though that does not mean every cast member visited it. [49]
Vienna-born architect Hugo Stossel designed 72 Woodlands Road for himself, Hildegarde and their son Peter. Published in the Australian Women's Weekly in 1951 and Australian House & Garden in 1952, it used sliding doors to a paved terrace and a cantilevered awning to exclude high summer sun while admitting winter light. It had parchment-coloured rendered walls, tallowwood floors, and Stossel-designed silver-ash and Queensland-maple furniture and built-ins.
Michael Dysart answered one of Karoo Avenue's most difficult sites with five interlocking levels, warm masonry and timber, and an extraordinary tiled entrance moat. Newspapers dubbed it “The Moat House” in 2024. Whether the family ever used that name is unknown.
A full-page Sun-Herald feature published on 30 April 1967 identified Michael Dysart as architect, Habitat Pty Ltd as builder and A. A. R. Baldwin as the client. It described a block once considered almost impossible to build on. Rather than flattening the design, Dysart arranged two storeys as five split levels and extended the main floor to street level with about 1,000 cubic yards of fill held by a concrete retaining wall approximately 100 feet long and 10 feet high. The structure used an Oregon frame, sandstock brick and western red cedar, with tallowwood decking around the house and pool. [71]
The contemporary account records a large street-level living room, bedrooms, kitchen, dining room and sunroom on the main floor. Below were a rumpus room, workshop, store, bedroom-sitting room, tropical garden, bathroom, laundry, billiard room and sauna beside the pool. A steeply pitched roof, cedar joinery, exposed brick, cathedral-like ceilings and broad glazing carried the architecture through the interior. These are unusually characteristic concerns for Dysart, whose project houses for firms including Habitat explored split levels, open planning and a close fit with Sydney's broken topography. [73]
By 2024 the tiled entrance moat was still there, though no longer operating. The five-bedroom house retained its cedar panelling, clerestory windows, curved brick fireplace and extensive built-in cabinetry, and sold at auction for $3.796 million on 7 December. Domain called the architect “Michael Dyson” once, an evident typographical error beside the reproduced 1967 feature and other sources naming Michael Dysart. [71] [72]
Designed by Jean Fombertaux for his own family, Fombertaux House is an unusually complete experiment in steel-framed domestic architecture, poised above a steep sandstone escarpment at the end of Karoo Avenue.
Fombertaux bought the vacant sloping block after establishing his architectural partnership with Hans Peter Oser. Modern House dates the design and construction to 1964–66, with Fombertaux acting as both design architect and builder and Taylor Thomson Whitting as engineer. The house was conceived as an economical grid of standard construction units: 16 slender steel columns anchored into exposed bedrock carry precast concrete floor plates and wall panels. The original white panels and crisply expressed black frame turned the compact cubic form into a deliberate contrast with both its leafy suburban setting and the heavier masonry associated with much Sydney modernism. [36]
The difficult site generated the architecture rather than merely supporting it. A bridge crosses from a large street-side boulder to the first-floor living level, while the rear opens toward the garden and elevated views through broad bands of glazing. The frame remains visible inside and out, so columns, cross-bracing and floor edges continually reveal how the house is held above the rock. This contrast between massive sandstone and a visually light steel skeleton gives the building much of its drama. [36]
Inside, concrete platforms rise in small increments around a largely glazed central stair. Working rooms occupy the lower levels, living and dining spaces unfold above them, and the bedrooms gather at the top. Few full-height partitions interrupt the sequence, so the stair, dining platform, sunken conversation pit and adjoining rooms can be read together across several levels. Fombertaux's interest in Japanese spatial planning appears in the low seating and the careful movement between enclosure, framed views and open platforms. [36]
The plan combines openness with carefully placed privacy. Precast panels screen the western street elevation, while the northern and eastern sides are substantially glazed. The kitchen and dining area connect to a deck in the upper garden, and the sunken lounge looks southeast through mature trees. Beside the open entry-level rooms, a family room and bathroom provide more enclosed spaces. Timber linings, built-in cabinetry and slatted blinds warm the exposed steel, concrete and glass. [36]
The house remained in the Fombertaux family for more than half a century. Jean's son Andre Fombertaux, a cabinetmaker and builder, cared for it and made a few thoughtful changes. The lower laundry became an office while keeping its raw rock wall, roof space was enclosed for another bedroom around 1985, and the kitchen gained extra storage. The structural grid and original sequence of rooms remained clear. [36]
Jean Fombertaux brought an unusually international life to this suburban site. Born in Nice in 1920, he spent part of his youth in Europe, South-East Asia and China before arriving in Sydney in 1936. He graduated from Sydney Technical College in 1947, worked with Lipson and Kaad, travelled and worked overseas, then formed HP Oser Fombertaux & Associates in 1960. The confidence of the firm's commercial work found a more personal expression in the house he built for his own family. [36]
In the same street, Ancher Mortlock Murray designed the Somervaille House at 19 Karoo in 1963, adding another important Modernist work to this compact architectural cluster.
The contemporary photographs below were made by architectural photographer Michael Nicholson and published with the Modern House listing in 2017. Each image opens at its full original resolution. [36]
Built in 1970–71 for Dr Henry Fogl and Dr Stephanie Way, Fogl House remained almost frozen in time for nearly half a century. The architecture, furniture, textiles, lighting and family objects all survived together.
The Fogls bought the newly subdivided sloping block in 1968. Family recollection says Henry Fogl had acquired plans by Frank Lloyd Wright, possibly for an economical L-shaped Usonian house. In the video interview, a family member recalls a discreet trip to California to obtain plans and a Frank Lloyd Wright book found later with a 1964 New York receipt and an image of a strikingly similar house. Museums of History NSW's collection metadata identifies Harvey L Little & Associates Pty Ltd as the Sydney practice commissioned to reinterpret the idea for East Lindfield. The entrance was placed at the site's highest point and the house angled down the slope so its rear rooms and long verandah could look across Garigal National Park. The Wright connection remains a detailed family account, not evidence of a Wright commission. [37] [74]
Paul Kafka Exclusive Furniture Pty Ltd designed built-in cabinetry and movable pieces for the house in 1970–71. The family remembers Kafka as Henry's friend, and his work reached every room. In April 2020, the veneered living-room wall, dining storage, study desks, bedroom joinery and much of the coordinated furniture remained in excellent condition. Most textiles and fittings survived too. The main exception was the kitchen benchtop, originally orange laminate. Art, pottery and craft gathered on the family's travels kept the carefully controlled rooms from feeling like a showroom. [37] [74]
The film also brings back the life of the house. Children, friends and neighbourhood families moved between the pool and the surrounding bush, while the adults held long lunches on the deck, drinks and dinner parties. Downstairs were a laundry, kitchenette, a sunroom used for Sunday lunches and Stephanie's study. Her family remembers that she studied seven languages and was always learning. The formal living and dining rooms were saved for entertaining and kept off limits even to the children and cats. [74]
Both Fogls worked long hours as doctors and came home to what their family called a sanctuary. Henry's interest in design also shaped the Fogl medical surgeries at Gladesville, designed by Neville Gruzman in 1961 and remembered as unusually open and welcoming. When the East Lindfield house finally came to market, the family hoped for a buyer who would understand and care for what their parents had made. [74] [75]
Brenton McGeachie's April 2020 survey for the Caroline Simpson Library records the complete progression from the restrained street elevation to the bush-facing rooms and pool. The twelve images below are reproduced at their full published resolution. [37]
Property focus
The story of 34 Hobart Avenue begins with a new street on a 1921 estate plan, a first family whose name has been lost, and the three families who followed.
Hobart Avenue first appeared on the Crown Ridge plan offered for sale in November 1921. Brick houses rose along the street through the 1930s and early 1940s as East Lindfield spread towards Middle Harbour. By 1943 an aerial photograph shows a house standing at or very near the present number 34. It is the first surviving glimpse of the home and garden taking their place in the neighbourhood. [10] [11] [12] [25]
Brother and sister Derek and Sandra Watt, from the house's third family, were quite certain that someone owned it before Samuel Maybloom. The story passed down to them spoke of a very senior central banker who left a more exposed harbourside suburb as war approached and had the house purpose-built in East Lindfield. His name has been lost. In the Watt family's sequence, the banker was the first owner, the furniture-business Mayblooms the second, the Watts the third and the McKinnons the fourth. [21] [85]
The family later clarified that either this man's wife or daughter had a disability. The bath did not sit conventionally against the wall: it projected from the corner into the middle of the bathroom so that a helper could reach it from both sides. A doorway connected the main bedroom with the small room beside it, while the back room off the laundry was remembered as accommodation for a maid or other resident staff. In the Watts' understanding, these arrangements belonged to the unidentified earlier household rather than the Mayblooms. [83] [85]
When the Watt family installed ceiling insulation, the installer climbed down with unexpected news. Inches of solid concrete lay above the main hallway. Together with the double-brick walls and huge fireplace, the family understood it as a purpose-built air-raid shelter. The thick slab appears to rest on the hallway walls, and remnants of an extensive alarm system survive throughout the house. Both details lend weight to the story of the wealthy banker. [83] [85]
The first family known by name is the Maybloom-Pelerman family. In June 1952 the NSW Government Gazette listed Samuel Isaac Maybloom of 34 Hobart Avenue among those appointed to the Commission of the Peace. His daughter, Cecilia Frances Maybloom, had married Reuben Pelerman in 1940. A legal notice from December 1952 gives Cecilia's address as number 34 while placing Reuben in Kingsford. Newspaper greetings show Samuel and Mrs Maybloom with Cecilia at the house in 1953, and connect the wider family with it again in 1954 and 1957. [20] [21]
The Watts remembered buying directly from Maybloom and associated him with a second-hand furniture shop in Victoria Street, Chatswood. His furniture career is clear. In February 1939 he became a founding director of May's Furniture Pty Ltd, a £10,000 warehousing and manufacturing company with a modern store at 306–308 Pitt Street. The Chatswood shop remains part of the Watt family's memory, as its address has not yet surfaced in the records. [21] [85]
Around 1960, Colin and Nell Watt bought the house. Sandra was beginning her music studies at the Conservatorium and needed somewhere to practise the piano without silencing everyone else, so Nell went looking for a home with two living rooms. Number 34 was so dark and neglected that several agents had refused even to show it to her. Rusted metal flyscreens shut out most of the light, the windows had been painted closed, and Sandra's future bedroom was an astonishing mixture of lipstick pink and brilliant green. The Watts spent about six months bringing the place back to life before moving in. [85]
They bricked up the doorway between the main bedroom and the small adjoining room. Derek made the smaller room his bedroom, with specially designed furniture and black and gold paint in Sydney Grammar colours. Sandra took the larger bedroom and chose the white azalea planted outside it. The house had come with a high-quality Scottish carpet patterned in green swirls, but Nell disliked it and eventually laid turquoise carpet throughout. Visitors either loved or hated the new colour. Sandra believed it was still there when the McKinnons bought the house. [83] [85]
The renovation produced an astonishing find: $2,000 hidden in the curtains, a fortune in 1960. Colin insisted that it be returned. Soon afterwards, Council decided Melbourne Road needed a footpath, which meant jackhammering away about a metre of solid rock. The disturbance sent funnel-web spiders into the house. For years the family checked their shoes, found spiders in the bath and kept a golf-club “whacking stick” ready. The cut rock face is still visible beside the footpath. After heavy rain, water draining from lawns higher up the slope can seep down it for weeks, leaving passers-by convinced that a pipe has burst. [83] [84] [85]
Colin and skilled landscape gardeners created the extensive planting along the Melbourne Road verge. A landscape architect kept a natural hollow in the rock as a small pond. Colin then spent Saturday mornings for months cutting steps into the middle of the rock ledge with a hammer and chisel. They remain there today. During a storm, three young magpies fell from their nest and Nell sheltered them from cats. One injured bird, known as Hoppy, returned with its family at ten to six each morning for the next several years and waited on the back-veranda rail for Colin to appear. [85]
Derek also remembered the arrival of the 207 bus. Its early double-deck drivers sometimes knew neither the new route nor its unmarked stops, so on the way to Sydney Grammar he would stand near the driver's window and call out where to turn. Derek lived at number 34 through his twenty-first birthday and continued returning from overseas for family Christmases. Sandra, who became a high-school music teacher, came and went as her work took her around New South Wales. [22] [85]
Colin James Watt had attended Sydney Grammar from 1923 to 1926. During the Second World War he served in the Australian Army as Gunner NX20452, then built a career as a chartered accountant and was professionally associated with Hungerford, Spooner & Co. He died on 13 October 1991, by then retired and living at The Cotswolds in North Turramurra. [82]
Derek went on to become a significant figure in Australian performing-arts administration. He was General Manager of Sydney Dance Company in the early 1990s, later researched performing-arts venues and cultural infrastructure for the City of Sydney, and became General Manager of Symphony Australia. His career also included a senior role with Opera Australia and, from at least 2007 to 2013, the position of Executive Manager at St Paul's College at the University of Sydney. [82]
Derek lived in the Netherlands for much of the 1980s. He sent Nell several ceramic tiles, which she attached to the fireplace at 34 Hobart Avenue. When Christina McKinnon later renovated the house, she carefully removed the tiles, contacted Colin and Nell and returned them. Derek still remembers that kindness with great appreciation. Four now hang together in his home, a tangible piece of the house's history returned to him. [83]
In 1983, Malcolm and Christina McKinnon bought 34 Hobart Avenue from Mr Colin James Watt. The house has remained in the McKinnon family ever since. Their children, Angus, Katrina and Duncan, grew up in the house and attended East Lindfield Primary School. The boys then went on to SHORE and Katrina to Roseville College. The land is now recorded as Lot 120 in DP9998, with the earlier title held in Volume 7795, Folio 147. That older folio and Ku-ring-gai's building records may yet reveal who first commissioned the house, who built it and exactly when its walls went up. [69] [82]
Lives connected with the suburb
Soldiers, broadcasters, athletes, musicians, doctors and academics have all called East Lindfield home. Some can be placed at a particular address. For others, only the suburb survives in the record.
One of Australia's senior commanders in both world wars, Mackay led the 6th Division in North Africa and Greece and later commanded the Second Army. He became Australia's first High Commissioner to India and died at his East Lindfield home in 1966; the exact address has not yet been found. [42]
Angles became one of Australia's best-known racing and sporting broadcasters, remembered for rapid, accurate race calls and a national radio career. Records place him in Pleasant Avenue, and the Australian Dictionary of Biography says he died at his East Lindfield home in 1962. [41]
Barnes played 13 Tests for Australia and opened the batting in Don Bradman's undefeated 1948 “Invincibles” side. Contemporary evidence places him in East Lindfield by August 1952, although no exact address has yet been located. [43]
Raised in East Lindfield and educated at Lindfield East Public School, Solomon reached the 400-metre final at the 2012 London Olympics at 19 and returned for Tokyo 2020. He later became Australia's most successful men's national 400-metre champion. [44]
Denise Thompson, a coloratura soprano associated with Owen Street, won the 1952 Sydney de Vries Scholarship and the 1953 Mobil Quest. Her exact house number and a dependable portrait remain unresolved.
Dr Diana Lynn Williams, of 37 Crana Avenue, served as medical officer at Macquarie Island, Mawson and Heard Island. Her research in polar immunology, endocrinology and health, undertaken in unusually difficult field conditions, earned the Antarctic Medal in 1989. [48]
Professor Douglas William Piper, of 57 Carlyle Road, was a University of Sydney medical academic, Royal North Shore Hospital physician and persistent gastroenterology researcher. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1990 for service to medical education and research. [47]
A local mystery
A long-standing local rumour places a quarry on the far side of Melbourne Road, opposite Perth Avenue. The location is remembered with confidence, but the quarry itself has slipped out of the written record.
Still a mystery
Another version of the story points farther east. Bill Sykes's Recollections (1980) reportedly names a Mr Tom Elford quarrying the land later crossed by Karoo Avenue. The original manuscript has not yet been inspected and no contemporary source has located Elford's workings, but it is a promising thread. [77]
Old subdivision plans do not mark a quarry opposite Perth Avenue, and the 1943 aerial shows an established residential grid without an obvious scar. Yet small-scale sandstone cutting for roads, foundations or levelling may never have been called a quarry, and any workings could have disappeared before the aerial photograph was taken.
There was certainly plenty of rock moving nearby. Soldiers Memorial Oval was carved from a sandstone ridge. The Highland Estate developers also said in 1950 that they had opened sandstone quarries to supply their building program, though they gave no locations. Their quarries may have been elsewhere.
Melbourne Road offers one final clue. Council fixed formal road levels between Adelaide, Perth and Hobart in 1941, work that may have involved conspicuous cutting and filling around the intersections. A large roadside excavation could easily have become “the quarry” in local memory. For now, that remains the most plausible explanation rather than a settled answer.
At a glance
Notes, maps and memories
This story has been pieced together from old maps, newspapers, aerial photographs, family memories, school histories, heritage studies and local archives. Trove has been indispensable, allowing old stories and neighbourhood lore to be checked against the newspapers of their day. Ku-ring-gai Library, the State Library of NSW and the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society have preserved much of what makes the suburb's past visible. The source list below records where each thread began.
