Fitzroy Gardens and Cooks' Cottage

Deep inside the Fitzroy Gardens, there is a cottage that was shipped brick by brick from Yorkshire, England, in nineteen thirty-four. Each brick was individually numbered, packed into barrels, and transported halfway around the world along with cuttings of the original ivy. It took two hundred and fifty-three packing cases. The cottage was built in seventeen fifty-five in the village of Great Ayton, and it is marketed as Captain Cook's Cottage. But here is the thing: Captain James Cook almost certainly never lived in it.

The cottage was built by Cook's parents, James and Grace Cook. By seventeen fifty-five, young James had already left home and joined the Royal Navy. He had been gone for about ten years when his father built the house. The official name is Cooks' Cottage, with the apostrophe deliberately placed after the S, because this was the cottage of the Cooks, plural, the parents. Not the Captain. The Australian philanthropist Sir Russell Grimwade purchased the cottage and donated it to Melbourne as a centenary gift in nineteen thirty-four. Whether Cook ever set foot inside is a matter of scholarly debate, but almost certainly he visited his parents here.

Now find the Fairies' Tree. Artist Ola Cohn spent the early nineteen thirties carving a series of fairies, gnomes, koalas, kookaburras, and flying foxes into the stump of one of the garden's original red gum trees, which was over three hundred years old. In nineteen seventy-seven, when the stump was lifted for chemical treatment, workers discovered an immaculately preserved mummified brushtail possum inside the trunk, forty years dead and perfectly intact. The possum had apparently crawled inside and become trapped. It is one of the most unexpectedly eerie discoveries in Melbourne's history.