Tolarno

This large house, occupying a prominent site on the corner of Vulture and Browning Streets, has had a long association with the medical profession. Built at the turn of the century, the building has been used as a dentist’s residence, and as a doctor’s surgery at various times in its existence.

The land on which this house stands was bought in 1882 by Joseph Darragh. He bought this 48 perch block for £120 at an auction, being land purchased under the first section of “The Victoria Bridge Land Sales Act of 1879”. Despite mortgaging the land for the large figure of £40,000, there is no evidence to suggest that Darragh constructed and building on this block. William Baynes assumed title to this land in 1891, and although he owned the block for more than ten years, he similarly did not build on it.1

Charles and Penelope Collins bought this land from Bayes in 1904. Charles Collins was a dental surgeon whose surgery was in Queen Street in the City2. Mr. and Mrs. Collins took out a bill of mortgage for £500, a month after acquiring titles to the land, and built this house. This house, named “Tolarno” was used as the Collins private residence for a few years until they sold the property in 1910.

Mrs. Bertha Cameron then bought the property. Her husband Malcolm was a medical practitioner and he utilised the premises for a doctor’s surgery. Dr. Cameron worked here until 1926, when Dr. Raymond Hayes bought the property. He maintained his medical practice in the residence for many years.

Dr. Leo Geraghty bought the practice in 1947. The property stayed in his ownership until his death in 1970, when it passed to his sons. They sold it the next year to Jin, Ninko, Jimmy and Raymond Wan. The Wans are the current owners and they maintain the house as a rental property.

Although the house is in rather poor condition today, it is considered to be one of the premier residences in the South Brisbane region3.

The main walls of horizontal boarding did however have staggered vertical grooves to imitate bonded brickwork, indicating the walls of the house may have been stained a darker colour originally.

The curved verandah roof is of corrugated iron unlike the main roof, indicating that the designer was not afraid to draw from common building material and yet still conform to a particular style. The verandah intricately follows the line of the external wall of the house stepping around a bay window below one of the gable ends and also around the corner octagonal tower. A portion of the verandah has been enclosed with casement windows and vertical boarding seemingly at an early stage of the building’s history. The remainder of the verandah still retains much of its intricate timber detailing including a skirt of vertical timber members below the eaves line supported by Art Nouveau timber fretwork brackets to each side of the verandah posts and a handrail supported by balustrading of a similar nature to the timber skirt above, but with regularly spaced diagonally crossed members between groups of verticals. The house is raised well above the ground on timber stumps and the undercroft is screened by timber battening. All of the timber below floor level is painted black reducing its visual impact in comparison to the house above. The house is surrounded by dense vegetation including some large weeping figs, which obscure much of it from busy Vulture Street. These trees have contributed greatly to what is otherwise a harsh streetscape.

1. Titles Office Records

2. Post Office Directories

3. The Courier-Mail, June 26, 1991

4. Apperly, Richard, Irving, Robert & Reynolds, Peter, A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture, (Sydney: Harper Collins, 1994)