Best 48 Real Estate Agents In Templestowe [2025]

Templestowe Suburb Overview

Templestowe” redirects here. For the Victorian Legislative Council Province, please see Templestowe Province.

Templestowe is a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 17 km north-east from Melbourne’s Central Business District. Its Local Government Area is the City of Manningham. At the 2011 Census, Templestowe had a population of 16,484.

The suburb has a number of natural attractions, including ample parklands, contrasted with large, modern shopping malls.

Templestowe is located in the north-eastern area of Melbourne. Templestowe is bordered by the Yarra River, King Street, Victoria Street, Blackburn Road and some parks.

Gentle, rolling hills extend from east of the Yarra River flood plains, along Templestowe Road for seven km, to the north-east. The altitude of the plain above sea level is 50 m, and the topography is subdued and mostly flat;the hills are just below 60 m, the slopes rounded and there are several forrested gullies.

Since the Southern Ocean sea-level stabilised 3000 years ago, the rivers of the Port Phillip Sunkland ceased eroding their channels and have been depositing an alluvium of silt, clay and sand in the lower reaches of the flood plains. Over the last 2000 years the slowly coursing river widened the build-up to form a series of meanders. In Warrandyte the river flows through a steep sided gorge for a distance of 26 km, forming an “antecedent” stream: the absence of steps or high river terraces on long spurs inside meander bends indicates some relatively recent deposition. In the suburb itself, at the confluence with the Plenty River, the valley opens up into “wide flood plains surrounded by undulating country of tertiary geology.”

Degradation of the soils in the steep slopes at the river’s edge has been exacerbated over the last century by unsustainable agricultural processes, deforestation and the introduction of rabbits. Following the 2006 drought, the community newspaper had reported several times that the population was only brought under control in 2007, 12 years after baiting programs were begun and that more conservation funding is needed to halt the loss of vegetation along the river. Most of the surrounding area has been cleared for agricultural and orchard use, although an “urban forest” exists in the densely populated rural-residential areas. There is a wide diversity of growth within the flood plain.

Most of the area corresponds to the climate recorded in Melbourne, though some variation has been recorded in the hills to the north-east.

A report from The Argus in 1923 gives rare insight to interest in the area. It had been recently accepted that “when the coastal plain is overweighted the back country rises” due to inexorable forces moulding the surface of the Earth and the so-called “Templestowe anticline ” was studied as representative of microscopic faulting, which accommodated this elevation of the eastern suburbs. It was observed that the new reserve grounds established along it would become a ” Mecca ” for geologists:

The land to the east of Melbourne was acquired by The Crown, early in the 19th century, during the Stawellian timocracy;the Wurundjeri people, who inhabited the Yarra River Valley and its tributaries for 500 years, were granted “permissive occupancy” of Coranderrk Station, near Healesville and forcibly resettled. Extensive trading networks had been established with the predominantly British colonists prior to pastoralism in 1835. George Langhorne, a missionary in Port Phillip from 1836 to 1839, noting in his recourse to the Colony of New South Wales, that a substantial monetary trade was well established in 1838: “A considerable number of the blacks obtain food and clothing for themselves by shooting the Menura pheasant or Bullun-Bullun for the sake of the tails, which they sell to the whites.” The increasingly rapid acquisition of guns, the lure of exotic foods and a societal emphasis on maintaining kin relationships meant they weren’t attracted to the mission. According to John Green, the Inspector of Aboriginal Stations in Victoria and later manager of Corranderrk, the people were able to achieve a “sustainable” degree of economic independence: “In the course of one week or so they will all be living in huts instead of willams;they have also during that time made as many rugs, which has enabled them to buy boots, hats, coats etc., and some of them even bought horses.”

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