Rowe Family farm, Eden Park
The farm has been in the family since 1911; it's now divided among descendants of the original Rowe owners, Agnes Hooper Mill (1874-1944) and William Philip Rowe (1876-1956). Their parents and grandparents, all immigrants from Illogan and St Agnes in Cornwall, were part of the Ranters Gully mining community in Campbells Creek, near Castlemaine, when the children were born. The "ranters" were Primitive Methodists, most or all of them from Cornwall and often related by blood or marriage or both.
However, in the late C19 many Cornish immigrants moved north and took up farms in the Mallee. The Rowes were among these settlers. William grew up in the Mallee, and eventually acquired a block in Willangie, near Woomelang, that his mother's brother-in-law had received by ballot in November 1897.1
In 1904 he was farming there, but he returned to Campbells Creek to marry Aggie.2 Their first child was born in Campbells Creek in 1905 and the second in Willangie or Woomelang in 1908; a third son was born and baptised in Willangie in 1909. William was the director of the Willangie Methodist Sunday School when the boys were very young.
It must have been a hard life for people with generations of mining, not farming, behind them. Drought drove the Rowes off their farm in 1911, and they began afresh in Eden Park.
[edit] Eden Park
The 1888 subdivision of Eden Park (formerly Glenburnie) was promoted as ideal for the market gardener or small farmer, boasting "rich, friable chocolate-coloured loam" and "adequate" water from "numerous waterholes and small creeks".3 William took up 60 acres, watered by two of the "small creeks", on the flats, and grew fruit; later Aggie and her youngest son ran a small dairy herd for cream, with a few pigs and many chooks, while William supplemented their income by working as a tile burner at the Northcote Pottery. This was one of the last orchards in Eden Park, and one of the first dairies to be electrified.
The land was not as rich and productive as the promotion had suggested and life was a struggle. But the Rowes were resourceful people: in the background of the photo, just visible near the barn, is the chaffcutter, homemade from an old truck, showing what could be done with limited means and plenty of creativity and hard work.
The land must have been already cleared when the Rowes bought it; their house was built in the 1880s, possibly soon after the 1888 subdivision. The barn (now demolished) shown in the photo looks about the same age, and in poor repair, but it had seen much and varied use. When medals were given to local members of the armed forces after WWI, the ceremony was held in Rowes' barn, where the Honour Roll was installed and remained until the school was built. Barn dances were held there - absolutely teetotal, at William Rowe's insistence. When electricity came to Eden Park in 1958 the SEC used Rowes' barn for the launch.4 And some years earlier, when Aggie and her sisters held the big family gatherings that her granddaughters still remember, all the men and boys slept in the barn while the women and girls slept in the house.
[edit] Methodism
Methodism was an important part of Rowe life. William was described as "a generous, religious man",5 very active in the local community. He lent his tin shed for use as a school before the building, for which he lobbied, of State School 3477 Eden Park. He worked with the Ministry Children's League, accommodating convalescent children on the farm. He bought a piano which was loaned around the district... but it was his sons who built their mother a functioning bathroom.
Perhaps unusually for the time, the Rowe farm belonged to Aggie until her death; her will leaves William the use of it during his lifetime. In an era when women were not allowed to be recorded on the census as farmers, Aggie appears on the electoral rolls as engaged in "domestic duties".
Two of Aggie and William Rowe's three sons followed the line south and lived their adult lives in Northcote; the youngest stayed on the farm. The eldest had a workshop in High St making machinery for the textile trade, and the middle son drove local buses; both married locals. This is a family firmly located north of the Yarra.
Photograph: Aggie and William Rowe with one of their granddaughters, in 1944
Photograph: Eden Park residents pictured outside the local school on the ocassion of the unveiling of the local Honour Roll, about 1920.
Phoebe Thorndyke fcutting@alphalink.com.au
[edit] Footnotes
1 The Birchip Advertiser, 1897.
2 Marriage certificate. 3 J.W. Payne, The Plenty. A Centenary History of the Whittlesea Shire (Kilmore: Lowden, 1975).
4 Jan Smith, "Eden Park", in the Town Crier. Whittlesea and District News and Views, Oct 1988, Vol 17. No pagination.
5 Smith, op. cit.
