Doomburrim a parish not a town

The name alone makes us want to know more about it, though Doomburrim is a parish name and not a township.

There was a “Doomburrin” school, so there was at least a community that went by that name, though the spelling might not have been quite accurate.

Before you ask, it lies in the tumbled hills just north of Fish Creek, down in South Gippsland. I see, too, that the creek was called ”The Fish Creek” but the “The” vanished at some later time.

The school was opened in 1902, more or less in the usual way for those days. That is to say, the locals decided a school was needed, which happened in 1900, and petitioned the Education Department.

A District Inspector would come down and map out where the children lived and how many would attend the school and then make a recommendation.

It was then up to those same locals to find a site and put up a building, which the Department would lease. W.G. Little built an unlined wooden ‘school’ eighteen feet by twelve; call it 6 metres by 4 to be generous.

On 7 May 1902 James Whitney arrived as the first Head Teacher, operating the school half-time with the Dumbalk South State School. That school closed in 1904 so Doomburrim was then worked half-time with Meeniyan East, which later became Dumbalk.

The half-time arrangement meant that the teacher went to one school for three days of one week and the other for two days, then switched in the following week.

The in the hill country were pretty fit in those days. It worked well enough, because the kids were normally needed at home for the rest of the time to work on developing the family farm.

Doomburrim was destined for better things, becoming full-time on 15 June 1909. A new school was needed. Two acres were bought from Little (I think adjacent to the existing site) and a ‘proper’ wooden school was opened on 23 May 1913.

That school lasted until 1945. An existing photograph of the school shows a quite respectable building in place in 1911 – perhaps the photo is wrongly dated. It doesn’t really matter. The Head Teacher at that time was Edward Michael O’Kelly. A Miss Ivy Barrett became the Head Teacher in about 1914

In 1978 Bryan Fitzgerald published a small book on Doomburrim’s first settlers and their memories – his family were among the first. It is titled ”A Tale of Doomburrim, Its earliest Pioneers of Land Selection in the Parish of Doomburrim, Volume 1, West then North along the Fish Creek”.

I don’t know if there was ever a Volume 2 but I hope so. (I haunt secondhand book sellers for these little gems but one rarely finds a full set of anything!)

Fitzgerald tells us more about the Walter George Little on whose crown Allotment 9A the school was built.

Little took up the 309-acre selection in July of 1884 and got freehold title to the land in August 1905. He had some extraordinarily hard times between those two dates, and they did not end in 1905.

In 1891 he was given a Certificate of Leasehold Title, which offered him protection in holding his selection for a period of fourteen years. It also meant that he still had to pay rent to the government. Being granted a selection was not to be granted ownership.

From 1903 it seems that there was a strong chance of Little and his wife being forced from the land on which they had worked for so many years. He had married Anne Moore Atkinson, daughter of James Atkinson, and he stated in a letter to the Lands office in 1903 that the Littles and the Atkinson’s were the true pioneers of Fish Creek.

There were three Atkinson brothers who came down to the Fisk Creek area, and it was usual for families to move together, take up selections together and then work to support each other.

To quote Fitzgerald “and now after all their struggles were to be forced off their land because of their debts to the Lands office. Little claimed he did not drink or gamble and only existed on his holding to pick up logs and cut ferns year after year and his wife was just a slave struggling away with him and still only a young woman.”

Perhaps the authorities were sympathetic, perhaps he got help from a bank or perhaps he had a couple of good seasons because in 1905 he was issued a free hold title to the land. It was 315 acres, 1 rood and 6 perches. (Let me help. A rood is a quarter of an acre, and a perch is a fortieth of a rood. You are on your own from there.)

It seems that the land was later sold to another settler named Chapman, who sold it in turn to the Soldier Settlement Commission, who sold it to a returned man named Dolder, but none of this is very clear to me.

Very little about Doomburrim IS clear. Les Blake in his 1977 “Place names of Victoria” says that Doomburrin (he uses the ‘n’ ending) is an Aboriginal word meaning “lizard”, which doesn’t help much. It may not even back up the claim by John G. Saxton, who did a place-names book in 1907 saying that it was native word for a lizard.

That might be where Blake got the information. Wikipediia only tells us that it is a parish in the County of Buln Buln.

I found my 1900 Municipal Gazetteer. It told me that Doomburrim was a parish in the West Riding, and that was all. In all the councilors and officers and magistrates and what have you listed – and there were many – not one came Doomburrim.

I looked into Meme Farrell’s “Fish Creek – Good Old Days” and there I did find a list of the first settlers “north of Fish Creek” which included “Atkinsons (3 brothers), W. Little, Falls (father and 2 sons), Davies (4 brothers), Lloyds – they all came from North Gippsland.” The Atkinson’s and Little were those mentioned above. That was it.

I checked every source I could find or think of. Nothing more. Doomburrim won’t get away with it, though. I will be back.