On Friday last week I headed over to the Woodlands Golf Club in Mordialloc. As a newly joined member of this golf course on the sandbelt of Melbourne, I now have a place away from home where I could meet new people, play golf and socialise whenever I want. It’s a welcoming club and I love playing the course as well as hanging out in the club house with others.
I headed over to the reception desk to pick up my new member kit but it wasn’t ready for me just yet. They were waiting for the engravers to finish my bag tag so instead they gave me this great coffee table book about the history of this course which is the only course in the area that has been on the original site for over a hundred years.
I flicked through the book and commented to the lady at the reception desk about the clothes females used to wear on the course. I marvelled at the women in the black and white photos, hair piled high in their long skirts having a hit at the turn of the 20th century.
This morning while Andrew was doing the grocery shopping, I had put a load of clothes washing on. I sat down to flick through the book and within the first few pages was introduced to a fantastic story of the owner of the land from which the course was bought from being a French Count of Castlenau (Francois Louis Nompar de Chaumont Laporte (1810-1880) who had brought out his Brazilian mistress Contessa Carolina D’Araujo Fonçeca and built a mansion in the outskirts of Melbourne in Mordialloc in the 1880s.
Back then it would have been a wild place unlike the industrial estates and wetlands it is today. You have to wonder why on earth they would leave cities like Paris to come out to….Mordialloc. The Count was an explorer, diplomat and naturalist. This is him. 👇
…and a bit of his story…
Well anyway back then, I’m sure it would have been scandalous if the couple wasn’t married but they had two sons, Charles and Edward.
The golf book mentioned that in the early years of Mordialloc history, they mentioned that there was a “Mad Count” who would harass the golfers for cigarettes on the course and that the count was Edward who was willed the estate by his mother after her death in 1902. In the evenings, the Mad Count would lock himself up in his bedroom which had steel grilles, padlocks and padded walls.
Now this story set my mind alight.
I wished I was a writer. This is the STUFF OF NOVELS.
I looked up where the house called Mayfields, would have been. It’s there no longer but at the corner or Boundary and Lower Dandenong Roads, it means it’s near the 6th hole (an annoyingly long par 5).
I imagined a dishevelled man with long hair wandering around this hole begging for cigarettes at unsuspecting golfers trying to tee off. At worse, imagine being stuck at the golf course around the 6th hole when the sun goes down only to have the wind blow through the eucalyptus leaves and dense scrub whispering “‘ave you a cigarette, monsieur?” (In a French accent. To be fair, Edward was born in Australia so there wouldn’t have been a French accent, but you know, creative licence and all that).
Anyway, I told my husband of the story when he was unpacking the groceries. He acted out the story of the Mad Count and pretended to be an annoyed golfer interrupted at half swing by a madman asking for ciggies at the tee.
I lamented that I was not a fiction writer. I would have created a story around this character who captured my imagination. A mad man on the golf course of French nobility with a mother of Brazilian heritage and an older brother, Charles who also had died in an insane asylum while the younger brother Edward, also mentally unstable locked himself up in a padded bedroom every night. Brilliant.
“Imagine writing the story from the point of view of the lawyers or the Master of Lunacy who had to determine Edward’s state of mind to determine the estate,” said Andrew to me.
“Yes, I’d write the book in the form of an epistolary – a series of letters and we get an idea of his background,” I added.
Afterwards I decided to go to the library but not my local library.
On a whim I decided to go to the Clayton Library which is a library never go to. I have no idea why I even went there. I borrowed a card and then spent time perusing the shelves when I saw this book sitting there on the top shelf beckoning me to pick it up. 👇
I liked the colourful front cover and imagine my surprise when I read the back.
OMG. I was FLOORED.
This book was a fictionalised account of the very story that was mentioned in passing in the Woodlands Golf Book.
Look at the first page!
The book was written as I had imagined the story to have been written by author Caroline Petit.
I had to borrow the book. It was simply too freaky not to. How can a story like this enter my life and then, on a whim, go to a library I never go to or belong to, find a book on the very same topic?
To make it even more weird, Edward had died on the same date of my birthday.
….and it’s freaky that we will be teeing off from the 6th hole next week at our Nine & Dine Event.
….and to top it off, the person who got me back into golf is also called Caroline – same name as the author of the book. Indeed even the same initials CP. In fact, the surname of the author has the first three letters of the surname of my friend.
Now I’m going to regale the story of the Mad Count when I play golf and get to the 6th hole and warn my playing partners to be aware of that ghost of the insane man asking for cigarettes. 🤣
More reading?
https://localhistory.kingston.vic.gov.au/articles/51
[…] Afterwards, I went to the office to pick up my new member kit and ended up recounting to the lady at the reception, the story of the history of the old house that used to be on the 7th Hole in the 1880s (a book review that I’ll publish in the next month will go into this story because it is a major and unbelievable coincidence that happened in my life recently). I wrote about it in Eerie Coincidences. […]