Pound Road zig zags its way across the old Shire of Cranbourne from Ballarto Road at Cardinia to the South Gippsland Highway at Hampton Park. There is a reason that it ends up in Hampton Park and that is because where Hampton Park is now located used to be a Pound. We will let Niel Gunson author of The Good Country: Cranbourne Shire tell us - Hampton Park - the area had originally enclosed the Dandenong Pound (later known as the Cranbourne Pound). The ‘pound’ Paddock was later owned by the Garner (1) family of Diamond Hill, well known in Dandenong as undertakers and coach builders. When W. Garner was gored by a bull the paddock was purchased by E.V Jones of Somerville Road, Footscray. It was subdivided in 1916 into small blocks from five to twenty acres. (2). This subdivision was known as Hampton Park and the road through the settlement was named Somerville after Jones' home street (3).
The Dandenong Pound was officially established November 20, 1849 and the name was changed to the Cranbourne Pound in July 1868. This pound was closed in January 1887 and relocated.
Pounds played a larger role in the life of people in the early days than they do now - the Victoria Government Gazette has pages and pages of notices of impoundings of animals - stock was valuable and fences were poor. In some areas, as we have seen hawthorn hedges were used as fences or post and rail fences or wire fences.
These fences were not as effective in holding cattle in as barbed wire fences, but it wasn't until November 1874 that Joseph Glidden took out the first patent for barbed wire in the USA. So it was more likely that livestock would go wandering and be impounded by the Pound Keeper, who could charge a fine for allowing the animals to stray and a daily 'sustenance' fee for feeding the animal. As a matter of interest the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum has a history of barbed wire on their website, you can read it here. The first advertisements in Australian newspapers for 'American barbed fencing wire' (that I could find) were in 1879.
East of Tooradin where Koo Wee Rup, Monomeith, Yannathan etc are was part of the Koo Wee Rup Swamp and until major drainage works commenced in 1889 was fairly uninhabited. There were early settlements down around Lang Lang but before the Swamp was drained and the roads improved it would have been common to travel by boat to Tooradin and then by road and then head to the Pound and Dandenong by either what became the South Gippsland Highway or north from Tooradin to Pound Road.
Footnotes
(1) The surname is actually Garnar - I have written about them in my Diamond Hill post, here.
(2) Gunson, Niel The Good Country: Cranbourne Shire (Cheshire, 1968) p. 212.
