The History of Croydon, Victoria

Croydon, a suburb in Melbourne’s outer east within the City of Maroondah, has evolved from pastoral grasslands and timber country into a thriving residential and commercial centre. Its story reflects broader patterns of Indigenous dispossession, colonial expansion, agricultural enterprise, and suburban growth driven by transport infrastructure.

The land now known as Croydon formed part of the traditional Country of the Wurundjeri people, speakers of the Woiwurrung language and members of the Kulin Nation. Early European accounts note that the area was not a major campsite, largely because it lacked a reliable permanent water supply, though the broader district was used for hunting and seasonal resource gathering. The arrival of Europeans rapidly disrupted these patterns through land clearance, fencing, introduced livestock and diseases.

European pastoral activity began in the late 1830s. William Turner, who arrived from England in 1837, is widely regarded as the first European settler in the district. From around 1840 he held the Western Port run, which stretched across country from present-day Mitcham toward the Dandenong Ranges. Other pastoral runs in the vicinity included Thomson’s Warrandyte Run, the Anderson’s Creek Run and portions of Gardiners Run. The open, level terrain covered in coarse silvery-white grass known as "White Top" (often identified as Danthonia pallida) earned the district the name White Flats. Early settlers used the land primarily for cattle grazing.

Closer settlement accelerated in the 1860s. Parcels of land were surveyed in 1868, and the first permanent dwellings—often simple wattle-and-daub structures—appeared. An earlier focus of activity lay a short distance east at Brushy Creek (named for the tea-tree along its banks), which developed shops, blacksmiths, a hotel and churches from the mid-1850s and served as a stopping place on routes toward the goldfields. Cobb & Co coaches reached Brushy Creek by 1874, improving mail and passenger links with Melbourne.

The decisive transformation came with the railway. On 1 December 1882 the line from Hawthorn (later extended from Camberwell) reached Lilydale, and a station was opened on land formerly owned by Gregory Lacey. Initially named Warrandyte—because it lay within Warrandyte Parish—the name caused confusion with the established township of Warrandyte several kilometres to the north. After community consultation, the station was renamed Croydon on 1 August 1884. Lacey, whose wife Sarah came from Croydon in Surrey, England, is credited with suggesting the name (preferable, local tradition holds, to naming it after his own Essex hometown of Steeple Bumpstead). The railway reduced travel time to Melbourne to roughly an hour and a half and immediately stimulated land speculation and commercial development.

James Hewish emerged as a key early entrepreneur. From the mid-1880s he established a home, general store, newsagency, butcher’s shop, orchard and the Temperance Hotel (later known as the Wine Hall) near the station on what became Main Street. Other businesses followed—bootmakers, saddlers and the like—and a post office opened in December 1883. Timber-getting remained important; cleared trees supplied firewood that was loaded onto trains bound for Melbourne, sometimes in large daily quantities. Fruit-growing expanded rapidly, with cherries, apples, pears and peaches becoming notable local products, mirroring orchard districts further west such as Doncaster.

By 1900 Croydon was described as a timber district with a population of about 270. A public hall (Croydon Hall, 1908) and mechanics’ institute appeared, and the first banking agency opened in 1909. Croydon was officially proclaimed and gazetted as a town in 1912. After the First World War, subdivision accelerated. The Croydon Market began operating in 1920. Electrification of the railway reached Croydon from Ringwood in 1924 and continued to Lilydale the following year, further enhancing the area’s attractiveness for residential development and commuting.

Local government followed population growth. The district had long formed part of the Shire of Lillydale (established 1872). As Croydon became the most densely settled portion of the shire and lost its purely rural character, ratepayers successfully pressed for independence. The Shire of Croydon was incorporated on 24 May 1961 and was proclaimed a city a decade later. In 1994, as part of statewide local-government reform, the City of Croydon was amalgamated with the City of Ringwood to form the City of Maroondah.

Throughout the twentieth century Croydon continued its shift from orchards and mixed farming toward a suburban residential and retail centre. Main Street remained the commercial heart, evolving from early general stores and a hotel into a diverse shopping and hospitality strip. The railway station was rebuilt in the 1980s, and bus interchanges were later improved. Post-war housing development, improved roads and the growth of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs absorbed former farmland, though pockets of parkland and the nearby Dandenong Ranges continued to shape the area’s character as a gateway to more elevated, scenic country.

Today Croydon retains visible links to its past: street names such as Lacey, the layout of Main Street near the railway, and community institutions that trace their origins to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its history illustrates the successive layers of occupation—Indigenous custodianship, pastoral runs, closer settlement, railway-driven township formation, and modern suburban consolidation—that have shaped many of Melbourne’s outer-eastern localities. From White Flats to a well-connected residential suburb, Croydon’s development mirrors the wider transformation of Victoria’s rural fringes into parts of a major metropolitan region.

Craig Payne is a University lecturer, runner, cynic, researcher, skeptic, forum admin, woo basher, clinician, rabble-rouser, blogger and a dad.