The Sumners of Stony Park
06th September 2026
By Anthony O'Donnell
Maie Casey was an author, artist and aviator. The National Portrait Gallery adds “chatelaine” to that list. She was married to Richard Casey, a baron, Liberal politician and Governor-General. She was also the granddaughter of Theodotus Sumner. Her memoir, An Australian Story, recounts her many childhood visits to “Stony Park”, the old Sumner mansion in Brunswick East. In the 1850s, Theodotus Sumner acquired landholdings straddling the Merri Creek, south of Arthurton Road. 120 acres in all, it stretched from Nicholson St in Brunswick East to St Georges Rd in Northcote. A year after Sumner’s death in 1884, the family erected Stony Park, a grand mansion on the east side of what’s now King St, Brunswick East, where the Brunswick Electrical Terminal Station stands. The mansion replaced the original sprawling house on the same site which had been destroyed by fire.
Casey never knew the original house, only the “new” house where her grandmother Sarah lived on for over four decades after Theodotus’ death. A visitor in the years around the turn of the twentieth century, Casey gives a detailed, but not entirely favourable, description of the mansion as “formidable British Italianate…cold and pretentious.” Lacking proportion, the interiors were “heavy and ornate, without grace. Stony Park took its name from the Merri Creek which bisected the estate. Casey describes the creek “moodily” winding “between flat banks and little ravines … overhung by eucalypts and willows, it could be forded over slippery stones … Paddocks were enclosed by walls of boulders; dark stone houses built in the pale swards of native grass.” Although she never liked the house, she recalls the “the garden and the wilderness … a continual delight … the flute-like gurgle of the magpie … the laughter, cynical and rough, of the kookaburra.”
Image credits: left, Stony Park, T.J. Sumner, Esq.,1866, photo. Right: Stony Park
The estate east and west of the creek was subdivided in the 1920s. The eastern portion is a residential enclave, still known as Sumner Estate. Its compact grid is upset only slightly by Sumner and Auburn Avenues each sashaying for short distances. The curve of the former probably marks the original course of the Merri: the old meander now reclaimed as wetlands. Family names still mark out the old Sumner landholding: Rupert, Noel and Peers Streets are in Brunswick East; Winifred, Ryan, Osborne, Traill and Nash Streets are on the Northcote side. An exception is Lowan Street, named after the Sumner coachman. Old man Sumner is immortalised in both Sumner Street (Brunswick East) and Sumner Avenue (Northcote).
After the subdivision, the mansion was used as St Joseph’s Marist Brothers College, until the school relocated to Barkly St, Fitzroy North, in the late 1930s. The house also served as a migrant reception centre immediately after World War II, then was acquired by the State Electricity Commission and demolished. The demolition, recalls Casey, seemed to take years, proceeding “slowly, like something being eaten by ants.” Casey revisited the site, presumably around the time of writing her book, which was published in 1962, recording that:
“The jungle has closed over it now — a jungle of concrete, of steel masts, of electrical transformers. The paddocks are filled with neat streets … The Merri Creek remains as wilful and untidy as ever, ducking under small bridges, deep enough below the level of the ground in most places to receive all sorts of awkward rubbish.”
Image credit: Sumner’s Stony Park Estate Brunswick, Phoenix Press, printers.