What\’s In A Name
What’s In a Name delves into the fascinating stories and personalities behind some of the city’s best-known street names. This week the Journal looks at central Dandenong’s Foster Street, named perhaps in honour of early settler John Leslie Fitzgerald Vesey Foster.
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MANY have believed that Foster Street was named after the Foster family of Keysborough.
However evidence points us in the direction of an earlier settler, John Leslie Fitzgerald Vesey Foster. Mr Leslie Foster (1818 -1900) is recorded as being the owner or lease holder of the Eumemmerring Run on the List of Runs at the Chief Secretary’s Office in 1845.
This is the very early days of Dandenong when the main roads of Lonsdale, McCrae and Foster streets were named.
The Keysborough Foster family did not come into the district until May 1855 and was not established in Keysborough until 1859.
It is believed that the Eumemmerring Run was transferred to Mr Foster from Dr Farquhar McCrae in 1839.
John Leslie Fitzgerald Vesey Foster was a nephew of Lord Fitzgerald, whose title he inherited.
Foster, a trained lawyer, author and land owner, figured prominently in the colony’s conservative squatting element in Port Phillip in 1846-’48 due to his family connections.
However in an episode which must have shaken the citizens of Melbourne in the 1840s, in 1843 Foster – feeling he had been thoroughly fleeced by Dr McCrae on a land sale – denounced McCrae and challenged him to a pistol duel.
McCrae declined in provocative terms. Not long before Christmas 1843, McCrae was riding his horse up Queen Street when Foster waylaid him and whipped him so severely that McCrae fell off his horse in a most undignified manner.
Newspapers of the day record the legal proceedings under Judge Jeffcott on the matter.
It appears ironic that when naming streets after the early settlers of Dandenong, the councillors of the period arranged for Foster Street to run into McCrae Street.
– Dandenong and District Historical Society
