By Casey Neill
Anne Preston and Helen Hart can’t understand what all the fuss is about when it comes to Benga House.
Greater Dandenong Council bought the historic home and surrounds on McCrae Street, Dandenong, in the 1980s to preserve it, including the neighbouring Laurel Lodge.
The Heritage Hill property, as it’s now known, hosts exhibitions, workshops and music events.
On display until early next year are enlarged photos of Anne – nee Hart – and her brother, Peter, during their childhood at Benga.
The panels hang in Anne’s old bedroom.
“It is a very strange feeling,” Anne said, sitting in the Benga House garden on an overcast but warm morning, pondering community interest in the property and her ancestors.
Peter’s widow, Helen, agreed.
“We can’t understand it, really, can we?” she said.
“It’s a lovely family but nothing out of the ordinary.
“I’m just so impressed with how they’re looking after the gardens, they’re just beautiful.”
Doctor Ian Hart and his wife Dorothy built Benga the year Anne was born.
“I swear I can remember seeing it half-built but that would be impossible because they moved in when I was a few months old,” she said.
“I must have seen a photograph or something.
“Even then it was a bit like an oasis.
“It was a jungle that Peter and I played in, but it wasn’t a jungle because it was a beautifully-laid out garden.
“My mum designed the garden and that was her main love.
“She could always be found in the garden doing something.”
Shortly after Dr Hart died, Dorothy moved out of Benga and next door to Helen and Peter in Mont Albert.
“That’s when the council bought it,” Anne said.
“It was an interesting concept – it was my house, what on earth did the council want with it?”
Helen lived in the home for six weeks after her first baby was born, and visited regularly over the years.
“They were the most wonderful people, they really were,” she said of Dr and Mrs Hart.
“I married Peter when I was 24. I came from England.
“Immediately I felt as if I were a daughter of the family.”
She was nursing at the same hospital as Peter was completing surgical rounds.
“I knew him for five years,” she said.
“It took him all that time to persuade me that I needed to marry him!”
There were two years, nine months and four days between the siblings.
“Of all the people ever, I was the closest to understanding where he came from,” Anne said.
“I did spend my entire life shocking him, and the family.”
Helen explained: “He was very, very conventional.”
“I don’t think you shocked the man, I think it was just that you knew what you wanted.
“My youngest daughter, Amy, looks like Anne and acts like Anne.”
Anne ended her full-time residency at the home when she was just seven years old to attend school.
“I was a boarder until I went to university. Then I lived in the women’s college,” she said.
“Every girl needs an education.”
That education led her to a career as an architect, which she continues full-time at age 80.
She spent 10 years living in London, on and off, and drove across the country to Sydney on her return.
There she met her second husband and made a home.
Helen calls Berwick home.
“When I first came to Australia we used to drive up here,” she said.
“Anne’s uncle had a farm in Pakenham.
“I can remember thinking ‘one of these days I’m going to live in Berwick’.
“It was so pretty.”
Anne’s parents had strong roots in Dandenong when they decided to build Benga House.
“My grandparents had a house called Roseneath – that’s now where the catholic school is there – a beautiful old place that was built by the first Lord Mayor of Melbourne when it was a day’s horse and buggy ride from the city,” she said.
“Mum and dad used to live at Roseneath with Peter.
“When I was 15 they were painting it, they used to burn the paint off the eaves and it was a hot north-wind day.
“My grandmother called them in for a cup of tea.
“It must have been smouldering. It was a slate roof. The roof collapsed.”
Anne recalled walking to market with her mother every Tuesday, and said her father also had a very set routine.
“He had bacon and eggs for breakfast every day of his life,” she laughed.
“Then he’d go to the surgery, and then he’d go and do his visits.
“If we were home from school on holidays we would go with him, which was lovely.
“If it was at a farm house, he’d go in and we’d look at the animals.
“People were enormously generous.
“I very seldom went out to a house with dad where I wasn’t entrusted with a few eggs or a cauliflower or something that they had that they’d been keeping for the doctor.
“He always had Wednesday afternoon off.
“He and mum used to go into town.
“Dad’s interests outside the surgery were he loved to play golf.
“He belonged to the Rotary Club and St John Ambulance.
“The other thing dad loved was the tenors on Saturday night.
“For years I thought he was listening to the tennis! It was a program called Singers of Renown.”
Helen said Mrs Hart didn’t do paid work but was a very active volunteer.
“She worked at the hospital on the kiosk for how many years?” she said.
Anne answered: “My entire life, that I can remember.”
“She worked at the charity shop for children with special needs,” Helen continued.
“Another thing she was really passionate about was International House where students from outside Australia came to study at Melbourne University.
“They were marvellous people.”
Heritage Hill Museum and Historic Gardens is at 66 McCrae Street, Dandenong, and is open to the public from 10am to 4pm Tuesday to Friday.
