A House in Deans Marsh
Some ten or eleven years ago Jenny and I decided to purchase a small cottage at the back of Lorne in Deans Marsh. As usual it was one of those spur of the moment decisions that have been the hallmark of our lives which invariably turn out for the best.
For some reason we were having a coffee in Moravia in Burke Road, Camberwell without any children to bother us. Where they were I have no idea but it allowed Jenny to think about buying a small block of land in the country and maybe in a few years build a house. We called one of the Lorne Estate agents to see if they had some land for sale and headed off down to Lorne. We dropped into Lorne Real Estate, picked up the land for sale list and started driving into the hills. How utterly depressing – we hated every block that we saw for one reason or another and decided to drive home. As we were driving towards Deans Marsh and on to Winchelsea (which later we came to know as ‘Winch’) Jenny picked out a small place bordering the Deans Marsh cemetery. We found the gate and hesitantly drove up the long driveway to the house. Noone was home so we snooped around and Jenny started to get a bit excited. A few moments later Edward Coleridge, the owner drove up the drive and showed us around. It was around six o’clock and Edward took us up the hill at the back of the house behind the dam where we could see the sun setting over the dam and the house – it was beautiful and I think Jenny made her mind up at that moment.
We left Edward and on our way home stopped by the Deans Marsh store and found a copy of the ‘History of Deans Marsh’ for sale. It consisted of twenty or thirty A4 typewritten pages stapled together with old black and white photos and lots of typing mistakes. What was so fascinating was that it contained a photograph taken in 1905 of William Lawrence and some children in front of the Deans Marsh butcher shop. One of the children was Ted Lawrence, Jenny’s uncle by marriage. If Jenny hadn’t made up her mind about buying the house already then the fact that she had ‘connections’ to Deans Marsh sealed her decision.
We nearly didn’t buy it because the agents had advertised the land as 12 acres and when the title arrived it was in reality 8.5 acres with the option to take a 99 lease on another 2 acres (for the princely sum of $39.00). After a few months we eventually settled on the house and Edward threw in an oil painting of the dam that we first saw on that fateful first day when we looked at the sunset across the dam.
People who have a dream of owning 50 acres in the country need to think again. All we have is roughly 10 acres and every time we go down to Deans we work like navvies from the moment we arrive until we leave at the end of the weekend. What needs to be done depends on the time of year but it’s usually mowing grass, grubbing out thistles, chopping wood, cleaning up branches that have fallen over the fence lines and constant maintenance of all sorts of stuff. Fire and irrigation pumps always need checking and often the lines from the dam to the pumps need to be re-primed.
In spite of all of the work involved it is real relaxation after a week at the office!
