East Melbourne, Hotham Street 086

Richard Corbett owned the quarter acre allotment now occupied by a block of apartments known as 86-90 Hotham Street. Corbett was a storeman with Alston and Brown in Collins Street west.  Alston and Brown was classed as a drapers but sold everything from carpets and tapestries, upholstery fabrics, dress fabrics, hats and other accessories. 

It appears that Corbett intended to build three terrace houses on the land but only had the finances for two. In July 1868 he notified the council of his intention to build a two-room wooden house on the land.  A month later he applied to build two further houses.  According to the rate books these were brick houses each of eight rooms. 

Corbett and his wife, Mary Ann, occupied the wooden house presumably with the intention of building the third terrace house when funds were sufficient.  But it never happened.  Mary died in 1877 and Richard moved out soon after and let the house to tenants. 

About 1885 Corbett sold the three houses to David Goldie, the licensee of the Town Hall Hotel in Bridge Road. He died in 1887 leaving the properties to his wife, Kate.  Kate died in 1892 but the properties remained in her estate until the early 1900s. 

In 1901 the cottage was leased to Percy Lindsay, one of the well-known family of artists. He lived there with his close friend, Herman Kuhr, a French horn player.  Daryl Lindsay, as a young boy, went to stay with his brother and wrote a paragraph about the experience in his autobiography, The Leafy Tree:

When I was about ten, Reg and I went down to stay with him in a strange little four-roomed house in Hotham Street, East Melbourne, which he shared with an Austrian musician named Kuhr who was known as ‘The Count’.  The Count was an extraordinary individual, a small man with a large head, a bristling moustache and very short legs.  He played the French horn in J.C. Williamson’s orchestra, and had a passion for cats.  When he came home from rehearsals on a warm afternoon, he would immediately take off his trousers.  His shirt came down below his knees displaying a pair of strong calves with thick black hairs.  Armed with cats’ meat, he would whistle and all the cats in the street would come to his call.  He fed them, occasionally picking one up by the tail and hurling it ten feet in the air to see it come down on its feet.  In his guttural voice, he would say: ‘Dey like it.  Dey would ask for it, if dey could spik.’ The house had a large mulberry tree at the back and a vine-covered pergola running from the front up the path to pair of handsome iron gates on the street. They had a large white bull-terrier which guarded the place by day.  The Count and Perce took us to a pantomime, the first time I had been inside a real theatre.  Coming back at eleven o’clock on a moon-light night, we found the bull-terrier sitting on guard under the pergola, growling.  From above in the vines came a plaintive voice saying, ‘Landry. Landry.’ A Chinaman had delivered the laundry at five o’clock but could not make the distance to the gate and had been perched in the vines for six hours.  Percy and The Count were great cooks and we had strange European meals of exotic sausages, spaghetti and cheese and were allowed a glass of wine.  The two weeks with them were a wonderful holiday for two country boys. 

The next owner was Henry McDonough.  He was a wealthy grain merchant who lived with his wife and family of ten children at Tara, one of Victoria Parade’s grand mansions just west of Clarendon Street. 

The Age on 26 Jan 1921 advertised: ‘THIS DAY. At 11 o'Clock. On the Property, 86 Hotham-street, EAST MELBOURNE FOR REMOVAL. TIMBER COTTAGE. 4 Rooms, Outbuildings, In One Lot.’ Possibly by this date the cottage was in a state of disrepair and rather than spend money on it to bring it up to date Henry decided to get rid of it. 

Henry died in 1925 and the land and neighbouring houses passed to his daughters, Catherine and Sarah. The land remained vacant but the rate books list it as having an occupier, the same person who occupied the house next door.  Perhaps the land became a garden or even a car park for the occupants of the two remaining houses. 

Sarah died in 1965, Catherine having predeceased her. The properties were sold and the land redeveloped with a block of apartments.