By Henry Drury
You barely need to scratch the surface of an Australian locality to find the involvement of a pub. Malvern is no different. In 1853, English barrister Charles Skinner bought and sub-divided 84 acres of land on Glenferrie Road, south of Gardiners Creek and advertised this sub-division as the Malvern Hill Estate. It was named after the Malvern Hills spa country in England where his forbears had lived, but apparently no one really noticed. Not at least until he built a pub on the northwest corner of the present-day Glenferrie and Malvern Roads, naming it the Malvern Hill Hotel, cementing for evermore the hotel name as the title for the area.
Like Kew at the northern end of Glenferrie Road, Malvern at the southern end by the 1880s became the site for “fine residences on generous allotments”. These residences included such mansions as Stonnington, originally the home of John Wagner (founding partner of Cobb and Co) and later to be the Victorian Governor’s residence, notably giving the name Stonnington to the amalgamated municipalities of Prahran and Malvern in 1994.
Stonnington now describes itself as “a city of quality and diversity”. It was into this diverse community somewhat noted for producing Prime Ministers (Menzies and Holt), Treasurers and sundry past and present State and Commonwealth government functionaries, that Malvern Rotary received its charter on 27 May 1959. The Club celebrated the 60th anniversary of this event appropriately in May 2019 with High Tea at The Gables, a stately late Victorian, Queen Anne-style Malvern mansion.
Community service is one of the Club’s great strengths. The list is long, but an early notable example is the funding in 1983 of the first Mobile Diabetes Testing Unit (caravan), which won two State Government Community Awards and a Rotary International Significant Achievement Award. Staying in the medical zone, the Club has funded equipment for palliative care for home visits and assisted with the provision of “care packs” for inpatients in the Mental health Units at the Alfred and Box Hill Hospitals.
The Club received a District Community Service Award for funding the re-building of a Children’s Day Centre and has had on-going relationships with charities including Very Special Kids, DIK, the SES, Vision Australia, the police and the Salvos, once again, just picking a few at random.
Youth and International Service also figure strongly at the Club, including a hands-on volunteer tour to Cambodia in support of the “World of Difference” program.
Malvern Rotary is an energetic and very active club in the community and President Jenny La Marca is proud to quote its website in saying: “We will work with groups and organisations of all sizes to achieve even more.”