The Beginning
In 1852 Walter Russell Hall came with his brother Thomas to Sydney, Australia from humble origins in Herefordshire, England. Walter quickly immersed himself in the Victorian goldfields, but initially had little success. He became an agent for Cobb & Co, the horse-drawn coach line of Australian history and folklore, running a service between Ballarat and Melbourne. In 1861, Hall and partners took over the firm and made it a great success. Hall married Melbourne-born Eliza Rowden Kirk in 1874 and they lived at Potts Point in Sydney.
The Hall brothers joined a syndicate to develop Queensland’s Mt. Morgan mine, which was rich in gold and copper. The mine yielded abundant wealth and Walter became a major shareholder and Director.
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Frederick McCubbin
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Frederick McCubbin
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The Halls were childless and upon Walter’s death in 1911, Eliza was persuaded by her executor and financial advisor Richard G Casey to use a portion of his legacy to establish a million-pound charitable trust.
The Walter and Eliza Hall Trust was to be used for the relief of poverty, especially among women and children, the advancement of education, and the general benefit of the community, with half of the distributable income to be spent in New South Wales and a quarter each in Victoria and Queensland.
Casey organised for a small portion of the Trust's annual income to be used to found an institute of medical research, the first in Australia, encouraged by Harry Allen, the Dean of Medicine at The University of Melbourne. The vision was for an Institute that ‘shall above all things devote itself to Medical Research….in a broad and comprehensive spirit. The Trustees especially hope that the Institute will be the birthplace of discoveries rendering signal service to mankind in the prevention and removal of disease and the mitigation of suffering.’
In April 1915, the Melbourne Hospital agreed to provide a home for the new institute in its recently rebuilt quarters in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne. The directorship was to be offered to Dr Gordon C Mathison, Sub-Director of the Clinical Laboratories at the Melbourne Hospital. Mathison, who had studied with Professor E H Starling at University College as a Beit Fellow, was on leave at the time, serving in the Hospital unit of Australia’s Expeditionary Force. Tragically, he suffered fatal wounds a few days later in the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli.
Through the endowment from The Walter and Eliza Hall Trust, a third floor and a basement with animal houses were added to the new Pathological Block of the Hospital. The new research premises were completed in 1916 and named The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Research in Pathology and Medicine. Harry Allen was appointed Honorary Director but permanent appointments were put on hold until the end of the war. During the construction of their own laboratories, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories used the Institute as its home and began the preparation of vaccines and sera there.
