The history of development in Glen Eira

Glen Eira’s Thematic Environmental History

This revised municipal history replaces the Glen Eira Heritage Management Plan 1996 Volume 1 and provides an understanding of Glen Eira’s physical environment of today using Victoria’s Framework of Historic Themes (the current industry standard).

The suburbs that comprise the City of Glen Eira have a long and multi-layered history that encapsulates many different phases of human settlement and interactions.  While Glen Eira was subject to European settlement from as early as the 1840s, this has manifested itself in different ways in different locations: mansion estates in the north-western fringe (present-day Elsternwick, St Kilda East and Caulfield North), pastoral runs (present day Caulfield South, Carnegie and Murrumbeena) and agricultural activity, mostly market gardens, in the south (present -day Bentleigh and Bentleigh East).

Today, physical evidence of early settlement is represented by a handful of surviving grand residences of the 1850s and ‘60s scattered across Elsternwick, St Kilda East and Caulfield North, areas otherwise strongly characterised by a subsequent layer of Boom-era mansion and villa development. Further field in Carnegie, Glen Huntly, Murrumbeena, McKinnon, Ormond, Bentleigh and Bentleigh East, the earliest surviving buildings tend to date back only as far as the 1880s, spread among more dominant layers of twentieth century settlement.  While Carnegie, Murrumbeena, McKinnon and Ormond remain strongly characterised by inter-war development, areas further to the south, such as Bentleigh (and parts of Bentleigh East), as still most potently evocative of post-WW2 settlement.