Syndal

Syndal, formerly a residential suburb and now a locality, is 18 km south-east of Melbourne between Mount Waverley and Glen Waverley. The name was given to the locality when the railway line to Glen Waverley was opened in 1930, and the name for the station to be built at Blackburn Road was undecided. The Mulgrave shire president persuaded the Victorian Railways that Syndal was appropriate, it having been the name of a model farm and orchard owned by Judge Sir Redmond Barry between 1868 and his death in 1880.

Syndal remained a farming community until housing for returned service personnel was built with assistance of the War Service Homes Commission after World War II. Land was cheap even if services rudimentary: kerosene lamps lit the railway station in 1950, despite the representations of the Syndal Progress Association which had been formed two years before. In the late 1950s Syndal had a primary school (1955) and a technical school (1959), a progress association hall (1957), and the cool store as a reminder of the area's receding orchards. In the next decade two more primary schools (Syndal North and South), and a high school were opened. Wesley College established a second campus near Syndal in the mid-1960s.

By 1970 Syndal was a mature suburb described as having a good shopping centre, three State primary schools, a high school, a technical school and an indoor pool and squash court.

There is a shopping centre in Blackburn Road south of High Street Road and a smaller group of shops and other facilities near the railway station. The Catholic church has a primary school and there are Baptist and Uniting churches. Syndal primary school closed in 1992. Syndal technical school became a secondary college which closed in 1993 and the high school was incorporated into an adjacent primary school.

The Syndal railway station was expanded with a four-level car park in 2014-15.