The Bells of Gulf Station: pioneer farmers in the Yarra Valley 1850-1950
This book tells the story of the author's Scottish ancestors who, in 1839, arrived at Port Phillip on the David Clark as part of the first shipload of free settlers to migrate directly from Britain to the new settlement. It follows their early pioneering of the Scottish farming community at Kangaroo Ground, and later expansion to become the owners of Gulf Station, a large pastoral run in the Yarra Valley, in the 1850s.
There, most of the third generation of Bell descendants would live out their lives without having children of their own, until, after a century, the property passed into other hands. In the 1970s, it was bought by the State of Victoria, to be managed by the National Trust. The unusual diversity and state of preservation of the original buildings and infrastructure at Gulf Station make it perhaps the best example of a mid-19th century farmstead in Australia.

Alan Bell is a retired agricultural scientist who grew up at Pine Grove, Kongwak, the farm to which his grandfather, Frank Bell, relocated from Gulf Station in 1911. He, his sister and several older cousins are now the only direct descendants of the Gulf Station Bells who remember visiting the old property and its residents in the 1940s and early 1950s.