The story of Mountain Glen Run

I am sometimes surprised at how little I know about some things. An example? Ivan Blitz has sent me a copy of his research on the Mountain Glen Run – and I barely knew of the place. Using his book as a start-point and main source I set out to fill one more gap in my knowledge.
In 'So Tall The Trees" John Adams wrote "A more significant run was established between what was soon to be Moe and Trafalgar. This was the Mountain Glen Run, which took up about 4860 hectares west of the Narracan Creek and south of the Moe Swamp. Only a quarter of this land was held to be assessable grazing land and for many years the depasturiisng licence cost the run holders about nine pounds per year. The run was taken up in 1859 …(by Waller and Haxell) … who also held Merton Rush, Buneep and Wilderness runs."
Tenders were called for the Mountain Glen pastoral run in the Government Gazette of September 1859. It was described as being "Bounded on the north by the course of the Moi (Moe) Swamp; on the east by Mr Farley's run Merton Rush; on the south by high scrubby ranges; and on the West by Mr Connor's Tarween run."
It was said to be of 35 square miles and on today's maps it covered an area from south of Childers, northwest along Elizabeth Creek to a point near Allambee and north to Yarragon and the Moe River, east to Moe, south along the Narracan Valley and Coalville then southwest through Thorpdale South to a point south of Childers. Trafalgar, Moe and Thorpdale are within the original boundaries. I haven't done the arithmetic but Ivan quotes 12,009 acres or 4860 hectares.
In 1862 it passed to J and B Woodrow and the following year the licence named Frederick Lloyd, a surgeon who'd come out from London. The name of the licensee from June 1863 was Robert Maunsell Lloyd, Frederick's cousin.
R.M. Lloyd asked to subdivide the run in two, Mountain Glen and Narracan but he was refused. In 1883 it was back in the name of Frederick Lloyd and in 1864 it was taken over by Buckland Brothers and Company.
For some reason I seem to recall the Frederick went back to London and that he and Robert had an agreement which resulted in Frederick obtaining the licence and passing to his cousin until he returned. That would explain a couple of the title changes but that is entirely supposition on my part.
Whether or not that is true, Frederick was in Melbourne in 1865 as chairman of the North Melbourne Bench, the magistrates for that area.
Interestingly, Robert also was a lawyer. The two men were both born in Limerick, Ireland. They migrated to Australia separately, though no dates are given.
There is a reference to Frederick Lloyd exercising his pre-emptive right to keep a square mile of the run when it was opened to selection after the 1869 Land Act. This PR claim occurred in 1869-70, and while Frederick seems to have taken the southern portion of the reduced property – the part which contained the homestead and the best of the land – an undated map shows R.M Lloyd as the titleholder for three sections totalling 769 acres, looking like a 360-acres pre-emptive right block south of the line, 129 acres of unexplained title north of the line and another 319 acres of pre-emptive right north of that, reaching right up into the swamp.
On one of the maps in Ivan's book the blocks on either side of the railway are named as part of Mountain Glen but the northern section is not.
The pre-emptive right allowed a squatter to choose 640 acres of his run to keep when the squatting licences were cancelled. Somehow, Frederick ended up with more, and in the name of his cousin. Nor did his magisterial role in North Melbourne stop him being involved locally. He was a Narracan Shire councillor and spent two terms as Shire President.
Ivan tells us that a sawmill to make sleepers for the line was on the property at Mosquito Creek and there was a quarry established – in Gippsland the railwaymen always had trouble getting good supplies of quality stone for ballasting the line. The mill was managed by a man named Dockendorff. This sawmill produced 40,000 sleepers. It was about three quarters of a mile south of the line. It had a tramway which ran past Dr Lloyd's home. The country was too wet to allow cart or dray transport – the narrow iron rims of the day were no good in 'soft' country.
At this time this part of the line's construction was running late and the mill at Mosquito Creek was a big part of getting it back on schedule. It might have been this use of his land that persuaded the Victorian Railways to provide a subway under the railway so that he could move cattle from one part of his run to the other.
There was a need for a high-capacity drainage culvert there and contractors simply made it big enough to let a horse-drawn cart pass through. It was just wide enough, with little margin for error. Accidents were common enough but the real issue was the boggy approach on both sides, which VR engineers said was a council problem, not a VR one. The council was extremely cash-strapped as it tried to build the road along the south side of the line to Yarragon.
The approaches were gravelled from time to time but there were level crossings within reach and the use of the 'underpass' faded. When the railway was duplicated there in 1959 the underpass was lengthened but still to the same narrow dimensions. An earth wall closed it off on the "Gooding" side and a spillway was created on the south side. No-one would ever guess now that this was once a useful and trafficable underpass, much safer than a level crossing.
It was about 1872 that the land was transferred officially to Robert Maunsell Lloyd because Frederick Lloyd was fully occupied with his legal duties in Melbourne.
We should remember Mountain Glen (and I admit that I should have known about it) and we should remember Robert Maunsell Lloyd for his own story. The Lloyds were well educated men but like many Irishmen the potato famine sent them away from home forever. Robert, born in 1827, went to New York in 1848. He worked his way across the USA and became a rancher near San Diego in Southern California. In 1858 he came across the Pacific and went through Melbourne to Kapunda in South Australia, where he married. Kapunda was a copper-mining town.
He went back to the US but was back in Melbourne in 1862. He travelled in NSW but was at Mountain Glen in 1863 and remained there until his death in 1906.
Thanks, Ivan Blitz, for doing your bit to keep our history alive.