Final Fulham

Wimmera Mail Times Picture: Elijah Macchia

The Fulham Station homestead, at Kanagulk, was originally settled in 1840 by Francis Desailly. It was the first homestead to be settled in the Balmoral area.

Today, current owners Greg and Heather Walcott have the refurbished homestead on the station and its 65 acres (26.3hectares) on the market.

Greg & Heather (Wimmera Mail Times Picture: Elijah Macchia)

 The original landlord, Sir John Owen, may have never seen the land. He sold it privately to George Armytage and his family who established the buildings. The buildings date from 1846 and were progressively built after that.

In 1857 Fulham became the home for Charles Armytage and his wife Caroline. Eight of their 10 children were born at Fulham (50 miles from the nearest doctor). Fulham's remoteness encouraged them to purchase Como House in South Yarra as a town house in 1864.

The Armytages finally sold their Fulham and Mt Sturgeon properties in 1948, to the Soldier Settlement Commission, and the Commission developed Fulham Estate into settlement blocks.

 
Greg Walcott’s father successfully applied for the homestead block, and the homestead has been with the Walcott family ever since. Greg then inherited Fulham from his father and has spent almost his entire life living at the property.
Now they are moving on, and Fulham is looking for a new owner.

Wimmera Mail Times Picture: Elijah Macchia

Fulham Homestead was first listed with the National Trust in July 1965. Most of the heritage-listed buildings at Fulham have been built with ironstone. The stone is from within a kilometre of the homestead which was built on an ironstone shelf. The homestead is made from rubble-coursed ironstone with 2ft-thick walls, and contains two bedrooms, bathroom, living area, office and kitchen.

The Guesthouse

Along with the homestead building, there is a detached guesthouse featuring three bedrooms, two bathrooms, lounge and fully renovated kitchen, as well as a reading room with windows that frame an ancient Moreton Bay fig tree.
 

The tennis court & gardens (Wimmera Mail Times Picture: Elijah Macchia)

Greg and his wife Heather have developed the site - from the garden with sculptures Greg as created, along with a vegetable patch, a child’s play set under a tree and a lawn tennis court. “The garden was established when the property was built and then it was bulldozed. When (Heather and I) were married it was only a horse paddock, so we gradually re-established the garden in stages...there were a few established trees but very little else so eventually we have developed it right down to the water’s edge,” he said.

The garden slopes down to meet the Glenelg River at a broad bend. The property has its own watering hole finished with a bbq pit, wooden bench & table, an outdoor toilet, and a canoe landing stage.

The station cookhouse

The station cookhouse is one of the 10 heritage listed buildings which the Walcott’s have reinvigorated to a dining room with the original fireplace and stone oven still intact, now utilised as a wood-fired pizza oven.

Greg said moving away from this piece of 'living history' where he had spent almost 65 years of his life, would be a huge change.

Wimmera Mail Times interview video
If you have a spare $1.1 million- $1.2 million, then, Expressions of Interest close on Friday May 25 at 1pm.

Tales from the churchyard

A word about the effort some organisations, trusts have gone to assisting family and history researchers.

Just a couple of examples from afar.

Old St Matthew's Church, Lightcliffe, is a former church in the village of Lightcliffe, West Yorkshire in England.

 

The original building on the site was a chapel of ease called Eastfield Chapel, which was built in 1529. This was damaged during the Reformation, and repaired in 1536. The chapel was rebuilt as a church in Neoclassical style in 1775. It was then replaced in the late 19th century by a new church a short distance away. 
The old church was then used as a mortuary chapel. It was severely damaged by a storm in the 1960s and its fabric deteriorated and the church suffered from vandalism. Now only the tower remains.

   
The tower is square in cross-section and constructed in hammer-dressed stone with ashlar dressings. 
On the west face is a round-headed window with a circular window above. At belfry level is inscribed stone taken from an earlier church on the site. At the top of the tower is an octagonal cupola with a ball finial. 
Inside the tower are an inscribed stone dated 1529, benefaction boards, and a monument from 1830 designed by Richard Westmacott.
In its accompanying churchyard there are over 11,000 grave sites.

Lots of centuries old history, but St Matthews has a website, a number of YouTube clips,
and a Friends Facebook page, and its churchyard cemetery has headstone photographs and transcriptions.

While the Prospect Cemetery in Toronto has affiliated with Google Maps to guide people in finding graves. Especially helpful in large cemeteries (148,000 burial records have been indexed for the cemetery), and when the cemetery concerned is halfway across the world.

Prospect Cemetery (part of the Mount Pleasant Group) has been in use since 1890, with a special focus on its 5 acre Veterans' Memorial, Canada's largest First World War memorial.

It has a Cemetery App with options to 'Find a grave', 'Find a tree' in the arboretum search, and a 'Notable person' search.

There's also a little video of where Toronto's original Potters Field cemetery was located in now downtown Toronto. 

This is what just two different cemeteries have been able to achieve by embracing a number of digital initiatives.