Beaumaris ( ) is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 20 km south-east of Melbourne's Central Business District, located within the City of Bayside local government area. Beaumaris recorded a population of 13,947 at the 2021 census.
Beaumaris is located on Port Phillip Bay and is bounded by Reserve Road and Weatherall Road in the north, Charman Road in the east, the Port Phillip Bay foreshore in the south, and McGregor Avenue, Fifth Street, Keating Street, Iluka Street, Fairleigh Avenue and Royal Melbourne Golf Club in the west.
Geology
The blunt V-shaped intrusion of land into the Bay that is spearheaded by Table Rock Point is referred to as the Beaumaris 'Peninsula'. The Beaumaris cliffs to the north east of Table Rock are formed by the steeply folded rock layers known as the Beaumaris Monocline, which is considered to be of Tertiary age overlying older structures.Singleton, F.A. (1941). The Tertiary geology of Australia. Proc. R. Soc. Vict., 53, 1–125. These include the underlying Silurian rock known as the Fyansford formation above which is the 15 m thick darker Beaumaris Sandstone, overlain by yellowish Red Bluff Sandstone, as outcrops in the cliffs, ferruginised, with hard ironstone in the upper sections, extending to the platform, and as small reefs parallel to the coastline. A thin calcareous sandstone is overlain by fine sandy marl and sandstone with calcareous concretions. At the base of the sandstone is a thin gravelly bed that includes concretionary nodules of phosphate and iron of which detached nodules may be found around the cliff base.CARTER, A. Phosphatic nodule beds in Victoria and the late Miocene–Pliocene eustatic event. Nature 276, 258–259 (1978) doi:10.1038/276258a0
The Monocline can be seen where the cliffs of Beaumaris are locally parallel to the turnover of the monocline, which forms a drainage divide between the Gardners Creek-Dandenong Creeks systems and the Carrum Swamp.King, P.R., Cochrane, R.M. & Cooney, A.M. (1987). Significant geological features along the coast in the City of Sandringham. Unpub. rep. geol. Surv. Vict., 1987/35 Layers in the cliff are almost horizontal, but fold downward almost 30º toward the vertical south-easterly and out to sea. Jagged remains of the strata can be seen off-shore at low tide from the cliff-top walk at the end of Wells Road.
Behind Keefer's Fishermens Wharf the lower level of the cliffs is a fossil site of international significance.Beaumaris Bay Fossil Site Beach Road, Beaumaris, Victoria, Australia: Register of National Estate. (1999). Australia: Australian Heritage Database. Shells, sea urchins, crabs, foraminifera, remains of whales, sharks, rays and dolphins, and also birds and marsupials, dating back to the Late Miocene to Early Pliocene (12 to 6 million years ago) can be found, and have been the subject of a number of papers.Chapman, T.S. & Cudmore, F.A. (1924). New or little known fossils in the National Museum. Proc. R. Soc. Vict., 36, 107–162.Gill, E.D. (1957). The stratigraphical occurrence and palaeoecology of some Australian Tertiary Marsupials. Mem. Nat. Mus. Vict., 21, 135–203.Woodburne, M.O. (1969). A lower mandible of Zumogaturus gilli from the Sandringham Sands, Beaumaris, Victoria, Australia. Mem. Nat. Mus. Vict., 29, 29–39.Wilkinson, H.E. (1969). Description of an upper Miocene albatross from Beaumaris, Victoria, Australia, and a review of fossil Diomedeidae. Mem. Nat. Mus. Vict., 29, 41–51.Simpson, G.G. (1970). Miocene Penguins from Victoria, Australia and Chubut, Argentina. Mem. Nat. Mus. Vict., 31, 17–23Ter, P. C., & Buckeridge, J. S. J. (2012). 'Ophiomorpha Beaumarisensis Isp. Nov., A Trace Fossil from the Late Neogene Beaumaris Sanstone is the Burrow of a Thalassinidean Lobster'. In Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, 124(2), 223.Fitzgerald, E. M., & Kool, L. (2015). The first fossil sea turtles (Testudines: Cheloniidae) from the Cenozoic of Australia. Alcheringa: an Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, 39(1), 142–148.Megirian, Dirk, Gavin Prideaux, Peter Murray, and Neil Smit. "An Australian Land Mammal Age Biochronological Scheme." Paleobiology 36.4 (2010): 658–71. Web.
History Indigenous occupation
The Bunurong (or Boon Wurrung) peoples of the Kulin nation lived along the Eastern coast of Port Philip Bay for over 20,000 years before white settlement.Tindale, Norman Barnett (1974). "Bunurong (VIC)". Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names. Australian National University Press. . Their mythology preserves the history of the flooding of Port Phillip Bay 10,000 years ago, and its period of drying and retreat 2,800–1,000 years ago.G. R. Holdgate, B. Wagstaff & S. J. Gallagher (2011) Did Port Phillip Bay nearly dry up between ~2800 and 1000 cal. yr BP? Bay floor channelling evidence, seismic and core dating, Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, 58:2, 157–175, DOI: 10.1080/08120099.2011.546429 Visible evidence of their shell middens and hand-dug wells remain along the cliffs of Beaumaris,Brooks, A. E. (1960). The Aboriginal Well at Beaumaris. (n.p.): (n.p.). but by the 1850s most withdrew to the Mordialloc Aboriginal Reserve established in 1852, and after the 1860s, to Coranderrk.
European settlement
One of the first white settlers was James Bickford Moysey in 1845, who, along with several other local settlers had Welsh roots, and he gave the name 'Beaumaris' to his pastoral run after the Welsh Town of Beaumaris (Welsh: Biwmares) on the Isle of Anglesey in the Menai Strait, called 'beaux marais' by Norman-French builders of the castle there, a name which translates as "beautiful marshes". Moysey eventually purchased 32 hectares for his farm. There is a monument on the foreshore opposite the hotel where Moysey had built a house.
Beaumaris cemetery The first Cheltenham settlers, Stephen and Mary Ann Charman, donated land in 1854 that was the first cemetery of the area, established in the churchyard of the small timber Wesleyan Church at the western corner of what is now Balcombe Road and Bickford Court. There, two of the Charman's own babies were buried in 1855 and 1859. Soon reaching capacity, this small cemetery operated for only 11 years with the last known burial in 1866. Other faiths traveled to Brighton to bury their dead. The church building on the site was sold in 1893 and moved to Langwarrin and the land turned over to grazing. In 1954 the Moorabbin Council, faced with growing population and ramping land values, granted a permit to the Methodist Church to subdivide the land. Everest Le Page, Moorabbin Councillor and Cheltenham resident, believing that the previous burial sites may not have been relocated following the closure of the church, argued unsuccessfully against sub-division and seven lots of land were sold and houses built there. Researcher Shirley Joy was unable to find evidence in 1998 that the church burials at the site had been relocated prior to the subdivision and development of the land Responding to her efforts Mayor of Bayside, Cr Graeme Disney, had a commemorative bronze plaque set into the footpath at the corner of Balcombe Road and Bickford Court, Beaumaris.
Establishment of the suburb Current day Beaumaris covers two early estates in the parish of Moorabbin developed by Josiah Holloway from 1852. Named Beaumaris Town and Beaumaris Estate after the Moysey holding, the lots comprising them were marketed by Mr. Holloway's suggesting that the railway was imminent and a canal would be built. Advertising for an auction on 13 March 1876 of blocks of land at "Dalgety's Paddock" between Balcombe Road and the beach, Beaumaris, portion no. 48, Parish of Moorabbin, describes the area as "The Ramsgate of Victoria," after the seaside town in East Kent.
A Beaumaris Post Office was opened on 1 March 1868, but was renamed Gipsy Village (now Sandringham) office at the end of that month. The township developed slowly, with Beaumaris Hotel, the first shop and civic hall being built in the 1880s. Beaumaris Post Office did not reopen until 1925. In 1957, this was renamed Beaumaris South when a new Beaumaris office opened in the current location. In 1954, Cromer Post Office opened to the north of the suburb.
The 'Great Southern' hotel was built in 1889 as a seaside resort, then in the 1920s, was renamed the Beaumaris Hotel. The original structure survived in the Beaumaris bushfires of 1944, only to be extensively rebuilt and extended in 1950 as 'The Beaumaris'. In 2014, the hotel was converted into 58 apartments.
Beaumaris Tram Company
Horse tramway
At the height of the Victorian land boom in 1887, the Brighton railway line was extended to Sandringham. Thomas Bent, Chairman of Moorabbin Shire Council, keen to stimulate development south of Sandringham sought and received permission to build two tramways from Sandringham station along the coast road to Beaumaris, and from there to Cheltenham railway station, with a branch from Beaumaris continuing down the coast road to Mordialloc; more than 15 kilometres of tramline in total.
The Shire Council contracted the Beaumaris Tramway Company (BTC) in February 1888 for a horse tramway with a 30-year operating lease. The Sandringham to Cheltenham route cost £20,000 and opened that Christmas. At the February 1891, half-yearly meeting of the Beaumaris Tramway Company Limited the chairman Mr. H. Byron Moore reported that a recent doubling of traffic was coupled to the increasing popularity of cheap rail return tickets to Sandringham issued by the Victorian Railways,Frost, D. (2006). A short history of the Victorian railways trams : St. Kilda – Brighton – Sandringham – Black Rock – Beaumaris / by David Frost. Nunawading, Vic.: Tramway Publications.Trips by Rail from Melbourne: To Sandringham, Mentone, Mordialloc, Frankston, Mornington, Beaumaris on the Sea. (1908). Australia: (n.p.). nearly 17,000 of which had been issued. Holiday-makers were offered moonlight tram rides during summer that year and artists of the Victorian Sketching Club used the service. The Mordialloc branch line was never built, and after the land boom bubble burst in 1891, development beyond Black Rock ceased for several decades. Holiday traffic kept the business afloat until in 1912 the Beaumaris to Cheltenham section closed, and in 1914, the BTC ceased operation.
There are no remains of the line to be found, but it is remembered by the name of the suburban street that it once used; Tramway Parade, Beaumaris.
Electric trams
Development from the first decade of the twentieth century of the area between Sandringham and Black Rock prompted formation of a public association to lobby for extension of the Sandringham railway that gained Parliamentary support in 1910, though it was vetoed over the high cost of land resumptions. In both 1913 and 1914, proposals were put forward for an electric tramway from Sandringham to Black Rock but using an inland route to preserve the visual amenity of the coastal reserves. In November 1914, an Act enabled this tramway to be owned and operated by Victorian Railways, on standard gauge to cater for any future connection to the main Melbourne system. The line, almost entirely double track, was opened on 10 March 1919 with a small three-road depot at Sandringham railway station yard connecting with the down track in Bay Street. Six crossbench cars with six trailers operated on the tramway, with Elwood Depot maintaining track and rolling stock, joined in 1921 by four new bogie tramcars.