A Receptacle for the Most Valuable Plants
The Walled Garden had been described as being “a receptacle for the most valuable plants” and “laid out in the most modern London style with a unique design of squares and curves” (Ballarat Star 23 January 1901). It once housed a double blue Wisteria of the Kameido variety that was estimated to be two hundred years old way back in 1901, and its blooms were reported as being three feet long. Apart from the two hundred and twenty roses, including a variety called ‘Sir Samuel Wilson’ named after the second owner, there was a large collection of Japanese azaleas, a giant chestnut tree (possibly American), a Chinese lacquer tree, a Japanese cucumber tree or Magnolia obovata, a Sweet osmanthus that also hails from Japan and China, a Japanese lilac, Japanese holly, a jacaranda, gardenias and white and pink heath.
The Calla lily Richardio Elliottiana was also grown, and it was said that it grew at the foot of the cross of ‘Our Saviour’ so that the leaves are speckled as a result of them having become stained with ‘His’ blood. A rather one-sided Golden elm is pictured as a small tree in The Australian Home Beautiful dated 1929, and one of the 4 Canary Island date palms planted around the garden, were all that remained now. There were only a few old black and white pictures of how it looked when it had Cupressus macrocarpa ‘Lambertiana’ dividing it into 3 areas or garden rooms, as pictured in a Grimwade photo of 1928, and there had been another newspaper article with pictures of the rose garden area in the Walled Garden back when the Curries owned Ercildoune.
Before we started reinstating the pathways and re-planting the borders and new rose beds, we had even kept three young foals in there for safekeeping, and we’d been told that a bull had been kept in there by one of the previous owners too, so it became a multifunctional space. There were some bricks placed in the walls, between some of the granite blocks, and when I did some research, I found out that another Walled Garden at Croxeth Hall in Liverpool had openings on the inside of the walls where fires could be lit to heat the wall where fruit was growing against it, and that it also had some flues where the air and smoke could escape.
It has been said that the sweeter the fruit tastes, the more sun it needs, and some varieties suited to areas that become real sun traps are grapes, figs, apricots, nectarines, peaches, strawberries and kiwi fruit, and the Learmonth family was no doubt into growing many different varieties of fruit and vegetables, and even won first prize for their water melons (possibly grown with the help of their clever gardeners). It was reported that there were espaliered cherries, peach and figs still growing in there in 1901. We espaliered many fruit trees on the outside of the west facing granite wall too.
The Curries had apparently grown over 1000 rose cuttings from old imported stock, and they no doubt benefitted by the extra warmth these walls created.
A War of Attrition with Nature
To make progress anywhere in the garden seemed to be at a snail’s pace in the beginning and patience definitely became a virtue. The area eventually came back to life with the planting of what seemed like hundreds more bulbs, perennials, roses, shrubs and trees. John arranged for a beautiful wooden gate to be built for the larger entrance, and had the local blacksmith Jamie Armstrong, build an imposing wrought iron arbour that he had designed. We felt that this was a better solution than reinstating the cypress hedges that are known to be susceptible to canker. Even though we couldn’t replicate those classic garden rooms, the iron arbour looked wonderful with climbing roses and laburnum starting to grow all over it, although the rosellas and cockatoos did take a liking to the juicy new growth.
We sadly couldn’t replicate the large keel shaped conservatory that had been installed during the Wilson era. It must have looked amazing, and there is mention of another conservatory that was situated to the West of the Walled Garden, once badly damaged by the gardeners when they were trying to ‘carefully’ prune some nearby trees, a concrete pad is the only evidence of where it once stood. Their Accounts Books also have an entry in regard to the cost of the repairs to the conservatory wall and furnace.
It really did feel like a war of attrition at times, as if nature was constantly trying to reclaim back what had been hers. We, including Neil for awhile, and Robin for a long while, were constantly attacking the tenacious and rampant self-seeding vegetation along with what seemed like millions of weeds. Scottish weeds mingled happily with Australian weeds, and Scotch thistles, the floral emblem of Scotland, were actually acknowledged as the first pest to be recognized here in Australia under South Australian legislation dated 1852. Other annoying species were the variegated thistles, sticky weed and nightshade weeds with their highly toxic black berries, and the neverending capeweed to contend with, just to name a few.
It is good to learn about which weeds persist in the soil seed bank for many years as opposed to the ones with shorter lifespans but with multiple generations in the same growing season (as stated by Wikipedia). We were to find out that Periwinkle is a useful groundcover, even though it had sequestered a huge area around the front lake, but it was a good foil for the massive weed infestations, and just needed a trim every now and then to keep it off the pathways.
The older trees became a double-edged sword too, with many of them looking very stressed and half-dead (or half-alive), during the drought years, and the huge planting of pines east of the lake began to turn brown, so that we ended up having quite a few removed and or professionally trimmed up. One lady had given us a photo of these pines saying that if you turned the picture on its side then you could see the Mother Mary and her child, and it did look a little like them, but the illusion appeared because of the curvature of the branches.
The Palestinian Wellhead
The other amazing artefact in the garden was the Palestinian Wellhead allegedly brought to Australia from the Holy Land. Heritage Victoria had informed us that this had been illegally whisked away from Ercildoune for four years, and we could only see the flattened circular area in the grass where it had once stood, just outside the Walled Garden. Legal action had been already undertaken by Heritage Victoria, and with John’s assistance, it ultimately found its way back from somewhere in Essendon to its now rightful place, thank goodness, and Heritage Victoria has now put a covenant in place stating that it is never ever to be removed.
Apparently, Sir Samuel Wilson’s sons had bought it as a special gift for their father’s ‘favourite property’ and it was said to have remained hidden in the hold of a sailing ship for two years before it made its way to Australia and it arrived by bullock wagon from Geelong. They didn’t get off scot-free for their troubles and they faced a seven year court case in London after which they were told to return the ‘font’ or pay the substantial fine of £63,000 by the Egyptian Government, not only for taking it illegally, but for trespassing on consecrated ground (The Argus August 28, 1935 page 13). I also found an entry in one of the account books dated 1905 listing railway fees for a Venetian Wellhead, so that is a bit of a mystery too.
It used to have an old sign on it saying that it had once been a baptismal font, and one lady told me at an Open Garden Day that Jesus had even drunk water from it, and all of these comments certainly added to its mystery. We did try to have its age verified by an expert in the field, but that idea hit a brick wall, so its real age remains a true mystery.
Our time at Ercildoune always seemed to feel a bit like two steps forward, and one step back, but in the end we could be proud of what was achieved there, and most Sunday nights we would return to Melbourne, with John dictating to me the latest list of jobs that needed doing, whilst I contemplated what to do next in the garden. It was lovely to finally see the garden growing and not being fried by the sun or drowned, but it still had a long way to reach that level of maturity where it looked like it belonged, but sadly we couldn’t stay there to see it all come to fruition. The Open Garden Information kindly stated: “Saved from dereliction by the current owners, who are intent on recapturing a bygone era with the addition of their own landscaping ideas to compliment this amazing old homestead. Visiting will leave lasting memories”.
Some of our mass plantings included the planting of 250 Shiraz and 250 Chardonnay vines, with our first vintage being made in 2009, 500 Australian natives, around 500 roses, 100’s of lavenders and assorted box hedging, 200 Osage orange trees, 100 fruit trees, and a copse of 50 river She-oaks, after we’d seen them in a copse near the Etihad Stadium in Docklands, Melbourne. They reminded me of when we used to go there nearly every week and watch the Saints play, and they even reached a few Grand Finals. Of course, it was not to be.
Ercildoune in Print
Stories about Ercildoune during our ownership were published in Country Estates of Australia (2007) with a special thankyou by the author at the end acknowledging the quality of my pikelets, Gardens of the Goldfields: A Central Victorian Sojourn (2010), The Australian House and Garden Magazine (2010) Great Australian Gardens – House and Garden (2015) and pictures of the property have even made it on to Pinterest. We nearly made it on to Better Homes and Gardens, but I kept delaying meeting up with them as the garden always looked parched and in desperate need of a few months of constant rain, just like everyone else’s did! The monumental floodproofing works and sinking a bore were all well over and above what we expected to have to do.
John did enjoy buying and using all of the large equipment that included a tipper truck, front-end loader, an ex-council chipper truck that was handy for making tonnes of mulch, an excavator and a hay baler, and I did enjoy learning to drive the tractor myself in order to help distribute the neverending piles of mulch although nothing much seems to suppress such rampant weed growth. Robin did put thick piles of newspaper under many of the new garden areas and we put weed barrier mats around the base of newly planted trees, and all that helped a fair bit, at least maybe psychologically.
There is a film called ‘The Money Pit,’ and that’s what Ercildoune became. John kept milkman’s hours by leaving at 4.15 a.m. in the dark just to beat the crazy peak-hour traffic, and he arrived home in the dark, depending on the season, around 8pm. Pretty challenging when you spend most of your life in a windowless office under fluorescent lights. He clocked up thousands of kilometres of course along the Western Highway to Melbourne in our fifteen years of ownership.
As ‘Caretakers of History,’ as Heritage Victoria liked to call people who own these important slices of Australian history, we managed to meet other such like-minded people of course, and had an interesting visit to Longerenong Homestead (c. 1862) near Horsham in order to meet the owners taking on the challenging renovation there. They had asked Heritage Victoria to arrange a bit of a think-tank with other owners in a similar position, in order to provide a bit more information to people who owned Heritage listed properties on how to go about things.
Visitors and Friends
We did meet many lovely and interesting people over the years though, including a former Prime Minister and his wife, the 27th Governor of Victoria, and a famous History Professor whose wife was doing a story on Dame Nellie Melba, just to name a few. We never did get to visit the magnificent Rupertswood Mansion (c. 1874), but the owner kindly forwarded us a copy of a note from Dame Nellie that he had in his possession that she had written on Ercildoune letterhead. A Scottish Lord even asked if he could nominate Ercildoune as his Australian residence, and said Scottish Lord was even prepared to come do some work around the place in return.
Ercildoune had been leased to many members of the upper-class over the years, including a Scottish noblewoman in 1907, at a time when it was being run by some of the Wilson sons as Trustees.
Other visits were by a group of our second son’s friends who wanted to camp up in the hills in order to undertake a variety of activities as part of their Duke of Edinburgh badge. We also allowed a film crew to shoot some scenes of a horror movie that was called Damned by Dawn at Ercildoune. They stayed at the nearby Burrumbeet Caravan park, and we allowed them access to the property for filming and didn’t charge a cent, in order to support Australian film making. The occasion of our eldest son’s wedding was of course one of the highlights during our period of ownership.
The wedding took place in the Walled Garden on a rather wintry November day, and a marquee had to be erected rather last minute in time for the ceremony, as the day started off so cold and wet, but luckily the sun decided to make an appearance in the afternoon. Another special event happened on the 2nd March 2009 when members of the Australian Learmonth family and the Russian Lermontov family who were related to the Learmonths of Scotland, came to visit. Three silver birches were planted along with 3 brass plaques and one plaque read –
This copse of Silver Birches symbolizes the incredible determination of the Scots, but notably the Learmonths, who migrated to many far away lands including Australia, Russia and the USA. The family led in the pastoral settlement of Victoria, and also established one of the most famous sheep studs in Australia here at Ercildoune. Many of the Russian and Australian members of this incredible family gathered here on the 2nd March 2009.
The Lermontov Connection
Mikhail and Elena Lermontov also planted a tree to commemorate the Lermontov Heritage Association of Russia and I received a signed copy of a book that was published in 2011 called ‘Learmonth-Lermontov’ – A history of the name and families by Tatiana Molchanova (Ph.D in Biological Sciences, “Hematological Scientific Center” and “Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology”, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow. BS, Chemist (Chemistry of the Biologically Active Natural Compounds), Institute of Fine Chemical Technology, Moscow) and Rex Learmonth.
They also sent a copy of this book to The Queen and her Lady-In-Waiting replied on behalf of The Queen in a letter with the Balmoral Castle Crest dated 12th September 2008 –
“The Queen wishes me to write and thank you all for the letter and the books which you have kindly sent to Her Majesty. The Queen was pleased to hear from you and thought it was kind of you to send the volumes which you have so extensively researched and recently published on the subject of the families of the Learmonths and Lermonotovs and their connection throughout the years. I am to thank you all once again for this thoughtful gift and for writing as you did which, together with your good wishes, Her Majesty greatly appreciates”.
The Russian version of the book was published in Moscow in 2008 and received the National Prize for that year in the field of ‘Genealogical Studies, Memory’ which was presented to Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov.
Finishing the Conservation Plan
In the end we managed to tackle ‘nearly’ every job listed in the Conservation Plan. We owe thanks to a great many people, including the builder/carpenters, painters, groundsmen/gardeners, arborists, plumbers/electricians, roofer/renderers, the excavation workers. So thankyou Steve, Kelvin, Charlie, Neil, and the irrepressible Ted, his son Michael, and the creative brickee Peter, and we would like to give a really special thank you to Dianne Gow of course. An extra big thanks to Robin Hill, the tireless groundsman and master of many things, including mowing, whipper-snipping, spraying, pruning, clearing excess vegetation in every corner of the property, and in 2020, he reached a special milestone of having worked 20 years at Ercildoune. We would also like to acknowledge our wonderful neighbours over the road, Leo and Shirley, and thank them for their kindness they showed towards us.
Leo has sadly since passed away but told us many stories about his family’s association with Ercildoune including how his father used to lie under the window and listen to Dame Nellie singing. He has a newspaper article about him standing on a raised area on Ercildoune Road in order to get a glimpse of the Duke of Gloucester. He also acted as a part-time chauffeur to Lady Currie and we will always remember his wife Shirley’s lovely sponge cakes.
I had said that when John ever retired, that he would be tempted to develop Ercildoune into a golf course, or that it will at least start looking like a golf course because he is such a perfectionist.
As we had to keep employing people to keep the place up to a certain standard, I thought it was a good idea to let other people enjoy all of the hard work and expense, so it was wonderful to wander around a garden with all of the visitors from the various Garden Clubs, Vintage Car Clubs, Probus groups and the local history society, and quite a few people were also in touch who had a connection to the Learmonth, Wilson and Currie families. They usually had some interesting stories to tell and we thankfully received some great photos.
Digging into the Records
When we first purchased Ercildoune, I’d ventured into the State Library of Victoria and armed myself with spools of newspapers articles and was quite excited to see pictures of the olden days and how it used to look. I have gone off on so many tangents though, thereby learning so much about a myriad of subjects that include a camembert eating eel when doing some research on eels. I have now found out so many more extra snippets of interesting information that I now have many folders of relevant (and irrelevant) information pertaining to Ercildoune.
It has been a challenging and time-consuming task sifting through all of the online newspaper articles associated with the name Ercildoune and its more famous owners that are available Trove that is a collaboration between the National Library of Australia and hundreds of partner organizations around Australia and it is a free faceted search engine that is capable of accessing around 90 million items. If you type the name Thomas Learmonth into the search engine, over 100,000 entries come up, but obviously not all to do with the pioneering owner of the property. There is a former National Bank (c1876) named Ercildoune that is situated in Footscray and another rural property of the same name in New South Wales.
It is also the name of a hamlet in Pennsylvania, USA, and the name of a property in the Brittsdown district of Cape Colony, South Africa that was formerly called Kareeboschpan. A doctor, Sir William Thomas Smartt, a family friend of Sir Samuel Wilson renamed his property in South Africa “Ercildoune” as he was so impressed by his visit to Ercildoune in 1879. He also became a leading sheep farmer who later became a Minister for Agriculture, and he went on to become a South African politician and founder and leader of the Unionist Party. There was also a racehorse called Ercildoune and there was a coursing event and a horse race that were both named the Ercildoune Stakes.
Then there are quite a few different spelling of names and Ercildoun has had many variations as some names have been anglicized over time from their original spelling. Borrumbeet was first spelt with an ‘o’ later becoming Burrumbeet, Boninyong, also with an ‘o’ becoming Buninyong, and even Ballarat was once spelt Bolorat.
One of my favourite articles was when the Learmonths had all of their employees and families there to celebrate New Year’s Eve in 1871. I just wonder if some members of the family would have stayed at Ercildoune if they hadn’t have lost that Court Case in such an emphatic way, but they had to meet so many challenges including dealing with bushrangers, had stock and equipment stolen on numerous occasions, had fire deliberately lit on their property, suffered through terrible droughts, floods and bushfires. Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back – but who will ever know really why they sold up and left and it would have been hard for them to say goodbye to Australia and all of the friends they had made here.
And they had received quite a few negative responses from people over the years mainly through ‘envy or malice’ with some believing that they had been favoured in the way they obtained their huge tracts of land, or some complaining that they were often absentee squatters, as sometimes the more successful squatters appointed an overseer or manager to make sure things ran smoothly when they made visits to their home country.
Their ability to top the markets and win nearly every first prize in the show ring with their superior stock certainly irked some members of the community too, but on some occasions, the Learmonths even handed back a prize they had won too many, in order for someone else to be given a chance.
Gardens of the Western District
From what I’ve read, virtually every old Western District squatting family of Scottish descent was Presbyterian, a religion that originated primarily in Scotland, and nearly every family of English descent were Anglican. The brothers were very religious and also believed in giving away a percentage of their earnings, and a clause in Andrew’s Will mentions that 10% of the income from his Estate be put into a separate tithe account so that they could continue to support his various charities, and during their time in Australia, the brothers appeared to donate very generously to nearly all of the local causes that they felt deserved their financial assistance. It surely would have been challenging having over 100 employees and their families living on their property.
Others appreciate that they did make a remarkable contribution to the wool industry, agriculture, education, religious and general community life and their wives would have been making sacrifices along the way, especially in regard to the challenges of childbirth and rearing young children in those early years. Later on, it became more problematic as schooling in Australia left a lot to be desired compared with Scotland that was spoilt for choice in having fifteen Universities, with the University of St. Andrews being the oldest (c.1413), and Melbourne University wasn’t in existence until 1853.
The Learmonths Leave for England
Most newspaper articles stated that they were selling Ercildoune and returning to England, but they had been building another Homestead at Groongal near Hay well before they sold Ercildoune and had also invested in some Queensland sheep country too. Groongal started off as another huge tract of land being 310,000 acres in size and that had been divided up between the brothers by each of them drawing their portion randomly out of a hat. Thomas took his rightful place back at Park Hall, but another Thomas Livingstone Learmonth, one of the younger descendants, sold the Park Hall estate in 1921 and that ended the family’s involvement after some 274 years.
Thomas stated in one of his letters that ‘they would never have been as successful in their home country as he was wholly unable to cope with superior talent and energy of his coevals in the Old Country.’ That says a lot about how smart the people were back in his own country must have been and important too as indicated by his statement that ‘It is good for man to bear the yoke in his youth’. According to Reminiscences of a relation called Fred Macrae, he states that they had spent some time in Melbourne in April 1837 and way back then had found it a wicked city and life there very distasteful, so they took all their goods and chattels and moved up country.
He also tells of their grandfather buying a small piece of ground in Melbourne for £10 which he later sold for £50 and in 1900 when Fred was a boy, he saw in a newspaper that the same land, now with a building called the Equitable on it, had sold for £2 million. He said to his grandfather that it might have been good to have kept that land, to which his grandfather replied: “Man does not live by bread alone”. He also mentioned how the brothers had to work very hard for a number of years and how frequently the climate just about beat them, but they built up a very fine flock of sheep and together with Captain MacArthur, who acknowledged it, founded the great sheep and wool industry on which the country greatly depends.
They must have brought out merinos as well, though MacArthur is generally given all of the credit. At least they received the credit for creating a breed of sheep that could produce wool that could spin longer than any other wool in the world in a time frame of around 50 years.
There are so many shipwrecks strewn around the coast of Australia and there are around 638 known shipwrecks around Victoria’s coastline, some due to the unpredictable weather, human error and even foul play. Mathew Flinders said that he’d seldom seen a more fearful section of coastline when referring to the 130 kilometre stretch between Moonlight Head and Cape Otway that is now known as the Shipwreck Coast. Even at the thought of taking months between countries, and with the odds stacked against them, it is amazing how many people were keen to start anew and travel to far-flung Australia, as there a distance of approximately 17,000 kilometres (or 10,000 miles) between Melbourne and London.
There were quite a few choices in regard to the type of ship that they could sail on that originally included clippers, schooners, barques, brigs, ketches, sloops, fully rigged ships. Wikipedia states that the British Government began transporting convicts overseas to American colonies in the early 18th century. Robert Hughes in his book The Fatal Shore, states that “the population of England and Wales, which had remained steady at 6 million from 1700 to 1740, began rising considerably after 1740, and by the time of the American Revolution, London was overcrowded, filled with the unemployed, and flooded with cheap gin. Poverty, social injustice, child labour, harsh and dirty living conditions and long working hours were prevalent in 19th century Britain.”
Convicts and Colonisation
Seeking to pre-empt the French colonial empire from expanding into the area, and as British prisons had become overcrowded, England set up penal colonies in Australia in order to send over convicts in huge ships called hulks, with the majority being transported for petty crime, such as stealing a loaf of bread in order to feed a starving family, and about 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia between 1788 and 1868. One in seven convicts were women and the youngest female convict was called Mary Wade, and she was only thirteen years old when she was sent to Australia for stealing a cotton frock, linen tippet and a cap from another younger child, just eight years old at the time of the offence.
She had initially been sentenced to hang, so it was lucky that her sentence, along with all the women on death row at the time, was commuted to penal transportation part of the celebration of King George III beng cured of an ‘unnamed madness’ that was possibly dementia. Many of these convicts went on to make a great success of their lives, and their new country began to flourish under their collective willingness to ‘give it a go’ as they say here in Australia.
Many failed too, having suffered from any number of terrible accidents, and I can’t even imagine how the women coped with the voyage, let alone with giving birth and then raising their large families out in the middle of nowhere without the comforts and companionship they had once known. They had to deal with Australia’s wildlife that is a little more challenging compared with back where they came from in the United Kingdom. Australia has some of the worst poisonous snakes and spiders, including the possibility of finding a redback under the toilet seat scenario, and it would have been nerve racking in summer when children were playing outside without the snake bite antivenom that is usually on-hand today.
Wikipedia even states that it is now considered by many Australians a cause for celebration to find a convict in our lineage and almost 20% of modern Australians, in addition to 2 million Britons, are descended from transported convicts.
The Scottish Pastoralists
Niel Black (1804-1880), another of the well-known Scottish pioneering pastoralists who set up a company called Niel Black and Co., arrived in Adelaide in 1839 to investigate what pastoral prospects were there and then checked out Sydney, but settled on Melbourne because he thought it ‘a Scottish settlement’ and he settled on a 43,520 acre property called Weeraweeroit near Lake Terang that he understandably renamed Glenormiston. He also became known as one of the most successful stock breeders of his time, establishing pedigreed Cotswold and merino flocks and founding a Shorthorn stud that would help lay the foundations of the most famous of present-day Australian cattle studs at the property that he had pulled out of a hat called Mount Noorat. One of his partners in this venture was the first cousin of future British prime minister William Gladstone who served in four separate terms.
Niel Black became a member for the Western Province and held a seat continuously until his death. He was a prolific letter writer and noted down many interesting observations in his journals. He had brought men out under the bounty emigration scheme and said that the itinerant labour force were a set of devils incarnate. He said that some bachelors would dine on tea, damper and mutton chops three times a day. Children could also earn wages from as young as the age of eight, especially the children of the shepherds or ploughmen and making money was the prime objective and returning to England was the ultimate prize. Prince Alfred visited him at Glenormiston where Black had the verandah covered in to make the place complete for a large corroboree.
The Australian Dictionary of Biography states that he was ‘shrewd, righteous, proud, hard working and thrifty, typical of many of the successful Scottish immigrants of the time. Generous to those he thought deserving, he never ceased to denounce sloth and shiftlessness in others. He believed that the headlong progress of democracy would finally lead to anarchy and communism. He contributed generously but unostentatiously to the relief of distress”. The Age in an article dated 22 December 1937 stated that the bluestone Presbyterian Church was erected by the Black family in 1883 and it was built on the same principle as the famous Lansdowne church of Glasgow.
“By their work in subdividing the great areas they have held, the Black family have earned the right to be known as amongst the first and most long-sighted of the practitioners of closer settlement”. He is listed at 198 in The All-Time Australian 200 Rich List (2004) leaving an estate worth 0.188% of the GDP = $1.35 billion. One of his sons owned Dalvui that was and still is, one of the show places of the Western District.
The Scots in Australia
Some say the Scottish succeeded so well in establishing themselves in this country because of the hard and tenacious characteristics inherent in them, and I would have thought that their religious beliefs also played a part. Thomas died at 85 years of age and outlived his brother Somerville by some 25 years. He stated in his Will that he wanted his funeral conducted with the utmost simplicity, and for the smallest expense possible. He is buried in the family lair at Warriston Cemetery, and his gravestone apparently reads that he was ‘a sinner saved’. The Learmonth legacy will live on with their surname being used to name the town that was the place where they originally ran sheep in the surrounding foothills and A.S. Kenyon described Thomas Livingstone-Learmonth as the ‘godfather’ of that town that once a very busy and prosperous town having 6 hotels, 4 blacksmiths making farm implements, 4 stores, 2 bakeries and saddlery shops. The local government office headquarters of the Shire of Ballarat were originally located there. The nearby lake is also named after them and is still used for all types of water sports in the good rainfall seasons. A major road from Burrumbeet into Ballarat is called Learmonth Road and there is also a Learmonth Street in Buninyong, the town where they first established themselves.
It is located 125 kilometres north-west of Melbourne and lays claim to being one of Victoria’s first inland townships, along with Kilmore. When the period of the wealthy squattocracy had passed, Ercildoune was carved up into many farms and as well as Learmonth, the towns of Waubra and Burrumbeet were created.