East Melbourne, Berry Street 026

This house was built for Mrs Ellen d’Arcy Harvie by Peter Reid and completed in 1890. It was named Koolkuna.  Mrs Harvie was the daughter of Thomas Lang, a Ballarat seedsman.  In 1865 she had married William Harvie, also a Ballarat seedsman. In 1882 William died and Ellen was left as provider for her four children. At this point the Harvie family were renting 127 Powlett Street, East Melbourne. But by the time Ellen was planning her Berry Street house she and her children were living at Parkhill Terrace, Hoddle Street, just a few doors from her parents who had built the pair of houses now numbered 1091-1093 Hoddle Street, in 1886.  Peter Reid, the builder, lived next door to them. 

Thomas Lang by this time had become one of Victoria’s leading horticulturalists with a large business in Bourke Street supplying ‘all Garden and Farm requisites’.  He was a founding member of the Ballarat Horticultural Society in 1859.  He and his wife, Matilda, moved to Melbourne in 1870. In Ballarat Matilda had run a private school and, later, she was on the founding committee of the Ballarat Female Refuge in 1867, the first such institution on the Australian goldfields.

Ellen, like her parents, was enterprising.  In 1881 she had established a café in the Eastern Market in Exhibition Street. It was called the Thistle Co.  She advertised it as ‘NEW LADIES ENTERPRISE. Oat Cakes, Wheaten Meal Scones, homemade Cake and Pastry, Scotch Shortbread, Gingerbread, made by Ladies’.  She also made ‘wholesome’ cakes for children’s parties, and gave lessons in cake making.  The Victorian Chess Club met there for social evenings.  The café moved address frequently but custom remained good, until 1892.  In that year Ellen became insolvent citing as the reason ‘Falling off in business, pressure of creditors, and excessive rent’. The bank crash had taken its toll but somehow the Thistle Co continued to trade, and at her death in 1926 Ellen was still described as its managing director. 

Although Mrs Harvie was given as the owner of the land when a notice of intention to build was lodged with the Council the rate books consistently give Mrs Lang as the owner or rate payer.  In 1896 Thomas Lang died and the house ended up in the hands of the Land Mortgage Bank.  Presumably Mrs Lang no longer had Mr Lang’s income to pay off the mortgage. Ellen moved to Malvern where she spent the rest of her life. 

In about 1908 George Alexander Grant became owner.  He already owned the terrace at 14-18 Berry Street.  He died in 1922 leaving the property to his niece, Bessie Rose Duffy (nee Grant). A nephew of George Alexander Grant, George Alfred Grant, had married Amelia Caroline Thornell.  Amy’s sister, Lucy May Thornell, was a tenant until her death in 1941. The new tenant was Bessie Devlin, the widowed daughter of George Alfred Grant and Amy Thornell.  By 1974 Bessie Duffy’s sons, Douglas Burland Duffy and Donald Grant Duffy were listed as owners or ratepayers.  They may have been managing Bessie’s affairs at this late stage in her life.  She was already 90 and died four years later in 1978.  All in all the Grant/Duffy family had owned the property for nearly seventy years.