Rosebery, Hawthorn hotbed of radicalism during Dr Jim Cairns' ownership, sells: Title Tattle
Rosebery, the Hawthorn house remembered as the long-time home to former deputy prime minister Jim Cairns and his wife, Gwen, has been sold this week for the first time in almost three decades.
With impressive rose bushes on its front turning circle, the four-bedroom house, set on a 1,658-square-metre Wattle Road holding, was being offered for private sale at $3,475,000 through Kay & Burton agent Matt Davis who listed it last October.
The Cairns couple owned it between 1956 and 1981, first as joint owners, according to the land title, then as tenants in common from 1976. It was unencumbered from its purchase through to 1972, and then again between 1976 and its 1981 sale.
It last traded in 1983 for $280,000 with the Cairns sale being $225,000.
Cairns, who had a lead role in organising the 1970 anti-Vietnam War moratorium protests, was treasurer and deputy prime minister in the Whitlam government in the early 1970s.
The 1880s Victorian home was the bustling campaign headquarters throughout the Labor left-winger's career. He was already a member of parliament when he moved from Berkeley Grove, East Brighton to Wattle Road, having beaten the grouper, Stan Keon, for the seat of Yarra in the 1955 election.
"We had as many as 500 people in the back garden of 21 Wattle Road, sitting on the grass, talking away – all day Sunday, once a year," the late Cairns once recounted.
In a late 1980s interview the former member for the western suburbs seat of Lalor, when asked had he ever moved into the electorate, advised: “Oh no. Gwen [his wife] wouldn't move an inch to live in the electorate.”
They married in 1932, after which he moved on from a career in the police force to university academia life to politics.
The couple finally moved after 25 years to Narre Warren East in the early 1980s to a rural acreage.
Jim Cairns was born in Carlton in 1914, and his early years were spent on a dairy farm north of Sunbury.
Gwen died in 2000 and Jim in 2003.
Wattle Road, first known as Weinberg Road, is an early street in Hawthorn and marks the location of a farming settlement established by a group of German immigrants in the 1850s. Rosebery was reportedly constructed by the Vogt family.