Too-ra-loo-ra-loorak

I'm in Toorak today having stepped off the train from Elsternwick onto Toorak Road. What defines Toorak I wonder as I look around to gather my bearings. It is a suburb whose name is familiar to me. Toorak, I roll it round my tongue. In association with what I can't right at this moment remember but I think it is a well to do part of town and I'm right. I wander from Punt Road to where this street crosses Chapel as they all seem to in Melbourne's grid system town planning. Does every road lead to Chapel, I ask myself because there is no one else around and I am turning into the crazy lady that talks to everyone? In this short distance of Toorak Road I have passed three maternity shops. Ah, so do people who get married in neighbouring Armadale then move to Toorak to start a family? Good question and a pattern is emerging. I also pass plenty of Italian trattorias and French bistros. I suspect I may have stumbled upon an enclave of Europeans.

At a cafe where I pause for coffee it is confirmed when I meet Raoul, a French man who moved here in the mid-1950s. He likes the area because it is handy to everything, leafy, green, big old houses, old money with a recent injection of new. Melbourne's climate suits Raoul, the people, the neighbourhood too, he enjoys. Toorak is close to town and has everything you could possibly need. There are sixty hairdressers on this strip he tells me with a smile and a dandy stroke of his neatly trimmed beard.

Toorak is primarily Anglo, settled in the Victorian era by the country squatters. They built their town residences here to spend the winter and spring months enjoying the social scene as a reward for the hard work back on their country acreages during the summer and autumn harvests. Before the settlers, the area was home to the Woiworung Aboriginal people but Melbourne was built on the wool trade. I learn this visiting Como House, the National Trust property in Toorak.

This elegant verandahed house had it's beginnings in 1847 when Edward Eyre Williams built a cottage and named it in a romantic gesture Como, after the lake in Italy where he proposed to his wife Jessie. That cottage formed the foundation for the current house which became the home of squatters Charles and Caroline Armytage and their nine children.

Here I should explain the term squatter so that you don't start to think of this well-to-do family as parasitic hobos (unless of course you want to go into the whole settlement argument). The Melbourne Victorian aristocracy of gentlemen landowners with country farms and town residences were known as the Squattocracy. I'm not entirely sure why the term, please feel free to add your reference. They lived semi-permanently in town during the social season of winter and spring. Their townhouses were often packed with guests for week long parties. Friends, family everyone came to stay sleeping where ever they could find a space. Caroline Armytage was particularly known for her cherry teas which of course featured the freshly harvested fruit in as many delights as possible. I missed the house tour so made do with the gardens which gave me the opportunity instead to chat to the National Trust volunteer gardeners about the joys of spring. We have been hit by it all in the last week, ferocious winds, icy showers, high temperatures one day, plummeting back down the next. Four seasons in one day is a term used to describe Melbourne.