A story that is often repeated about this place is that a staircase to the second floor was omitted by mistake by the builder in 1865, and this necessitated the addition of an external staircase until one could be accommodated inside. This tale does not, however, take into account the personality of that builder, George Bollen (1826-1892). Bollen was multi-talented, meticulous, and above all unorthodox. As the radical design of his home at “Hawthorn Farm” would later show, he was not afraid to flout architectural norms. His plan for this Gawler Street building maximised the interior space on the second floor of the structure while he constructed the cantilevered balconies according to his own ingenious design. Later occupants retrofitted a more conventional floorplan, as also happened at “Hawthorn Farm.”
A second story one is likely to hear about this building is that it once housed an undertaking business. In the nineteenth century it was not unusual for carpenters to extend their coffin-making trade into full undertaking services, but Bollen was already overstretched as a barrel-maker (cooper) and bridge-builder in his early career, and there is no evidence that he ever took on work as an undertaker. In any case, he never owned this site, but built the house as a shop and residence expressly for mother-of-three Louisa Starling (1817-1893).
Louisa was the eldest child of Captain Edward Pickering (1781-1851), a prominent agriculturalist and explorer who had emigrated from Lincolnshire to the Swan River Colony (Perth) in 1829, as part of an expedition led by Captain Hugh McKay. Louisa married sea captain William Edward Starling (born 1818) in Fremantle in 1843, and in 1847 she made the trip to Adelaide aboard the brig River Chief in style, enjoying the privilege of travelling in a cabin with her infant daughter while William captained the boat.
Things started to go wrong during the voyage, when the River Chief collided with the Martha, a whaling barque loaded with 800 barrels of whale oil. This was not considered to be a major incident, but it coincided with the time when Edward gave up his sea-going career. He invested in two houses, both with attached shops, in Mount Barker, and the family started up a general store in the southern end of Walker Street.
The Starlings clearly had money worries, since William’s application for a storekeeper’s license was opposed by Mount Barker’s traders on the basis that he was a man of “no capital.” Yet, unaccountably, in 1850 William committed to buy the well-known Sturt Hotel in Grenfell Street, Adelaide. Not surprisingly, this severely over-extended his finances. He put both Mount Barker houses up for lease to raise some cash, but after only three months as a city innkeeper he was jailed for debt. A forced “sherrif’s sale” saw the liquidation of the Mount family’s stock-in-trade at Mount Barker, consisting of “grocery, drapery, potatoes, crockery, glass, &c., &c.”
Two months after Louisa moved to South Australia her mother died in Perth. In 1851, in the midst of William’s insolvency case, her father also died. Then William walked out and left town, reportedly with another woman. Louisa was now a “widow,” 24 years old, with three daughters under the age of six. She resumed trading at a line of cheaper dwellings below Mann Street, colloquially named “Resurrection Row” for an early burial ground nearby. Her long-term prospects were poor, but after more than a decade of hard graft her luck finally changed. In the early 1860s the land at 66-68 Gawler Street was placed in a trust for the lifetime benefit of her and her daughters, presumably by her well-connected Western Australian family. She commissioned George Bollen to build her this Gawler Street house, with six rooms, a shop, a cellar, and a single-storey cottage to the side.
Louisa ran her general store here until 1873 when she announced her retirement, thanking the public for their liberal support over the past 26 years. She handed over the shop to her son-in-law, Philip William Jones (husband of her youngest daughter, Selina), who opened a menswear store; later they all moved to Keswick. The building has since had a variety of functions, including the tailoring business of Sydney Cope in the 1890s and the Claremont Tea Rooms, which ran from the 1930s to the 1950s. The building’s early identity as “Mrs. Starling’s shop” has been all but forgotten.
As for George Bollen, he became Mount Barker’s district clerk. He also honed his skills as an orator by performing a prodigious amount of lay preaching at the Methodist Church. He had a longstanding interest in homeopathic medicine, and ran a homeopathic clinic at Mount Barker, mostly free of charge, before travelling to the United States in 1872 to gain a Bachelor of Medicine at Hahnemann Medical College of Chicago, Illinois (which upon his return was greeted with considerable scepticism by the Medical Board of South Australia). After moving to Port Adelaide in 1874 to practice as a doctor he gained an interest in local politics and was duly elected Mayor of Port Adelaide in 1882. One of his more unusual decisions was to ban alcohol from a Mayoral banquet, in line with his Temperance beliefs.
Bollen had planned to retire in Mount Barker at his innovative new mansion at the top of what is now Bollen Road, but he died suddenly in 1892, aged sixty-six. News of his demise was met with widespread shock and grief, and flagposts across Port Adelaide flew at half mast. His obituarists remembered him as kind, generous and witty, and “an independent and original thinker, scorning to tread the paths of conventional dogma.” His wife Rebecca pre-deceased him. He was survived by six of their nine children.
The District Council of Mount Barker Heritage Survey (2004) commented of Mrs Starling’s shop:
[It] demonstrates an excellent two-storey corner shop design with chamfered corner and large windows. The building also has an outstanding construction, demonstrated by the stonework (currently painted), the large shop windows with cambered arches, original timber detailing to doors and windows, and the complex internal construction including radial joists to the upper floor. During the 1860s, the building had a particularly striking and individual appearance with its cantilevered balcony, and although it has lost that balcony, the shop form and construction retains a relatively high integrity.
The sketch below is taken from the same 2004 heritage survey by Anna Pope and Claire Booth.
In the photo next to that, taken c. 1895, the shop can be seen on the right, with its gallery-style verandahs and signage for Sydney Cope, tailor. Lower-storey awnings have been added. On the left is Gray’s Inn; H. Freeman’s “Shoeing Smith” sign is visible in the saleyards below the hotel. (Click on photos to enlarge.)
