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 the influential Wedge family which helped to found Victoria.
THE Wedge family has not one but two streets named in its honour – Wedge Street in Dandenong and Wedge Road in Carrum Downs.
The first Wedges arrived in the fledgling colony of Australia in 1824.
Edward Davey Wedge and John Helder Wedge were the sons of a Cambridgeshire family. They sailed for Van Dieman’s Land on the Heroine, arriving in April 1824.
They were accompanied by two nephews, Charles Wedge and John Charles Dark.
The brothers bought with them a complete sawmill, which they intended to operate in Tasmania. However, the enterprise quickly failed for they hadn’t taken into account the hardness of the Australian timber.
John Helder Wedge was a surveyor by profession and was appointed assistant second surveyor of Van Dieman’s land.
The Wedges were with John Batman and his small party who arrived in Port Phillip and founded Melbourne in 1835.
It was John Helder Wedge who was responsible for allocating 40,000 acres of land to 17 members of the Port Phillip Association.
A map showing the allocation of land records the Wedge name against block number 13.
Number one is in the name of Charles Swanston.
The land of the two Wedge brothers, John and Edward, began at the mouth of the Maribyrnong River, ran south to Williamstown and round the coast to Werribee and along to Gellibrand’s land.
John Helder Wedge returned to Tasmania in 1843 and died there at the age of 80 leaving no children.
It was left to his brother Edward, who had settled on the Werribee River, to train three of his sons to carry on the development of the land and to settle them in the Dandenong district in 1839.
Edward’s three sons, John, Charles and Henry, between them held land which extended from Mordialloc to Dandenong one way and in the other direction to Cranbourne, where it met Dr Adam’s property, Balla Balla.
John and Charles were both among the early Justices of the Peace on the Dandenong bench.
Later, Charles went to Western Australia to carry out surveys there.
One of his sons, Charles Upton Wedge, was one of the first three babies christened at St James Church of England, Dandenong, in 1859.
The Wedge family can claim to be foremost among those stalwart pioneers who opened up the country in the Dandenong district for those who followed on when the squatting runs were broken up.
Want to know the history behind a street name in Greater Dandenong? Let us know and we’ll find out! Email journal@starnewsgroup.com.au
– Information supplied by the Dandenong and District Historical Society
