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Produced and published by the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne
Published July 2008
Published July 2008
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(3204, 12 km SE, Glen Eira City)
This southern suburb between Caulfield and Moorabbin was largely a market gardening district in the 19th century. A station that opened here on the Mordialloc (now Frankston) railway line in the 1880s was named North Road, but was changed to Ormond in 1897, apparently at the request of Caulfield Council who wished to honour the Melbourne philanthropist, Francis Ormond. The countrified aspect along North Road in the 1890s was remembered by Katharine Susannah Prichard in her autobiography Children of the hurricane (1963): 'open paddocks of gorse and wildflowers along the main highway, the Dandenongs in blue haze at one end, the sea at the other'. In the 1910s subdividers marketed Ormond as a 'garden suburb', close to the sea, although most housing was constructed between the 1920s and 1940s.