Rosedale
Postcode: 4674
Off the Lowmead Road is the Rosedale turnoff, the one kilometre detour into the small rural centre of Rosedale is worthwhile, the township has a friendly country hotel and a general store which boasts a garden model railway. In the park there is an excellent amenities block with wheelchair access. By the electric rail line is a large water tower, a reminder of the steam era.
Rosedale is a pastoral and agricultural town 184 km east of Melbourne via the Princes Highway. Once a staging post on the Port Albert to Sale coach run, it is now the administrative centre of the Rosedale shire which extends to the east and includes Ninety Mile Beach.
The earliest European inhabitant in the district is thought to have been a man named Blind Joe who lived in a hut on the Latrobe River. The town is named after and built upon the site of a station owned by David Parry-Okedon, who, in 1843, called his run Rosedale after his wife, Rosalie.
The area was once part of the Holey Plain grazing run, owned by the Curlewis brothers. Edward Cooke, who emigrated to Australia in 1837 and purchased a station at Omeo in the early 1840s, used the run as a holding station for the livestock which he drove to Port Albert for shipment to Van Dieman’s Land. He later leased the property and his son built an impressive homestead with a four-tiered tower on the site in 1889. Cooke’s descendants still live in the district.