In an unfortunate coincidence, 16 years later, Robert and his wife, Ruth SADLER, had the misfortune to lose their own young son, David, drowned in their farm dam.

As has been seen, Joseph and Ruth STEVENSON were well established in the heartland of the district and, already, under the regulations of the 1865 Act, their two eldest sons (David and Robert) had acquired some marginal land. Nevertheless, with David gone, drowned in the Yarra, and an awareness that soon the land they had acquired would prove insufficient for future needs, the family took immediate steps to secure additional land.

Already, a pattern of settlement was beginning to form. By 1870 practically all the Scots of Kangaroo Ground were related and Presbyterians; now their offspring were winging their way out from their embryonic oasis into the less fertile surrounds of the Stringy-bark Forest.

The STEVENSON family eventually selected a number of other properties along the lower reaches of Watson Creek bring their total holdings to around 321 acres.

On the morning of 29 August 1870, Joseph STEVENSON with his surviving sons, Robert and Joseph, his son-in-law, James MESS, and neighbour’s son, Mark BUNKER, set out for the junction of Watsons and Sugar-loaf Creeks to peg out for themselves farms under the newly enacted 1869 legislation. Their selections, they apparently decided, would have the best of water frontages. Perhaps harking back to the day, 28 years earlier, when he had chosen the Five Mile Creek junction as the site for his homestead, the elder STEVENSON, this time, chose the junction of Sugar-loaf Creek as the starting point for his sortie.

Compass in hand, armed with axes and shovels, partly cleared a mile-long trail due south from Sugar-loaf Creek to McPhersons’ track. Then after erecting posts every 200 or so paces along their blazed trail, they cleared six further trails due west for each post to Watsons Creek. There, on the creek bank, at the termination of their cleared trails, they set up their final posts. When complete, the manoeuvre saw six farmlets, all with their own water frontage, enclosed within each four sets of corner posts.

The regulations required that the posts they used be of a particular size, be painted white, and be readily visible at ten paces. Having clearly pegged out the land they desire, each immediately arranged for a contract surveyor (T.S PARROTT) to professionally mark out and accurately measure their own acreage’s. With all complete, each was then required to pay his first half-yearly instalment to the Board of Land and Works and make application for a ‘License to Occupy’. Ten years later, with payments made, and improvements carried out to the required one pound an acre, each could expect to be issued with a full title to his land. In the case of Joseph STEVENSON, his application, in part, read:

I, Joseph Stevenson of the Kangaroo Grounds, farmer, do hereby solemnly and sincerely declare on oath that on the twenty-ninth day of August at 12 o’clock I placed posts with notices thereon, as prescribed by the regulations of the first of February 1870, at the corner of the allotments for which I hereby make application ... that at the time I fixed those posts I saw no other posts on the same allotments and was not cognisant of any other person having marked it out ... that I have not selected under any previous Land Act and the area I now desire to obtain, if added to any land previously selected by me, would not exceed 320 acres.

That day, Joseph STEVENSON marked down in his own name there farmlets - two of 30 acres, the other of 18; his son, Joseph, chose another of 25 acres, his son-in-law, James MESS, one of 29 acres, and Mark BUNKER, another of 31 acres. Although heavily timbered each, when fenced, was ideally suited for the immediate location of stock.

Land Division

Only Joseph, the old pioneer of Christmas Hills, ever actually resided on any of these selections - the others simply conformed, as to payments and improvements.

By 1874, Joseph had enclosed his well-water farm of 78 acres in post-and-three-rail (chock and log along the creek frontage). Upon it, by then, he had erected a simple two-roomed weather-board cottage.

After an adventurous life, the aged pioneer had handed the reins of his Bank Head vineyard to his son, Robert, preferring, instead, to live out his years in the solitude of the Australian bush that he loved so much. The Scot in him had seen him nostalgically name his retreat, Kelvin Grove, after a rustic stream-side park in Glasgow beneath that city’s major seat of learning on Gilmore Hill.

His 1874 ‘return’ to the Board of Land and Works stated that he had also built stables for his stock, and had, each year, grown two acres of potatoes and oats. Alongside his house he planted a seedling oak believed to have been grown from an acorn brought back from Windsor by his countryman, John DONALDSON. Today, that tree, immense in age, stands alone in a deserted paddock, as sole reminder of the abode of a once proud pioneer.

The STEVENSON excursion that day, appears to have been designed mainly to acquire additional land for stock rather that for actual working farms upon which to reside. High in their deliberations would have been the knowledge that soon the Kangaroo Ground Farmer’s Common would disappear completely into the hands of selectors pegging it out for farms.

Stevenson Hall

Bibliography

WOIWOD Mick; Kangaroo Ground - The Highland Taken; Tarcoola Press;1994.