East Melbourne, Grey Street 114

Pre-fabricated timber house

This house was one of two similar pre-fabricated houses imported from New Zealand as an investment by Henry Cooke. Cooke, as well as being a land speculator, was the founder of The Age newspaper and an importer of paper products, anything from religious tracts to wallpaper. He was the son-in-law of the Rev. John Ham, Melbourne's first Baptist minister, which may have given rise to the story that the house was brought to Melbourne by Rev. Ham. However Rev. Ham arrived in Melbourne in 1842, moved to Sydney in 1847 where he died in 1852, before the first land sales in East Melbourne. However Mrs. Ham did return to Melbourne and lived in the house for a year. The site was just around the corner from Cooke's own home, now replaced by the Freemasons' Hospital. Cooke later transferred the house to his brother-in-law C.J. Ham, real estate agent and mayor of Melbourne in 1881. Much later, in 1917 it passed to S.T. Marchant, pioneer Melbourne optician whose daughters still lived there into the 1960s. The house was demolished c.1964 to make way for the Unitarian Church.