History

Latrobe Golf Club is located on one of Melbourne’s most historic sites. Melbourne was first settled in 1835, and in June 1840 Thomas Wills purchased, for £3784, 176 acres (70 ha) of land which formed a rough semi-circle between Darebin Creek, its junction with the Yarra River and the Yarra River itself. The land takes in all of what is now Latrobe Golf Club, plus Farm Road, Lucerne Crescent, the Tower Hotel and bordered on the west by what is now Como Street.

Almost straight away, Wills began clearing the property and landscaping the hill that overlooked it in preparation for building a mansion. ‘Lucerne’, as he called it, was the grandest home of its day. Proudly sitting atop the rise where the golf club upper car park is now, it was made of bluestone and hand-made bricks from one of the colony’s first kilns. The interior walls were lath and plaster with much stained woodwork and an imposing staircase. The photo below shows the house as it was around the end of the 19th century.  

Wills was one of early Melbourne’s most honoured citizens. He was the son of a convict father and free-settler mother, but became a successful business man, and moved to the newly-settled Melbourne from Sydney in 1840. He became a Justice of the Peace, a magistrate and was on a number of boards. For several years, Lucerne became a popular meeting place for the nouveau riche of early Melbourne. His wife also was a respected lady of society. Wills’ nephew-in-law, H C A (Colden) Harrison, wrote of his aunt that she was ’a true grande-dame and a splendid hostess’ and that ’under her guidance, balls, parties, picnics and musical evenings became a feature of life at Lucerne’. (Harrison was one of the founders of Australian football, with his cousin, Thomas Wentworth Wills, son of Thomas, the builder of Lucerne.)

Charles La Trobe, after whom the club is named, was appointed Superintendent of Port Phillip District in 1839, and subsequently became Victoria’s first Lieutenant Governor when it became a separate colony in 1851. There is conjecture about Governor La Trobe’s link with Lucerne. Some writers have called it his summer retreat and said he was a regular visitor; others claim he was seldom, if ever, there. However, he was certainly a friend of Wills, so it is highly likely that he would have visited Lucerne. The name of Wills’ property may well have been influenced by La Trobe’s Swiss background (La Trobe spent much time in Switzerland before coming to Australia, and later returned there) — and surrounding streets are also named after Swiss locations.

Wills and his wife separated in the mid 1840s — Wills bought land across the river (on which he built Willsmere, a very large mansion), while his wife continued to live at Lucerne.

Over the next 80 years or so, the property passed through a number of hands, and much of it was broken up. Lucerne deteriorated, but it was purchased in 1920 by Major Percy Lay, a World War I hero. Lay retained the property until his death in 1955, when it was bought by Latrobe Golf Club.

In the two decades between the world wars, Major Lay sold off various portions of the Lucerne estate, eventually retaining only the crumbling homestead and 24 acres. The most notable purchaser of Lay’s land (from Latrobe’s point of view) was a Mr J Ford Paterson, who bought 50 acres in the mid 1930s and leased the land to a group of businessmen who built a nine-hole public golf course. The businessmen were led by W E Spencer and E M Hall, who formed a company called Latrobe Golf Investments Pty Ltd.
There are conflicting reports of when golf was first played on the site — some say as early as 1934 — but by 1938 the businessmen had opened a course under the name Latrobe and the public was being invited in newspaper advertisements to come and play. In the same year an old house at 1 Roemer Crescent was acquired, and this became the first ’clubhouse’.

A newspaper report of the time, provided by Spencer, was not just colourfully optimistic about the future of the course but blatantly inaccurate. It read in part: ’The site is on a stretch of land with a lovely unspoiled river frontage of about two miles, surrounded by magnificent old oaks and elms planted by Governor La Trobe. The land is probably as rich as any in Victoria and will provide a base for greens and fairways unsurpassed anywhere in abundance and texture of turf.