J was down in Melbourne for a meeting in Heidelberg ast Thursday.

Chatting over breakfast this morning she said ‘Did I tell you that I saw a view that’s similar to Streeton’s Golden summer?’

Not terribly surprising, even if the area is now built up suburbia.

Streeton was a member of what’s the Heidelberg School of Australian impressionist painters, who were basically a group of artists who went out on camping and painting expeditions around Melbourne in the late 1880’s.

But actually they didn’t really go that far out of the city, simply because they went on the train – after all how else would one carry easels, tents, art supplies and the rest?

And, as a consequence they were limited by how far the suburban train network round Melbourne went out of the city.

This is neatly illustrated by their first camp in 1885 being on a property near  Box Hill.

Box Hill is nowhere near Heidelberg, in fact it’s on a completely different train line, but in 1885 it had a railway station, which had only opened three years previously in 1882, and was still a relatively rural location.

It was only after the Heidelberg railway station opened in 1888 on what is now the Hurstbridge line that the artists started using the area round Heidelberg for their summer camps, as it became possible to haul all their paraphernalia out to a summer camp site without resorting to hiring carts from the city.

At the time Heidelberg, even though the town had been established in the early 1840’s, was quite rural and remote and set in bushland. The station was as far as the train went until 1902 when the line was extended as far as Eltham.