Figsby & Fareham hh (Extant) 47-49 Robe Street

Fareham was the name first proposed for the municipality of St Kilda, yet discarded in favour of the more popularly known ‘St Kilda’. Figsby is named for an early tenant, Henry Figsby Young. He and his business partner, Thomas Joshua Jackson, were born in Dublin and related through their mothers’ families. Henry Figsby Young Senior had been licensee of the Elsternwick Hotel (39) in 1858 and the Freemasons’ Arms Hotel in North Melbourne in 1867. That year, Figsby Junior became licensee of Sparrow’s Hotel, St Kilda in partnership with Jackson. In 1875 the partners sold this lease and took over the licence of the Princes’ Bridge Hotel, corner Swanston and Flinders Street, Melbourne. Together, for thirty years they successfully ran the hotel that still famously bears their names.

The important early journalist and novelist Marcus Clarke (1846-81), lived at 49 Robe Street and wrote part of his great novel, For the Term of his Natural Life there. It was published as a serial over 1870-71. Paul de Serville wryly describes Clarke as a ‘gentleman bohemian’.

Albert Tucker (1914-99) and his wife Joy Hester (1920-60) were two of Australia’s most fascinating, significant and influential artists. In 1944, they left East Melbourne where they had been living, to look after Hester’s difficult, ill and deteriorating mother in Elwood. Hester was heavily pregnant. She felt frustrated in not being able to continue indulging in the affairs she was conducting behind Tucker’s back (and there is doubt that the father was Tucker). It was all too much, and in December, the couple moved out in search for somewhere more convenient to live.

About 1980, after probably 40 years as boarding houses, the two houses were renovated by Urban Spaces Pty. Ltd, architects and builders, of which a couple of years later I became a director. Then the rear balconies were removed to capture more south light.