Prahran & Windsor, Victoria

Prahran

Prahran (pronounced "pruh-ran"), also known colloquially as "Pran", is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 5 km south-east from Melbourne's central business district. Prahran takes its name from Pur-ra-ran, a compound of two aboriginal words, meaning "land partially surrounded by water" formed in 1837 by George Langhorne. The proximity of the Yarra River in the north and a swamp to the southwest (now Albert Park Lake) explains that description^[1].

Prahran was once the City of Prahran but has now been merged with the City of Malvern to form the City of Stonnington.

Google Maps

When the area was first established, Praharan covered a large area bounded by the Yarra River in the north, Wellington Street and (Great) Dandenong Road in the south, Punt Road (now, but it previously extended further west) to the west and Kooyong Road in the east. When we look at addresses in this area in the mid-1860s, they generally refer to "Prahran". As the population grew from farming to a suburban residential style, the area was further divided into suburbs that can be recognised today.

Of particular interest to those of us following the Crask and Kinder families, the south-west corner of Prahran became known as Windsor (shaded "yellow" below).

Windsor

In the bottom left corner can be seen the original names of streets occupied by people featured in this website, such as - St Davids Street (now Uption Road), Albert Street, Peeel Street, Henry Street, Union Street, Andrew Street, Duke Street and Vine Street.

In the 1960s, the Victorian Government decided to renovate the area known as St Kilda Junction (west end of Wellington Street where it joins St Kilda Road, Punt Road and Nelson Street. St Kilda Junction was a giant roundabout with trams running through it and was the intersection of 8 streets and three metropolitan traffic routes^[3].

This resulted in the extension of Queens Way just to the north of Wellington Street, to Dandenong Road. This destroyed Nelson and Vine Streets completely, the south side of Albert Street up to St Davids Street (the even numbers) and changed the south end of St Davids Street removing many houses (low numbers).

You can see from the modern map below how the area south of Peel Street has changed.

Google Maps

Chapel Street 1889

St Kilda Junction ca1900

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prahran,_Victoria
Sand & McDougall Directory ca 1886
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Kilda_Junction