Lyndhurst

Lyndhurst is a modern suburb 37 km south-east of central Melbourne, between Dandenong and Cranbourne. It has a rural history dating back to the early 1850s when the survey parish was named Lyndhurst after Baron Lyndhurst (John Singleton Copley, 1772-1863), Lord Chancellor of England on three occasions, the last ending in 1841.

The locality was first known as Bald Hills, a place of scattered farm settlements which depended on Dandenong and Cranbourne for commerce and local administration. There were Catholic and Anglican (1854) schools, the latter becoming the Lyndhurst state primary school (1888). The Lyndhurst South school was at Skye, a few kilometres to the south-west. Lyndhurst railway station on the line to South Gippsland (1888) did not attract a village settlement, although there was a post office (1867-1976) and a hotel recorded in the Victorian municipal directory early in the twentieth century. There was also a Presbyterian church on Western Port Highway and it continues.

In the late 1920s electricity supply was connected and the PMG built a radio-transmission station (1928) at Fagan's Hill.

Urban development spread from Dandenong and Cranbourne in the 1980s, and Vic Urban created a new suburb, Lynbrook, east of the railway line. This was subtracted from Lyndhurst, along with an industrial area in the north-west which was added to Dandenong South. The railway station, outside the urban areas, was confined to freight until being closed in 2002. The primary school on the Western Port Highway was replaced by a new set of buildings in the middle of Lyndhurst in 2011 (596 pupils, 2014); Lyndhurst secondary college (c1990) is in Cranbourne North (757 pupils, 2014).

Lyndhurst's census populations have been: