Country Houses of Tasmania: Behind the Closed Doors of Our Finest Private Colonial Estates

Country Houses of Tasmania

Country Houses of Tasmania Behind the closed doors of our finest private colonial estates

Photographs by Alice Bennett Text by Georgia Warner

First published in 2009 Copyright © Alice Bennett and Georgia Warner 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Bennett, Alice. Country houses of Tasmania : behind the closed doors of our finest private colonial estates / Alice Bennett, Georgia Warner. ISBN: 9781741756524 (hbk.) Bibliography. Country homes--Tasmania. Historic buildings--Tasmania. Tasmania--History. Other Authors/Contributors: Warner, Georgia. 728.3709946 Designed and typeset by Stephen Smedley, Tonto Design Printed in Singapore by Imago Colour reproduction by Splitting Image, Clayton, Victoria 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Thank you to every one of the amazing home owners who have helped make this book possible, and who made it so enjoyable along the way. Thanks especially to Michael and Susie Warner, Sandy Gray and Richard and Sue Bennett.

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Contents 1 2 10 18 26 34 44 52 60 68 76 84 92 100 108 114 124 132 142 148 160 168 174 182 190 198 208 216

Introduction Beaufront Belgrove Belmont Bentley Peppers Calstock Cambria Cheshunt Dalness Douglas Park Dunedin Egleston Ellenthorpe Hall Exton House Forcett House High Peak Highfield Hollow Tree Lake House Mona Vale Old WesleyDale Quorn Hall Summerhome Valleyfield, Epping Forest Valleyfield, New Norfolk Vaucluse View Point Further reading

Introduction You are usually getting warm when you spot the cluster of exotic trees—the towering oaks, liquidambars, chestnuts, elms, poplars and pines. Look closely and you might spy chimneys soaring within. Or, if you’re lucky, you might find yourself driving along a deserted back road of rural Tasmania, only for an imposing Georgian mansion to appear from almost nowhere and take your breath away. Tasmania is blessed with a rich cultural heritage. Lesser known than some of the state’s famous convict-built icons are the colonial mansions that were constructed by the early settlers who braved this wild and untamed land. As these adventurers laid the foundations of Tasmania’s flourishing agricultural industry, they also created an antipodean England in the lavish homes they built. Some of these homes are still in the same families today. This book not only showcases some of those amazing houses but also the incredible people who have passed through them over the years, and through those people gives a glimpse into the colonial history of Tasmania itself. With only a couple of exceptions, the properties you will be granted entrance to on the following pages are private family homes. Please respect the privacy of these homeowners and the generosity they have shown in opening their doors to you via the pages of this book. Alice Bennett and Georgia Warner

Beaufront Cashed-up and in the market for land, young English solicitor Philip Smith could hardly have timed his arrival in Van Diemen’s Land better. It was April 1832, and ten days before a proclamation had been issued to announce the sale of 32,000 acres of government reserve at Ross, in the Tasmanian Central Midlands. The grazing land was to be sold in eight blocks of 4000 acres in order to fund a government home for orphans in Hobart. Philip bought seven of the blocks on behalf of family and friends and these combined to become the Syndal and Beaufront estates, later known just as Beaufront. And it is still some of the best fine-wool producing country in the world. Beaufront is believed to be named after the Duke of Northumberland’s Beaufront Castle, not because of its distinctive Regency bow front, created from carefully rounded, dressed sandstone. The homestead was built for Philip’s brother Arthur and his wife, and a stone in the cellar carries the 2 | 3

inscription ‘Dennis and John Bacon, stonemasons, 1837’. The elaborate fanlight and half side-lights in the portico were later but still classical additions, as was the two-storey, pre-1900 stone extension at the rear. Within are a very fine hall and impressive formal rooms, and a new kitchen and conservatory area have sympathetically adapted the home for modern family life. It is not only the Beaufront home and its impressive stone outbuildings, including stables likened to a Palladian mansion, that are important historically. The magnificent Beaufront gardens are also on the Register of the National Estate. They are described by the Australian Heritage Database as follows: [A] rare Australian example of the transition from the Arcadian to the picturesque landscape styles … demonstrates features such as spaces articulated by stone and brickwalling, garden ornaments with classical detailing used for focii, and the utilisation of

distant views as enframed visual features. The garden has historical value for demonstrating the separation of the private pleasure garden from the utilitarian vegetable and picking garden. Aesthetically, the garden provides a high quality visual experience, with enclosed spaces, mature plants, structured views and a rich variety of colour and form.

Beyond the formal garden area is a stunning sandstone sundial that it is thought may have been originally carved for the Ross Bridge. This stone bridge, opened in 1836 and still taking traffic today, is not just a local thoroughfare but an astounding work of art. Former highway robber and convict Daniel Herbert is believed responsible for the 186 elaborate stone carvings on the side of the bridge, depicting animals, Celtic symbols and people involved in the construction. The carving at Beaufront portrays an eagle clutching a lamb. How it arrived in the paddock below the stables remains a mystery, but it has been speculated that some of the overseers at work on the bridge may have sold government time and materials to construct local buildings. Though the practice was forbidden, it was nonetheless fairly common. When Arthur Smith and his wife returned to England in the 1850s, Beaufront was sold to Thomas Parramore of nearby Wetmore, and in 1916 Beaufront and Syndal were acquired by William von Bibra, who farmed them with his brother Charles. The von Bibras acquired adjoining land over time. William’s son Donald von Bibra was a luminary in the wool industry and a founding member of the Australian Wool Board. He took on the management of the property at the tender age of twenty and involved Beaufront in many cutting-edge agricultural research projects. Donald’s son Kenneth and his wife, Berta, took Beaufront in some new directions, including the creation of Tasmania’s first wildlife park and one of

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the state’s first deer farms. They were among the earliest to capitalise on the tourism potential of the tiny historic town of Ross, population 400—the wildlife park attracted 25,000 visitors a year. Both Kenneth and Berta were, and remain, leading members of the local community; between them they have been involved in everything from municipal government to party politics, the National Trust and a variety of other community organisations. The couple first met in Tasmania and were reacquainted in England, where Kenneth was studying at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. Berta, meanwhile, had an intriguing role in one of the greatest political scandals of the twentieth century: the Western Australia-raised and Oxford-educated lawyer had a watching brief for a person entwined in the Profumo affair, to ensure they were not defamed at the later trial of Dr Stephen Ward (who infamously introduced the cabinet minister John Profumo to showgirl Christine Keeler). The tranquil countryside at Ross was a far cry from all that, but Berta threw herself into sheep and cattle breeding, raising children, and community life. She and Kenneth have now retired to another historic home at Longford, but their son, Julian von Bibra, and his wife, Annabel, continue the family tradition today. Julian and Annabel are deeply respectful of the natural and cultural values of Beaufront and are delighted with the opportunities their children have growing up here. Julian was encouraged to seek an education beyond agriculture and studied economics at the University of Melbourne, where he met Annabel who also studied there. But, like his father, he went on to study at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, and then returned to Beaufront. Farming won’t be foisted on the next generation of von Bibras either, but there can be little doubt that they will share their family’s strong sense of pride in being custodians of this precious part of the world.

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Belgrove As Peter Bignell tootles around in the tractor on his historic sheep, beef and strawberry farm, you’d swear you could smell hot chips or dim sims. You wouldn’t be far wrong. The owner of Belgrove, in Tasmania’s Southern Midlands, near Kempton, makes a habit of visiting fried food establishments in the area to collect their used cooking oil, which he converts to biodiesel to power his tractor, ute and even his home’s central heating. The original Aga stove in the kitchen is next in line for biodiesel conversion, which is just one of Peter’s many ingenious little modifications to this grand old sandstone home. Belgrove was built circa 1888 for Arthur Newell Corney and his family, who came to this property from Lake House at Cressy, near Launceston in the Northern Midlands, which was constructed for Robert Corney. It was the third house at Belgrove, the first being a very early cottage of which only sandstone foundations remain, and the second dating back to the 1840s, parts 10 | 11

of which (such as the meat-house, bake oven and dairy) stand in what is now the back garden. In about 1903, the Corneys sold Belgrove to Arthur Drysdale, known as ‘the man with the Midas touch’, who at times also owned several other pastoral properties, including neighbouring Mt Vernon and Kelvin Grove. In 1938, Drysdale sold Belgrove for 22,000 pounds to concentrate on building his lavishly appointed Wrest Point Hotel in Hobart. He later owned Hobart’s historic Hadleys Hotel and became the sole licensee and proprietor of Tasmanian Lotteries after George Adams’ Tattersall’s empire transferred from Tasmania to Victoria in the 1950s. The farm passed into the ownership of the Headlam and then the Hawker families before it was put on the market again in 1999. Sally Bignell didn’t even know Belgrove existed before she noticed the ‘for sale’ sign on the Midland Highway property as she drove past one day, even

though she’d passed it countless times before. She went to the open house and instantly fell in love. Coming from a sprawling old cottage in the nearby Central Highlands town of Bothwell, it was the perfect upgrade: sandstone, stately, open and light. But there were concerns about capitalising so much on a house, and when Belgrove and its 130 hectares were sold to the owners of a shorthorn cattle stud, Sally resigned herself to the fact that it just wasn’t meant to be. Eighteen months of drought followed and, on another trip down the highway, Sally once again saw a ‘for sale’ sign on the white picket Belgrove fence. She wasn’t going to let it slip through her hands twice and the transaction was completed in 2001. Having been well looked after throughout the years, there were no structural problems with Belgrove, but it was dated. The bathroom was turquoise, the carpet brown shagpile, there were multiple layers of wallpaper on some walls, a washing machine was in the kitchen because a laundry didn’t exist, and the only downstairs toilet was outside. Sally engaged Hobart designer Mirella Bywaters to assist with a full makeover of the interior of Belgrove, with instructions that it combine the old with the new and, most importantly, be practical and liveable. And how much fun both Mirella and Sally must have had scouring Tasmania, the mainland and overseas for the perfect furnishings to set off each room, such as the copper bath in ‘his’ section of the bathroom, the Italian ceramic toilet and red chandeliers in ‘her’ part, fittings to match the gleaming green Aga stove in the kitchen, and stunning antiques, ornaments and artwork for every corner. Where appropriate, new built-ins were added, such as the jarrah bookcase in Peter’s hunting-themed office, which is adorned with a zebra skin and dark, masculine furniture. The office also has a secret lift-up door in the floorboards, under which Peter has installed a row of containers holding beer and wine supplies which run on mini train tracks for easiest possible extraction. Arthur Drysdale added the sunroom at the back of the home, where nine servant bells line the wall. In their first week of living at Belgrove, Sally tried the bell for the master bedroom in the middle of the night. Her husband woke with such a jolt that he went downstairs and opened the front door. But, Sally laments, that’s as much of a response as the ringing of servants’ bells generates at Belgrove these days.

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Unlike many Georgian sandstone mansions, Belgrove is light and airy, both in its outlook and its Baltic pine joinery and kauri pine floorboards. The home is surrounded on two sides by a wide, twostorey sandstone verandah featuring intricate iron lace work. On the second storey, French doors open onto a hall-sized balcony area, providing expansive views across the entire Southern Midlands farming district and up to the Central Highlands lakes district. Positioned on the verandah below are a number of sandstone urn flowerpots carved by Peter Bignell’s own hand, a skill he discovered when they were still living at Bothwell. Sally had mentioned to her husband one day how much she’d like a sandstone birdbath for the garden. Having never seen one in a shop before, Peter decided to try making one with sandstone from the quarry on the family farm. Using his car’s front axle like a pottery wheel, Peter kicked the sandstone block around with his foot while wielding an angle grinder. Friends who saw Peter’s first effort started placing orders. Then more orders began arriving from Sydney, and not just for birdbaths: sandstone Pooh Bears, big and small, were a favourite for Peter (some he would swap for paintings in the local art gallery). Decorative sandstone balls were also in hot demand—the biggest weighed two tonnes and had to be lifted with a front-end loader onto a truck-axle lathe for carving. Before long, Peter’s acclaim grew and he was asked to restore the sandstone sundial in the Sydney Botanic Gardens and undertake sandstone restoration work on several public buildings in Hobart. His biggest job involved carving the three-tiered fountain that is a centrepiece of the conservatory at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens. When a commercial radio station ran an ad about a sand-sculpting competition on Hobart’s Kingston Beach, Peter’s interest was piqued. From there began a long reign as the Tasmanian king of sandcastles. The Bignell family would head to the beach for the annual competition, and they regularly left with first prize for sculptures that included a two-metre high church and a similarly sized lighthouse. The principle behind sand sculpting and sandstone sculpting is the same, Peter confides: start with a big block, and then carve the shape out. It was only a matter of time before he set his sights on a new challenge, winning a snow-sculpting competition at Hobart’s Antarctic Midwinter Festival with a sculpture of a seal.

From there followed an invitation to compete in the Russian Cup in November 2007, a prestigious international ice-sculpting competition held in the depths of Siberia. Peter had never carved ice before but modified some old shearing combs into chisels and practised at Belgrove for months, carving the ABC logo out of bricks of ice he’d made in the deep freezer. In Siberia, his team of two turned four tonnes of ice into a whale-shaped helicopter during five and a half days of work in minus-twenty-five-degree-Celsius temperatures and sixty-kilometre-per-hour winds. It was Peter’s carved ice gearbox cogs that actually turned which won over the judges and secured the mayor’s sculpture prize and an ugly, but unique, trophy. These days, Peter is working on a new invention for permanently fixing cracks in walls. He’s been experimenting on Belgrove; it works, and he hopes to patent Wisecrack soon.

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Belmont For years, Belmont stared down on John Pooley twice a day, as he drove between his Coal River Valley farm and Hobart business. By chance one evening he and his wife, Libby, enjoyed a glass of wine in the stone-walled courtyard by Belmont’s blue-tiled pool. They fell in love with the house. When friends who were renting it mentioned the house might soon be sold, the Pooleys snapped it up before it went on the market. Five years later, the Pooleys still cannot believe their luck as their stunning renovation job takes shape. And there’s a sense of serendipity in that, from the converted stone stables, they are now running a cellar door for their award-winning cool climate wines at the property that was first built for Hobart wine and spirit merchant Benjamin Guy. Belmont is set on a sandstone hillside that is itself heritage listed, because it is from here that all the sandstone that built Richmond village and its famous bridge was quarried. 18 | 19

Guy bought the land in about 1833, and around four years later the handsome home was built for his family, which included at least eight children. Only three years later the home and its forty acres were advertised for lease, as the family left to visit Europe. Belmont has since had several owners; strangers frequently make contact with the current landholders to recount their own tales of growing up in this fine Georgian home, while many more find a visit to the cellar door a very pleasant excuse for a closer inspection of the property. What so appealed to the Pooleys that evening by the pool was just how light, bright, liveable and positively Tuscan this place felt, a sense that was only enhanced by its glorious outlook over the productive Coal River Valley. The home’s spectacular outdoor areas include the walled courtyard that spans the width of the home to the old stables, the centrepiece of which is a stunning

solar-heated pool surrounded by sandstone pavers, olive trees and lavender bushes. Plans are afoot to create a large formal garden around the front terrace of the home, which commands views over Pages Creek and then to the township of Richmond. Meanwhile, at the back entrance, a new sandstone patio has been positioned to catch the evening sun. The house has always been in good structural condition, but it had a distinctly seventies feel to it when the Pooleys moved in. The kitchen is now the latest in design and three elegant casement windows face onto the delightful courtyard and pool area. It also leads into a dining room that features immaculate cedar joinery and built-in cupboards, and which looks out onto Richmond through French doors. Unlike a great many houses of the era, this one was built to capture both the views and the sun; so much so that when former owner Eric Gray lived here, a crystal bowl apparently burned a hole in his diningroom table, so intense was the sun shining through. The sitting room, with its marble fireplace, is yet to be redecorated—Libby is leaning towards bright yellow and white stripes to enhance the lightness of the room. Also on the lower floor is a small study, and an old kitchen that has been converted to another cosy sitting room. Its massive fireplace incorporates an intact baker’s oven that will be used to learn the art of wood-fired pizzas with the help of a local chef. Upstairs there are four bedrooms and two ultramodern bathrooms, his and hers. Outbuildings include an old laundry, stables and blacksmith shop, now converted to toilets for the cellar

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door which are, according to most visitors, the only ones they’ve ever used with a fireplace and lounge. The Coal River Valley produces some of Australia’s finest wines and the Pooleys are one of its longestestablished winegrowers. When John’s father, Denis, retired in 1984 from the car business they had established together, he felt lost. Action had to be taken, and so Denis and his wife, Margaret, bought land next to John and Libby’s Coal River Valley farm. A founding member of Hobart’s Beefsteak and Burgundy Club, Denis Pooley wasn’t up for farming beef but decided to give the wine a go. Half an acre of vines were planted at the Cooinda Vale Estate vineyard and they couldn’t have grown better. John says it added ten years to his father’s life because every year there was another vintage to look forward to. Margaret still runs the Cooinda Vale cellar door and, aged ninety-three, is the oldest female vigneron in Australia. After he moved to Belmont, John also planted vines on nearby Butchers Hill, and 2007 saw the first vintage of pinot produced. Pooley Wines consistently wins awards; its rieslings and pinot noirs took home no fewer than twenty-two medals and trophies at the 2007 Tasmanian Wine Show. These days, as they enjoy an evening glass of wine from their own cellar door in the beautifully designed courtyard, John and Libby marvel at their good fortune in living here. They also feel strongly that they are simply caretakers of this magnificent property for the next generation, in this case their son, Matthew, who is now running Pooley Wines, and his wife and children.

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Bentley It was by chance that John and Robyn Hawkins found themselves in the Chudleigh Valley, touring on a back road between Deloraine and Cradle Mountain. On passing through the narrow ‘eye of the needle’ entrance to the Chudleigh Valley they found a stunning landscape laid out before them. So when Bentley, one of the district’s original land grants, came onto the market, the memory of this beautiful vista eventually lured the Hawkins from Moss Vale, in the New South Wales Southern Highlands, to Tasmania. They have dedicated the last five years to the creation of a splendid country house through significant additions to the original homestead, laying hedges, building dry-stone walls, creating lakes and restoring outbuildings. And apart from Government House in Hobart, Bentley is also Tasmania’s first and only heritage-listed landscape. But this is of little consequence to John Hawkins when what he considers the greatest threat to the surrounding mountain landscape, the clear-felling of 26 | 27

native forest, is exempt from all heritage legislation. John believes no other state or country would permit such sacrilege, and he despairs at the visible scars on the surrounding Tiers and the loss in the Chudleigh Valley of some of Tasmania’s finest agricultural land to tree plantations. Life has certainly become a little livelier in the sleepy village of Chudleigh since the Hawkins’ arrival. But more than anything, locals credit John with completely recharging the valley and giving them a great sense of pride and appreciation of its visual significance as a unique, fire-farmed Aboriginal landscape overlaid by European settlement. Bentley was a land grant in 1829 to John Badcock Gardiner who, it is assumed, named Chudleigh after his local village in Devon. Along with a couple of other early landholders in the district, Gardiner struck paydirt by burning lime and sending it to Launceston for building work. The whole valley is home to the most important limestone karst in the

southern hemisphere, which is listed as the Mole Creek Karst on the Register of the National Estate. More land was added to the Bentley estate by its next owner, entrepreneur Phillip Oakden, who, among other things, introduced blackberries to Tasmania and brought Lincoln sheep to graze his land. A founding member of the Launceston Horticultural Society and the Union Bank in Launceston, Oakden was responsible for planting more than six miles of hawthorn hedge that is such a feature of the property today. The hedges were admired as early as 1870 by a passing traveller: The road for a mile before reaching Chudleigh passes through what is called the ‘Bentley Estate’ and is bordered on each side with the finest hawthorn hedges that I have ever seen out of England, planted 28 years ago, standing from 15 to 20 feet high; the smell of English grass hay which was then on the ground lent a great charm to this part of the journey. I could not help envying the lot of the residents of such a delightful spot.

The property underwent further ownership changes before it was sold to Donald Cameron of Nile, in the Northern Midlands, to be farmed by his son, Donald Norman Cameron, who represented Tasmania in the first federal House of Representatives. The Cameron family built the Bentley homestead in 1879, an elegant single-storey house based on a Melbourne ‘town villa’. According to John Hawkins, ‘the most famous episode in his career in the federal parliament was when it was being debated whether the federal capital should be built at Canberra or some other site. The decision lay with him. He kept silent for two weeks, tantalising the people of Australia by refusing to say which way he was going to vote; in the end he voted for Canberra.’ After Donald Norman Cameron’s death in 1931, Bentley changed hands a few more times and was subdivided along the way. When it was bought by John and Robyn Hawkins, the acreage stood at 560 but this has since been more than doubled, as has the size of the ‘villa’ to create one of the first important Tasmanian country homesteads of the twenty-first century.

The original house is now one wing and its replica another. Connecting the two is a conservatory which is crowned with an elaborate cupola inspired by the dome on the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. With its eleven north-facing windows, the conservatory captures the sun to warm the building’s core. And with restoration of the old stables in progress and a clock now installed in the clock tower, the property is once again a large working estate. Almost as breathtaking as the house is the new drystone wall that surrounds it—at 700 metres, it took three years and 2500 tonnes of rock to build, with two men from Deloraine receiving training from an English dry-stone walling and hedge-laying expert, here on a teaching holiday in 2003. The hawthorn hedges have been correctly laid, pleached and staked at blood horse height, and John Hawkins has found that a tea-cutting machine from his Japanese antique business doubles nicely as a hedge-trimmer, producing the perfect curve.

Everything at Bentley has been done with the landscape in mind. Robyn Hawkins, who created the famous garden at Whitley in the New South Wales Southern Highlands, is responsible for the design of the grounds, the planting of 50,000 native trees and the creation of the grass garden along the creek. The history of the estate was in part described by John Hawkins in the Australian Garden History Society newsletter, Blue Gum: The whole valley is presided over by the Gog range, this features a natural rock formation that, in the morning light, produces a perfectly formed human face some 200 feet high. It was from this ridge that the Aboriginals gathered their ochre; O’Connor, the Land Commissioner, called this area the ‘City of Ochre’ in his survey of 1828. Europeans, under Captain John Rolland, of the Third Regiment, spent nine days mapping the course of the Mersey River in 1823. On climbing the top, he named the ridges Gog

and Magog, the classical names for a King and his supposed Kingdom … Rolland must have been of a literary and artistic bent for apart from the highest peak, which he named after himself, the two peaks to the west he named Vandyke and Claude, after the great European landscape painter … The rural landscape is largely as created by Aboriginal fire farming and European settlement in the nineteenth century. The land grants … were taken up over fire farmed cleared floodplains created by Native Hut Corner Aboriginals over thousands of years. Not having to clear the trees made this land instantly valuable and profitable to European settlers. Their landscape was to be contained by hawthorn hedges, the native trees cut to copse, thereby protecting the ridge lines so as to create a large, still-existing parkland, later planted with European trees, all much in evidence.

On learning that the listing of Bentley and its landscape with the Tasmanian Heritage Register provided

no protection from the clear-felling of forests on surrounding hills and mountains, John has lobbied for change—so far without success. He believes the Tasmanian government is too closely aligned to the forestry industry, particularly in the matter of exemption of forestry from all heritage legislation. In an exhaustive review of this legislation for the Labor state government, it was recommended by consultants that such statutory exemptions should be removed and canvassed options for how to better protect historic cultural heritage landscapes, which are also exempt from protection under the legislation. When pursued on the issue of exemptions, the government’s response was: ‘These provisions will remain at this time.’ John Hawkins, a Sandhurst-trained former British army officer, is determined to reverse this scenario and is leading the charge in the valley for the preservation of this historic and beautiful Arcadian landscape into the twenty-first century. 30 | 31

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Peppers Calstock Few get the opportunity to laze about a stately Georgian mansion and absorb all the grandeur it evokes. The homes you enter in this book are private. Unless you are part of their inner circle, you might not have even known they existed. As for those who live in them—well, they’re usually too busy running farms, raising families and keeping on top of neverending maintenance to ever really get the chance to sit back self-indulgently. So that’s where Peppers Calstock comes in, an impressive home steeped in Tasmanian history offering luxury accommodation and fine dining. And yet it’s the placement of this magnificent building in the landscape that is possibly its greatest appeal. Deloraine, in Tasmania’s Central North, is picture-postcard stuff. It’s a historic town on the Meander River, where you can try your luck for trout, surrounded by lush green farmland complete with hedgerows. The rugged Great Western Tiers are on its doorstep, and behind them the Tasmanian Wilderness 34 | 35

World Heritage Area. Black truffles, cheese and honey are just some of the produce for which this area is renowned. Framed by giant oak trees, Calstock sits at the bottom of the 1228-metre Quamby Bluff on the Western Tiers. The mountain forms the spectacular backdrop while the home gazes down over the farmland, river and town. Calstock was designed to take full advantage of these views. For example, the original windows in the main living areas sit atop panels that can be opened like little doors; when the windows are right up and the panels open, it is possible to walk straight out from the lounge or dining room onto the wide flagstone-paved verandah, creating an indoor– outdoor entertaining area. The first owner of Calstock was Lieutenant Pearson Foote. He received the land grant in about 1830 after starting out as a settler in Western Australia but finding the going too tough. Foote was forced to sell

Calstock in the depression of the 1840s, and it subsequently became a property of the Field family. The family patriarch, William Field, had been transported to Australia for receiving nine stolen sheep as a butcher and made a fortune out of cattle farming in Tasmania after he was freed. When he died in 1837, Field’s wealth was estimated at 1.238 per cent of the country’s GDP—billions of dollars, in today’s terms—and he owned one-third of all the land and buildings in Launceston. Westfield, Enfield, Eastfield and Woodfield were among the Tasmanian properties William Field acquired. He built impressive homes on the land and left them to his four sons. His third son, Thomas, inherited Westfield and in the 1850s purchased nearby Calstock. Thomas added the main part of the present house complete with its wide verandah on three sides and distinctive open balcony on top. The Fields were keen on racehorses, and Thomas turned Calstock into Tasmania’s top racing stud from where two Melbourne Cup winners were bred, including the mighty Malua. Malua and his brother, Stockwell, were bought by former premier of Tasmania Thomas Reiby at one of Calstock’s two-day yearling sales. Reiby was determined that a Tasmanian horse would win the Melbourne Cup, and Stockwell did indeed lead all the way down the final straight in 1882—only to be pipped at the post. It is said the dramatic second-place finish so frustrated Reiby that he got out of racing then and there, selling Malua to J. Inglis of Victoria. The Australian Racing Museum describes Malua as the most versatile of all Australian champion gallopers; from sprints to staying events, and even the steeplechase, he left them all in his wake. His many wins in 1884 included the 1000-metre Oakleigh Plate, then Australia’s richest race, the 2600-metre Adelaide Cup, and the 3200-metre Melbourne Cup—won by half a head in front of 90,000 people. Malua’s brother Street Anchor, also bred at Calstock, won the Melbourne Cup the following year, while his son Malvolio won the 1891 Cup and another son, Ingliston, won the Caulfield Cup in 1900.

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And Malua’s racing career didn’t finish when he was put out to stud. At the age of nine he was entered in his first steeplechase, reportedly after Inglis watched him clear a high fence in the yards. Carrying Inglis himself, who weighed in at seventythree kilograms, Malua romped home in the three-mile VRC Grand National Hurdle. His last hurrah was taking out the 2800-metre Geelong Cup as a ten-year-old. In his home town of Deloraine, a committee is now raising money to build a monument to the mighty Malua, and as a guest at Calstock you are free to walk through the legendary stables where he was reared. Calstock remained in the Field family until 1971, then was the focus of a couple of separate efforts to redevelop it into a thoroughbred stud. It was purchased by the current owners just before 2000, restored and turned into a guesthouse. In 2005 it became part of the Peppers chain, and in September 2006 Linda and Daniel Tourancheau moved in as managers, viewing Calstock as the per­ fect place to combine their skills and fulfil their long-held desire to move to Tasmania. Linda is the highly trained hotel manager half of the equation, Daniel the French chef classically trained in Michelinstar restaurants. With their sixteen-foot high ceilings, the rooms are massive in proportion, each ornately decorated in a different style. Read about William Field in the library, take an aperitif in the lounge and then proceed to the dining room for a three-course set-menu dinner that is a drawcard in its own right. The menu is dictated by what is fresh, local and in season, from locally harvested black truffles to venison, and zucchini flowers from the garden. Even if there are only two guests staying, Daniel is up at the crack of dawn making the croissants for breakfast and, later, the bread for the evening meal. There’s a wine for every occasion on the list. Peppers Calstock showcases the best of Tasmania from one of its beautiful Georgian mansions, and allows anyone the chance to experience one of these properties in truly decadent style.

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Cambria Early settler Louisa Anne Meredith was a prolific illustrator and writer, and when she came to Tasmania in 1839 with her husband, Charles, and their baby son, they stayed at Cambria, regarded then as the government house of the state’s east coast. Louisa described it in her book, My Home in Tasmania: The House at ‘Cambria’ commands an extensive view of large tracts of ‘bush’ and cultivated land; and across the Head of Oyster Bay, of the Schoutens, whose lofty picturesque outline and the changing hues they assume in different periods of the day or states of the atmosphere, are noble adjuncts to the landscape. Below a deep precipitous bank on the south side of the house flows a winding creek, the outlet of the Meredith River, gleaming and shining along its stony bed … A large, well-built cheerful-looking house, with its accompanying signs of substantial comfort in the shape of barns, stackyard, stabling, extensive gardens, and all other requisite appliances on a large scale, is

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most pleasant to look upon at all times and in all places, even when tens or twenties of such may be seen in a day’s journey; but when our glimpses of country comfort are so few and far between as must be the case in a new country, and when one’s very belief in civilisation begins to be shaken by weary travelling day after day through such dreary tracts as we had traversed, it is most delightful to come once more among sights and sounds that tell of the Old World and its good old ways, and right heartily did I enjoy them. The noble verandah into which the French windows of the front rooms open, with its pillars wreathed about with roses and jasmine, and its lower trellises hidden in luxuriant geraniums, became the especial abiding place of my idleness; as I felt listless and inactive after my year’s broiling in New South Wales, and delighted in the pleasant breezy climate of our new home … A large garden and orchard, well stored with the flowers and fruits cultivated in England, were not amongst the least of the charms Cambria possessed

in my eyes; and the growth of fruit trees is so much more rapid and precocious here than at home, that those only ten or twelve years old appear sometimes aged trees … The orchard, with its fine trees and shady garden walks, some broad and straight, and long, others turning off into sly, quiet little nooks, was of great delight to me … the cultivated flowers here are chiefly those familiar to us in English gardens, with some brilliant natives of the Cape, and many pretty indigenous flowering shrubs interspersed.

Cambria, a twenty-seven-roomed Georgian mansion, was designed by Lieutenant George Meredith, one of the east coast’s first settlers and Louisa’s fatherin-law. The building work commenced in 1830 and Cambria took six years to complete, though Meredith had been developing the gardens for the best part of a decade, hence their well-established state when described by Louisa in the early 1840s. Cambria has an unusual colonial bungalow style at the front with four sets of glazed French doors opening onto the ‘noble’ and wide verandah, which has a colonnade and balustrade of wood and is paved with square sandstone set on a diagonal. From the front, Cambria appears to be only onestorey high, plus a great deal of roof, but the back of the house, which is cut into a hill, reveals its true scale. Here three storeys are evident, the top an attic with quaint dormer windows that face away from the home’s glorious views over Great Oyster Bay across to the Freycinet Peninsula. Marble fireplaces downstairs are complemented upstairs by what is thought to be a rare example of marbling wallpaper, or simulated marbling. The front hall is unusual in that it has two cedar fanlit doors concealing the stairs: behind one door the stairs go up, behind the other, down. The large drawing room was once the scene of dances that George hosted for visiting naval officers, their ships anchored just a short distance away. Among the extensive outbuildings were a kitchen, brick stables and timber barn, along with a toilet building that boasted a three-seater loo, each one a different size. In 1841, Louisa and Charles set about building their own place at Spring Vale, just north of Swansea, but they then resettled at Port Sorell in the north-west, and later lived in various other parts of the state.

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George Meredith died in 1856 and Cambria stayed in the Meredith family until it was leased, and later purchased, by the Bayles family. Basil Bayles, a local identity, lived in the homestead with his sister until 1949, although the upstairs section was never really used in this time and started to show its years. A short ownership by the Brettingham-Moores followed before Cambria was sold to the Burbury family in the 1970s. Nick and Mandy Burbury have now called Cambria home for thirty years, longer than George Meredith did, and theirs were the first babies to be raised here. The home wasn’t exactly designed with a young family in mind, but recent additions, such as a new kitchen/ conservatory area have made it an easier place to live. Cambria has also been recently re-roofed, and other restoration jobs are on the agenda. The gardens at Cambria have, like the adjoining 5000-hectare farm, suffered from prolonged drought, but still resemble some of Louisa’s elaborate descriptions, notwithstanding the fact that she may have been prone to a little poetic licence. Louisa Meredith’s other writings include Some of My Bush Friends in Tasmania, Tasmanian Friends and Foes, Feathered, Furred and Finned, Bush Friends in Tasmania, and two novels. She took a great interest in politics, was an early member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and influenced her husband to legislate to protect native wildlife during his many years as a member of the Tasmanian Legislative Council. Flora and fauna also feature heavily in My Home in Tasmania, including the trials and tribulations of trying to tame a possum, and her description of the capture of a Tasmanian tiger: I pitied the unhappy beast most heartily, and would fain have begged more gentle usage for him, but I was compelled to acknowledge some coercion necessary, as, when I softly stroked his back (after taking the precaution of engaging his great teeth in the discussion of a piece of meat), I was in danger of having my hand snapped off.

Her flora and fauna drawings also won many awards, and in 1884, after her husband’s death, the Tasmanian government awarded Louisa a pension of one hundred pounds a year for distinguished literary and artistic services to the colony. She died in Victoria in 1895, survived by two sons.

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Cheshunt Of all the members of Tasmania’s Archer dynasty, William Archer has been described as the most brilliant. The first Tasmanian-born architect is credited with designing some of the state’s most magnificent buildings, from the elaborate Italianate villa that was added to his father’s home, Woolmers, to his pièce de résistance, Mona Vale at Ross. Archer was also an acclaimed botanist who studied at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, and he contributed in such a way to Sir Joseph Hooker’s authoritative work on Tasmanian botany, Flora Tasmaniae, that it was jointly dedicated to him. He was also noted for his engineering, mainly in regard to surveying and designing irrigation channels to provide water for domestic animals and for flood irrigation. It was at Cheshunt, in Meander Valley in Tasmania’s Central North, that he combined his passions. The mansion is the home that William Archer designed for himself; in its gardens he planted exotic trees, and 52 | 53

in the surrounding forest, wilderness areas and on river banks he collected many native plant species, some of which, such as the conifer Diselma archeri, bear his name. William Archer was the third son of Thomas Archer, the founder of this great Van Diemen’s Land dynasty, who arrived in Tasmania about 1813. Before long, Thomas had established the vast estate of Woolmers near Longford, south of Launceston, and his success inspired his father and three of his brothers to also make the move to Van Diemen’s Land. The Archers soon owned tens of thousands of acres of prime farming land throughout the district, Cheshunt representing some 7000 acres on the western fringe. At the age of sixteen, William went to London to study architecture and engineering, and his first job upon returning home was aggrandising Woolmers. The palatial Mona Vale, which he designed later for his brother-in-law, Robert Kermode, has been described as the largest private home in Australia.

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Mona Vale is also known as the calendar house for its 365 windows, fifty-two rooms, twelve chimneys and seven entrances. Other building designs credited to Archer include the old Hutchins School building in Hobart, the main building of the former Horton College at Ross, and the two-storey addition to his brother’s home, Fairfield at Cressy. Archer’s work is mostly Victorian in manner and Italianate in style, although Cheshunt is considered quite unusual. It has been described as an example of architectural eclecticism, with its large Georgian mansion, Victorian verandah and Italianate tower. On the first level of the exterior brickwork quoins feature, while on the second level double pilasters grace the corners. The chimneys are ornate, the windows double-paned, and at the back a square tower has narrow Italianate windows. Connecting the two wings at the front is a two-storey verandah, with the iron frieze, brackets and balustrade all boasting different designs. Inside are twenty-three rooms, including nine bedrooms and an entry hall with a fireplace, which was said to be a mark of distinction. Cheshunt also has several brick-nogged, timber-clad outbuildings, including stables, a carpentry shop, a butchery and a blacksmith shop. The foundation stone for the home was laid in 1850, and the centre and eastern wings completed about 1852. A few years later, Archer set off to study botany at Kew, where he also contributed to Hooker’s Flora Tasmaniae. A stint in Melbourne followed where he tried, unsuccessfully, to earn money as an architect before he sold Cheshunt in 1873, the house still not complete. William Archer died a year later at his brother’s farm, Fairfield, broken and impoverished, leaving an annuity of just one hundred pounds for his wife and twelve surviving children. The new owners were William and John Bowman, themselves part of a pioneering farming dynasty from South Australia. William’s son Frederick took ownership of Cheshunt in 1879, and a few years later married Gertrude Field from the nearby Calstock estate. Also connecting the two colonial properties was an early, direct phone line. In about 1885, the Bowmans started work on completing Archer’s design, employing a live-in brickmaker who churned out 100,000 bricks in the space of a couple of months. Look closely at the façade and you’ll notice that the northern and southern wings are different sizes. The

verandah posts in between have been placed offcentre to balance the appearance. Before Frederick died in 1929 he left Cheshunt to his grandson Ronald so as to avoid paying death duties. It would be another forty years before Ronald moved in but for much of this time Cheshunt was occupied by Ronald’s grandmother and aunt, Stephanie, a period in which they endured the Great Depression and World War II. Though Stephanie spent nine years in hospital before her death in 1969, no one had the heart to displace her from her long-time home, so it wasn’t until the early seventies that Ronald and his wife, Leila, braved the move to Cheshunt. The house was by now in a sad state, and rats, mice and silverfish had well and truly moved in. The roof was leaking, plaster had fallen from the ceiling and many of the wooden floors were rotten. The interior was dirty, dusty and damp—three wheelbarrow-loads of soot were carted away from the old slowcombustion stove in the kitchen. After completing the most urgent structural jobs and cleaning the grime, the Bowmans restored a room every couple of years and repolished the antiques. This bit-by-bit interior renovation has continued since the latest generation, Paul and Cate Bowman, arrived in 1985. The bottom floor is now basically complete; work on the upper level with its six bedrooms continues, but it is only ever used when guests come to stay. In 1998 the Cheshunt exterior got a major new lease of life. The roof and rotten verandah were replaced, and the chimneys repaired with the help of a crane. The exterior walls were pressure-cleaned and then given three coats of paint, a process that took a team of five painters five weeks to complete. At one stage Cheshunt was painted in ‘blood and bandages’ style—red walls with contrasting sandstone quoins. The Bowmans considered returning it to this colour but ultimately opted for more muted tones, although one outbuilding remains in blood and bandages style. Considerable preservation has also been undertaken on the other outbuildings. The renovation efforts at Cheshunt are limited by time and funds. It’s an exhausting and never-ending task to look after a home such as this—it was built to be staffed, for one thing—and matters have not been helped by adverse seasons. It seems that life has always been a little bit harder at Cheshunt than at the foundation Archer farm,

Woolmers. When William Archer’s oldest brother, Thomas (II), died suddenly at the age of twenty-six, followed a few years later by his father, Thomas (I), Woolmers was left to his ten-year-old nephew, Thomas Archer (III). In his will, the elder Thomas bequeathed various annuities that were to become millstones around the necks of William and his other brother, Joseph, of Panshanger at Longford. The collapse of a family bank and the agricultural depression compounded matters, and William was increasingly struggling at Cheshunt. It appears that he was never paid a cent for his architectural work, which he limited to doing for the church, family and friends. Back at Woolmers, the subsequent generations of

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Thomas Archers (III, IV, V and VI) lived the life of landed gentry, pursuing interests such as travelling, golf and entertaining, before the last male heir died in 1994, having been a virtual recluse in the magnificent homestead all his life. Woolmers is open to the public and is also home to the National Rose Garden. Cheshunt is not quite the perfectly manicured horticultural showpiece that its grander relation is, but the old exotic trees that surround the homestead are a reminder of William Archer’s important botanical work. They include giant oaks, elms, chestnuts, Japanese cedars, laurels and American cottonwood trees. Botanists still call by Cheshunt today looking for examples of Archer’s work.

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Dalness Clan Mackinnon was descended from royal Scottish blood, and in its heyday controlled vast areas of land on the Isle of Skye, in the northern Scottish highlands. The clan was turfed off these lands for supporting Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Jacobite uprising, which had hoped to restore the House of Stuart to the throne. During the clearances that ensued, tens of thousands of highlanders were rounded up and forced to settle on poor land by the sea, to make way for large-scale sheep farming and to ensure the collapse of the old clan system. It was in this context that a young Allan MacKinnon determined he had no future on Skye anymore, and set off alone for Van Diemen’s Land, arriving in 1822. With great difficulty, Allan obtained a land grant near Evandale in the Northern Midlands of Tasmania, but he ultimately had to vacate it because of the constant trouble he encountered with the original Aboriginal occupants. Instead he ran the Launceston prison until he had the means to buy Dalness, located 60 | 61

about one mile from his original land grant. Dalness has been the home of members of the prominent MacKinnon family ever since. The 500-acre property was originally granted to a Captain Donald MacDonald, who presumably had connections to Clan MacDonald in Dalness, Scotland. After he died in 1835, his widow sold the property to Allan MacKinnon, although there would later be a dispute over whether or not he had title. In about 1839 MacKinnon built himself an ultrafashionable home for the era, Georgian Regency in style with unusual red-face brick; the bricks were made on the property in a paddock that has ever since been called ‘brickfield’. The home looks down over undulating fields and across to Ben Lomond. Around it were planted at least a hundred oak trees, an orchard and superb gardens, in which a small summerhouse was built. In contrast to the symmetry associated with Georgian homes of this time, Dalness has an irregular

interior plan; this style, in which rooms of different sizes feature in a home with a traditionally composed façade, would become more common in the Victorian era. The main entrance to the home is framed by an imposing Doric doorcase—a design replicated over one of the fireplaces—and an intricate rectangular fanlight. Internally, the outstanding cedar fittings bear a remarkable resemblance to those at Woolmers and Exton House. The home is three bays wide, and the cedar staircase in the hall is highly unusual as it appears to have originally turned upwards to the left, but was at some point switched to turn to the right. The main homestead block was balanced by wings at each side, however only one remains, and this was rebuilt in the 1920s. Allan MacKinnon married a Maclean girl from down the road who had also emigrated from Scotland with her family, and they had six children. Their male descendants ended up farming significant properties throughout the district, including Vaucluse, neighbouring Glen Esk, and Mountford and Wickford at Longford. Their daughters married into other prominent local families. With the exception of Vaucluse, MacKinnons still run all these properties today. After Allan’s success in Australia, his brothers followed him out, as did many other related MacKinnons whose

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descendants can still be found in all corners of the country. Every generation of MacKinnon has done its own bit of tinkering with Dalness. In the 1960s the entire southern wall of the main block had to be rebuilt from the cellar up; the builder said he believed its foundation was no more than a piece of two-by-four. The house also sits on clay and every now and again there is major movement and a crack, enough to jolt current owner, Neil MacKinnon, wide awake at night. But these are never worth fixing, according to Neil, because eventually they always shift back. There are now four bathrooms—for a long time there was only one—and the kitchen has been modernised. In one room, pictures of the MacKinnon forebears hang. None of the heirs has ever moved out of the home unless they died, although Neil made a brief exception to this when he leased Dalness for three years to pursue business interests in the Bahamas. These days he works in Sydney and commutes home to Dalness on weekends, the 2000-hectare farm run by a manager in his absence. With its spectacular views across undulating hills, it’s a piece of heaven to come home to after the hustle and bustle of Sydney, and that sense is enhanced by the fact that Dalness has always been considered a comfortable home rather than a stately treasure.

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Douglas Park Barbara Field’s mother couldn’t believe it when she found out Barbara was moving straight into the big house at Douglas Park upon her marriage to Robert Jones. ‘You can’t even keep your bedroom tidy,’ Mrs Field said to the twenty-three-year-old who was about to become the lady of a manor with seven bedrooms on its second floor. And, said her mother, it was high time she learned how to cook. ‘If I can read, I can cook, can’t I?’ was this tomboy’s response. Barbara was not the slightest bit overawed by her impending move from a small family home, built after World War I when materials were in extremely short supply, to a mansion that at one time was pictured on Tattersall’s lottery tickets. Douglas Park was built for retired army doctor Temple Pearson, who arrived in Hobart from Douglas, Scotland, in 1822 with 1300 pounds in goods and cash and his second wife, who some have claimed was the half-sister of navigator Matthew Flinders. They 68 | 69

lived in a weatherboard cottage on the property while he practised medicine locally, completing construction of the main residence in the mid 1830s, just a few years before his death. Douglas Park is a two-storey home with a façade and stately portico made of sandstone from nearby Ross in the Central Midlands. The portico’s entablature details the Pearson family coat of arms and motto, ‘Dum spiro, spero’, or ‘While I breathe, I hope’. It is believed that master Irish stonemason Hugh Kean designed and built Douglas Park. His Ionic columns were complete with entasis, a slight curvature at the base of columns to prevent the optical illusion of concavity, used in ancient times by the Greeks. Extravagant cedar replicas of the front portico and columns frame every door to the rooms off the front entry foyer. It is thought that Kean also designed two hotels in Campbell Town, as all three buildings feature handcarved sandstone staircases that are something

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of an engineering and architectural feat. At Douglas Park a single piece of cantilevered sandstone connects the landing on the staircase to the second floor. With no supports, it is interlocked into the wall to stay put, and boasts cast-iron balusters. The stairs—which over the years have been painted lettuce green and brown, and have now been taken back to their original sandstone colour—lead to the bedrooms (one of which was being used to store chaff before Robert Jones’ grandfather bought the house). Young boys have been known to slide down the handrail after first learning to walk up the steps, while girls have loved gliding down the stairs in all fashion of gowns. Friends and family members also remember gathering on the stairs to watch movies. When Barbara moved in, the entire stone wall on the right side of the house was sinking badly and had a number of gaping holes. Campbell Town man Jack

Lockett and his team of skilled tradesmen found the burst pipe to blame and repaired the house perfectly; they also replaced the mortar in the chimneys and repaired the stone wall enclosing the courtyard. The Jones family credits Jack and his team with the maintenance of Douglas Park and numerous iconic Campbell Town buildings. Temple Pearson didn’t have any children, and when he died in 1839, aged forty-nine, the place was left to his brother, John, of Bathgate, Scotland. In 1846 John Pearson put Douglas Park on the market and it was leased by various people until purchased by A.E. Jones, grandfather of Robert, in 1912. At the moment, Barbara is busy restoring a room at the front of the house. Knowing how to read was sufficient for learning to cook, and she still plays tennis with her grandson (in her gumboots) on the court that was once a hub of Campbell Town social life.

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Dunedin The country at Dunedin, near Launceston, isn’t arable. It’s so rough that mustering of cattle and sheep still takes place on horseback, and the back run of the farm is so rocky that it’s known as the goat hills. Which only makes the hectare of gardens this property is renowned for all the more remarkable. For Annabel Scott, who moved to Dunedin as a young married woman in the 1970s, gardening has become an addiction. With every year her garden beds have become bigger and better, more diverse, a different colour or style. Gardening gets her up at 5.30 am every day to start the watering, and she is still toiling away in the evening. The Scotts’ Gothic revival home is always adorned with freshly picked posies (visitors clamour for the rare breeds raised in her potting shed) and there is homemade, garden-grown elderberry Sambucus wine or syrup on stand-by, should guests pop in. International and national garden tours often include Dunedin in their itineraries, if they are lucky 76 | 77

enough to be allowed in. A proper tour of the botanical extravaganza that wraps right around the nineteenth-century homestead takes a good two hours. From the main driveway entrance stretches a bog garden. Here, among the first spectacles are the dramatic Gunnera tinctoria and Gunnera manicata. These giant herbaceous flowering plants, native to South America, have leaves that grow up to two metres long, resemble giant rhubarb and produce large flowering seed heads that resemble corncobs and can weigh up to five kilograms. Below them purple irises bloom, as do Peltiphyllum peltatum, also known as Darmera peltata or umbrella plants. These too thrive in a bog garden environment, growing up to two metres tall and producing bold rugose, or rounded, foliage. The dense, rounded flower heads of white to pink appear in spring. The cool and wet climate theme continues past Dicksonia antarctica, a handsome Australian native

tree fern that can reach heights of six metres, and which here towers over roses and the dainty green bells of Nicotiana langsdorfii (flowering tobacco), contrasted with blazing blue delphiniums. Saunter on past striking Papaver somniferum, or opium poppy. Their fragile pink petals last just a few days, but the glaucous blue pods persist. Providing shade and perfume to the garden tapestry from above is a Catalpa bignonioides, or the Indian bean tree. This may reach heights of up to 25 metres and can be recognised by its large, heart-shaped leaves, white flowers and the (inedible) fruit it produces that resembles slender bean pods. Other trees throughout the garden, all planted by Annabel, include the smaller Styrax japonica, or Japanese snowbell, which produces pendulous white flowers in summer. Then there is a Manglietia insignis, or red lotus, an evergreen tree from China aligned to the magnolia. It produces glossy twenty-centimetre long leaves and fragrant, white magnolia-like flowers

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in spring. Maple crimson kings line the western side of the Dunedin homestead, their dark crimson leaves deepening to blood-red in summer. There are smaller Eucryphia or leatherwood trees, a Liriodendron or tulip tree, a white flowering chestnut Aesculus, a forest pansy Cercis canadensis, and five different types of elderberry Sambucus. It was with a few trees that this novice gardener started out in the 1970s. At the time, the garden at Dunedin was nothing but a bare paddock surrounded by an old lambertiana hedge, a pin oak and a few elm trees, and twenty-eight depressing macrocarpa pines that were pulled down. The soil was abysmal and, before anything could be planted, the ground had to be poisoned to eliminate all the twitch and grass. So Annabel mapped out her proposed beds with garden hoses, and sprayed the ground within. Next came mulch. The first layer of this was the old navy carpet that Annabel ripped out of the homestead,

the second was old jumpers and other clothes. Manure from the shearing shed was piled on top, then newspapers, and lots of pea straw. Mulch and water, says Annabel, are critical to any garden’s success. As she started to fill in the garden beds she had created, Annabel joined all manner of gardening groups such as the Heritage Rose Society, the Royal Horticultural Society of England and the US Rock Garden Society, through which seeds and plants were bought by subscription. The Heritage Rose Society alone was the source of 150 different roses. From there developed an interest in perennials, such as Eremurus, or foxtail lily. Their tall spikes add height and colour, and many different varieties are grown in this garden. As the trees grew over the years, more woodland plants were added to take advantage of the shade. Annabel grows many different type of Hostas, plants native to the Far East, most species occurring in the

damp woodland areas of Japan, and propagates any number of Trillium. She loves the diversity provided by magnificent foliage, particularly variegated leaves that can lift any dark spot. Some favourites are the rare variegated Canna, the Bengal tiger, and the Armoracia rusticana variegata, or variegated horseradish, both imported from America. Twenty varieties of ornamental grasses can be found in the Dunedin gardens, including: Miscanthus sacchariflorus, which can grow two to three metres in a year and forms a wonderful windbreak or screen; Miscanthus variegatus, a variegated grass; and Stipa gigantea, a glorious semi-evergreen grass that can grow to about two metres in height and is adorned with oat-like inflorescences above graceful fountains of foliage. Other not-your-average-garden plants include: Symphytum uplandicum, or Russian comfrey; Watsonia ardernei, or bugle lily, a native of South Africa;

Brugmansia, or angel’s trumpet, with small trumpetshaped flowers, native to South America; and the spectacular golden flowers of Ranunculus cortusiflora. The picking beds boast peonies and climbing sweet peas, to name just a few. Adorning other areas are dahlias, pink lilium, salvias, many different varieties of foxgloves, climbing clematis and a rare Clematis Florida Sieboldii from Japan, flowering Heucheras, and wispy blue Nepeta subsessilis. Sisyrinchium striatum, or satin flower, is oldfashioned but handy, as it will seed itself, and then there are Philadelphus, or mock orange, hybrid Moyesii ‘Geranium’ roses, bred at the Royal Horticultural Society’s home of Wisley, Surrey, in 1938, and hydrangeas from the famous US plant hunter Dan Hinkley. A beautiful paved part of the garden features a sandstone statue carved by Daniel Herbert, of Ross Bridge fame, and there are two other statues, Poppy, who stands ensconced in variegated deutzia, and Pan. Annabel’s advice is to go with one or two beautiful statues—that’s all you need. There’s also a tranquil fish pond, lined with lilies and boasting a small frog water fountain. While most of the time she’s slaving away keeping the gardens weed-free, dynamic and recharged, the garden has relaxation areas for all occasions, and that’s a favoured pastime too. Annabel had never gardened before she moved to Dunedin as a young married woman from Hobart— the blind date with Angus Scott arranged by her friends had gone exceptionally well. They moved into the old homestead, but it was in poor shape, having been deserted for twelve years. Its aesthetics also were not enhanced by the two-storey enclosed verandah that had been tacked onto the front of the home some decades earlier. Annabel and Angus pulled it down and, to their delight, discovered it had been built entirely of top-quality Huon pine. This they used to furnish a new sunroom, and create benchtops and cupboards for the renovated kitchen. There were six layers of wallpaper that had to be removed from the living areas and the woodwork was stained. The place was so filled with silverfish that one night, not long after she moved in, Annabel had a dream they had eaten the entire staircase.

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But the homestead was gradually restored, as were outbuildings: a beautiful old dairy was turned into an office, and the stables still come in handy for the horses needed to muster sheep and cattle on this 8000-hectare property. Dunedin homestead was built in about 1858 to replace an original home on the property that burned down. Its owner was Captain Samuel Tulloch, originally from the Shetland Islands. He ran away to sea at the age of twelve, and eventually captained several ships, including the Halcyon, which was a regular packet between Launceston and Adelaide. His daughter Alice married Robert Steele Scott, and one of their eight children, Samuel Tulloch Scott, established himself as a leading breeder of Aberdeen Angus cattle and Merino sheep at Dunedin. Angus is Samuel Scott’s grandson. After Annabel’s day begins at 5.30 am with the hoses being turned on, there’s any number of tasks to attend to, depending on the season, from policing the weeds to pruning, mulching and fertilising. It’s a never-ending battle against thistle, oxalis, and native animals, but Annabel has the upper hand. In her potting houses, Annabel propagates rare and unusual plants, transplanting them into the garden when they’re established enough, or giving them away. She describes herself as something of a frustrated artist; the flowers are her palette, and the garden her continually evolving canvas. Her three top tips for a successful garden are: doing it for the love of it; focusing on health (of self and plants); and ample quantities of water and mulch.

Annabel’s recipe for elderflower syrup 2 large lemons 30 elderflower heads 2 ounces citric or tartaric acid 3 pounds sugar 3 pints boiling water Slice lemons thinly. Place in a jug or large bowl with the flower heads (including as little stalk as possible). Sprinkle with citric acid and sugar and pour boiling water over. Cover with a lid and leave for three days in a cool place, skimming daily. Then bottle it—you can freeze it too.

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Egleston The decision to sell their famous family estate, Kameruka, was gut-wrenching for Frank Foster and his wife, Odile. It meant severing ties with more than 150 years of a Tooth dynasty tradition, about 4000 hectares of prized beef and dairy country on the New South Wales south coast, an 1834 verandah-lined homestead and gardens that were a six-time winner of the Sydney Morning Herald garden competition. But it also led the couple to Egleston, near Campbell Town in the Central Midlands, and they still can’t believe their luck. They are now the proud custodians of a stunningly restored Georgian mansion that is steeped in history, with gently sloping gardens above river flats that would bring a tear to any former dairy farmer’s eye, and it is all just one hour’s drive away from the troutfishing heaven of the Central Highlands. The original owner of this property, John Headlam, and his family arrived in Hobart in 1820 from the English village of Eggleston, in County Durham. 84 | 85

They were ‘the first who built and established a respectable Boarding School in Hobart at great expense’, Headlam wrote in a memorial to Governor Arthur for land. They received 775 acres of land on the Macquarie River, but didn’t move to Egleston until 1830, when Headlam retired as headmaster of a government school in Launceston, reportedly amid controversy over his teaching style. His grand seven-bedroom brick and stucco Georgian mansion was built about this time. Son Charles Headlam took over Egleston upon his father’s death and, in 1851, founded the Egleston stud flock with five Saxon Merino ewes and one ram. He would become the biggest pastoralist in Tasmania, with holdings eventually totalling some 80,000 acres, on which he ran 60,000 sheep. In 1852 Charles Headlam pleaded with the colonial secretary for the continuation of convict transportation as it was already so difficult to find enough workers for his farms.

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Tasmania’s first shearing machines were installed in the Egleston woolshed, which established a reputation for fine, dense, top-priced wool. Egleston had several other owners before Launceston sawmiller Stephen Kerrison made it his home. Kerrison is credited with much of its restoration, which included lavish use of wood, from blackwood parquet floors laid in a 1980s addition to the home, to the fittings in the modernised kitchen, and even the authentically colonial-looking built-ins in some of the formal rooms. In 2003 Kerrison, aged about eighty, drowned at Bakers Beach, in Tasmania’s north. After his death, his daughter lived at Egleston for a year before it was put on the market. The Campbell Town community was abuzz after the October 2004 auction, when a mystery bidder paid two and a half million dollars for Egleston. Tongues were really wagging when, two weeks later, Virgin Blue co-founder Rob Sherrard snapped up nearby Lake House at auction and was revealed as the new owner of the two. Mr Sherrard had his heart set on Lake House, the auction of which was to take place two weeks after that of Egleston. Not wanting to risk ending up with neither, Mr Sherrard bid on Egleston, and then Lake House, and ended up with them both. While Egleston was already in good condition, Mr Sherrard did some updating, adding bathrooms, removing wallpaper and carpet, and polishing up the cedar and Baltic pine floorboards, skirting boards and other fittings. Water that had filled the cellar was removed, and a pump installed to keep it that way, and drainage problems between the house and the outbuildings were fixed in a major operation that involved correcting the ground levels to create raised lawn areas, and then putting in stone retaining walls in front of the old outbuildings and around some of the ornamental trees. Significant work was also done to tidy up the magnificent established gardens and orchard. When his job at Egleston was done, Mr Sherrard put it up for sale so as to turn his attention to Lake House, which was in need of decidedly more work. Having made the decision to sell the vast estate of Kameruka, Frank and Odile wanted a home with historic significance to replace it. They scoured New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand without success before it occurred to Frank that Tasmania, where they had both enjoyed fishing, might be just the place.

A real estate agent insisted they inspect Egleston, and the Fosters had not even set eyes on the homestead when they knew they would buy it—the feel of the place was enough as they turned off the road through grand green wrought-iron gates and headed past prime grazing country towards the Macquarie River. It was a bonus that there was nothing to do to the place but move in, which they did in November 2007. Neighbouring farmers, who all have their own fine historic homes too, have rapidly become great friends and it’s emerged that some of them, also Fosters, are quite possibly related. Egleston does not have a modern heating system, so winter could prove a challenge, however one of Mr Kerrison’s many legacies at this property was a new open-plan living and dining sunroom area that is much cosier than the grand formal rooms. The formal dining room and drawing room both have marble fireplaces with sandstone hearths at each end, and two sets of French doors. These open out onto a wide flagstone-paved verandah with elegant fretwork that looks down over the formal garden, tennis court, and Macquarie River plains. There is a blackwood-panelled library with open fireplace and, upstairs, seven bedrooms with extensive views across the countryside through delightful twelve-paned windows. In the cellar are four stone rooms that will undoubtedly prove themselves useful in the future, while a giant billiard room and granny flat have been incorporated into one of the old stables. The outbuildings, which also include a stone barn and blacksmith shop, form an impressive courtyard at the back of the home. Frank Foster’s great-grandfather, Sir Robert Tooth, made Kameruka famous after he acquired it from his uncle in 1857. At one stage the property was about 500,000 acres, although that reduced significantly over time. Sir Robert’s family founded Tooth & Co., which owned Sydney’s inner-city Kent Brewery and later several other brewing interests, and he was actively involved in their management. At Tooth & Co., employees didn’t just brew the beer—they apparently drank it four times a day, with a schooner ration provided at morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and when they clocked off at the end of the day. Carlton and United bought the brewery in 1983, and an era ended when, twenty years later, they announced it would close to make way for a new residential development.

At Kameruka, Sir Robert established an entire agricultural community. He built six-roomed cottages for his tenant farmers, a school, church, meeting hall, store, post office, golf course and a cricket oval where, in 1885, the touring English XI took on a Kameruka XXII and won by an innings and twelve runs. English trees were planted on a large scale, a lake was built and dairying was pursued, using Australia’s first herd of Jersey cows. From there came three cheese factories and the production of the highly popular Kameruka cheddar cheese, still manufactured today, but by Bega. In 1882 Sir Robert Tooth also built castellated Gothic mansion The Swifts at Darling Point, to specifications that included its ballroom being bigger than the one at Government House. In 1997 The Swifts was sold for a reported twelve million dollars, and it’s said an equal amount has since been spent on its restoration.

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Robert had divided his estate into thirds for his sons to inherit, but all three were killed in World War I. Kameruka passed to two grand-daughters, and then to one of their sons, Frank Foster, who came out to Australia from Scotland in 1975 to take on the estate. By this time, Kameruka covered about 4000 hectares that were used for beef, sheep and dairy farming. But with no children of his own to inherit the property—complete with its village and twentyfive or so houses—and no one else in the family line interested in taking on the property, Frank came to the conclusion that eventually the estate was going to have to be sold, it was just a question of when. By chance, an Englishman heard about the possible sale of the property from two separate sources within a week and it was sold before it even went on the market. The odd pieces of Kameruka memorabilia hang proudly at Egleston in a fabulous fusion of history.

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Ellenthorpe Hall For almost fifteen years, many of the most eligible young women in Van Diemen’s Land could all be found under the one roof at Ellenthorpe Hall. For this period of time from 1827, the two-storey sandstone mansion, sixteen kilometres west of Ross in the Central Midlands, was regarded as one of the most fashionable boarding schools in the land where instruction took place in everything from harp to French, useful and decorative needlework, mathematics and dance. It was the work of Hannah Maria Clarke (nee Davice), who emigrated to Hobart in order to open a school and then moved her successful establishment to the country where both she and her husband, George, had been granted land. Exclusivity was the order of the day as Hannah hand-picked her pupils from the leading families of the colony. Reports vary as to how many young ladies went to Ellenthorpe Hall; some records suggest between thirty and fifty at any one time, others claim 92 | 93

this is more likely to be the total number of pupils to have passed through. In any event, those who did attend are thought to have included: Eliza Collins, the daughter of Tasmania’s first governor, David Collins; her half-sister Mary Watts, the daughter of wealthy Clarendon grazier James Cox; Elizabeth Crowther, whose brother became premier; and the daughters of Robert Bostock, from Vaucluse. Their ‘board, washing and education’ cost about forty pounds a year, more for music lessons. Mail was censored and the girls rarely went home but, according to the authors of The Life and Labours of George Washington Walker, the school was ‘an excellent establishment which has, no doubt, contributed its share in giving to the upper class of Tasmania the refinement for which it is distinguished’. Ellenthorpe Hall was also a serious farm, growing under George Carr Clarke from 4000 to more than 44,000 acres and running in excess of 20,000 sheep.

So seriously did George Carr Clarke take his sheep that he built the property’s striking shearing shed out of superior dressed stone but the main house out of mere rubble. The homestead was built by convicts who laid the foundation stone in December 1826, reportedly making it the oldest double-storey stone residence in the Midlands. Barely one hundred metres away are soldiers’ barracks, as the convicts needed guards, and later the property needed protection from bushrangers, Aborigines and sheep stealers. Ellenthorpe Hall was eventually carved up into a number of substantial farms that were sold separately. The barracks, shearing shed and mansion were bundled up into one smaller parcel and also sold. At the time of this first sale, the house had become a depressing and decaying site. In 1999 the Dowling family, of the adjacent and similarly named property Ellenthorpe, acquired the 157-hectare parcel. Over the next five years, Ellenthorpe Hall was lovingly restored and the results are stunning.

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Ellenthorpe Hall is perfectly symmetrical, with a central hallway and five main rooms on the first floor, an exact replica on the second and six rooms in the attic. Two giant chimneys service a total of ten fireplaces, two of these elaborately decorated sandstone courtesy of convict stonemason Daniel Herbert, whose work on the famous Ross Bridge carvings earned him his freedom and is still revered. These priceless features had turned brown from grime when the Dowlings took on Ellenthorpe Hall. There was a metre of water in the cellars and it took eighteen months to stop the roof from leaking. Every room had holes in the walls and the sandstone verandah had shifted off the front of the house. All this was after renovations started by the previous owner, Simon Brown. Recounting his restoration work to the Examiner newspaper in 1978, he said it had taken 120 hours to strip the paint off just one door and its architraves. ‘It had twelve coats of paint and yielded 8.5 kilograms of paint,’ he said. There were any number of people who told the Dowlings they should bulldoze Ellenthorpe Hall and

do up the exceptional shearing shed instead. But, after a five-year repair and renovation job, John Dowling, his wife, Sue, and their sons, Edward and Hamish, finally moved in on 1 April 2005. Aside from assiduously fixing the shell, there was a new state-of-the-art kitchen, lavishly decorated dining and sitting rooms, five bedrooms upstairs, six in the attic, two ultra-modern bathrooms and a sunroom overlooking a lake that was recently deepened and stocked with rainbow trout. Ellenthorpe’s centrepiece is its wide, flagstone-lined hallway that leads to a double-storey portico enclosed by walls at the centre of the home’s façade. Hallway walls that were once covered in green felt are now painted white and adorned with beautifully framed original maps and designs for the Ellenthorpe property that the Dowlings found torn and stuffed in a paper bag. Sadly, that’s about all of the original belongings that remain in the house; it was once filled with incredible antiques and artworks dating back to its school days

but these were all sold by the Brown estate at a separate auction in 2006 and interest was intense. Sue did, however, recently find an old inkwell in the grounds that must hark back to the building’s school days, along with five butterflies embroidered in white lace. In the sitting-room window, on an original glass pane, a student scratched her initials, ACV, with a diamond and the engraving remains. Two arched doorways on either side of the portico open onto a wide, sandstone-paved verandah, with slender cast-iron columns that supposedly suggest an Egyptian influence and which were a later addition to the house. It was these that bushrangers apparently tried to use as scaffolding during a daring attack on the school in 1838. The story goes that three escaped convicts had been terrorising the Midlands, committing murder, until one day in May they surprised a party of men digging potatoes near Ellenthorpe Hall, ordering them to kneel down and be tied up. They refused, and one of the men fled to raise the alarm at the school.

Every mattress, pillowcase and cushion in Ellenthorpe Hall was piled behind its large Georgian windows, and heavy furniture heaped behind that. The girls were all ordered to lie on the floor in case a bullet managed to make it through. When the bushrangers arrived, the place was barricaded. One was shot dead by a worker and the other two bushrangers fled. All this time, with a household full of vulnerable women, George Carr Clarke was apparently hiding under his bed. George Clarke was born at Ellenthorp Hall in Yorkshire in 1789, and began his working life as a silk merchant. He was also known as ‘One-Eyed’ Clarke, having lost an eye as a child when one of his brothers shot him with an arrow. He emigrated to Hobart in 1822, followed a year later by Hannah Davice, to whom it is believed he was engaged. She set up her school in Hobart while he made money from mills. They married in 1824. Ellenthorpe Hall was built as the nucleus of adjoining land grants

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they had both received, and the school opened there in September 1827. Between 1825 and 1836 six children were born to the Clarkes, two girls, two boys and two stillborn babies. Hannah left Tasmania for England in 1841 with her four surviving children at the insistence of her husband—ironically, to give them a better education. She died in 1847. George Carr Clarke stayed in Tasmania until the sight in his only eye deteriorated so badly he had to travel to England for a cataract operation in 1863, which he did not survive. Ellenthorpe Hall was carved up and sold, and Clarke’s two sons moved to Queensland. The home allotment was bought by wealthy coach proprietor Samuel Page, whose daughter Julia Brown and her descendants stayed there until the place changed hands for only the second time in 1999.

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Exton House If maintaining hedges that stretch for fifty kilometres sounds like hard work, try an eighteen-year home restoration that is still continuing. But the results certainly vindicate the massive effort. When this property’s 170-year-old hawthorn hedges burst into a haze of soft white blossom, it’s a spellbinding journey down the long driveway they line. It leads into an old, tree-framed lane that opens onto a turning circle in front of Exton House in Tasmania’s Central North district, described in 1900 as one of the best-appointed estates in the colony. After Harvey and Julie Gee bought the property in 1990, they spent an enormous amount of time and resources restoring the homestead, surrounding buildings, hedges and gardens. Eighteen years of careful renovation has brought out the very best in this Georgian estate, restoring not only the property but Exton’s place as one of the jewels in Tasmania’s cultural heritage crown. The interior of the ten-bedroom mansion is an 100 | 101

extravagant exhibition of original cedar, from wide skirting boards to doors and their giant frames, builtins, staircases, and solid wood interior shutters that bolt fast with iron, designed to keep bushrangers out. The Reverend Samuel Martin named Exton House in honour of his wife, Sarah (nee Exton), when they arrived from England in the early 1800s. The original home was destroyed by fire and the two-storey home that replaced it, built in the 1840s, is attached to the 1820s walled courtyard and servants’ wing, which is in turn surrounded by a convict stone barn, lock-up, coach-house and large stables with hay loft above. From the 1830s to the 1860s, Exton House was a famous Australian Shorthorn stud under the ownership of the Bennett family. The property now supports a large Angus herd and prime lamb flock. Thirty miles of hawthorn was planted to mark out the paddock boundaries. A remarkable feature of the property is the twenty-metre-wide laneways—a full

surveyor’s chain width across—bordered with hedges that extend out of sight in every direction. The hedges take around one month to trim, an event that happens every winter, ready for the spring growth. They are as much a feature of the property as the house and the rich farmland they surround. In return for their dedication, the current owners have been rewarded by the property constantly providing above-average seasons, even when much of the state is in drought. The Exton House property still springs to life every September, as it has for nearly two hundred years.

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Forcett House Forcett House was the home of James Gordon, farmer and magistrate, after whom Tasmania’s mighty Gordon River was named. Built in 1832 on a sandstone knob that commands panoramic views over Pitt Water in southern Tasmania, it was at the time part of an estate of some 600 acres. Forcett House has been beautifully preserved, thanks in part to the dryness of the sandstone on which it sits. A unique feature of this convict-brick homestead is its clerestory (pronounced clear-storey), a small upper level rising above the roof. Its glass walls provide light for the five-bedroom attic that was originally servants’ quarters, and it doubles as a 360-degree lookout for unwanted guests. The attic part of the home remains virtually untouched since the 1800s; even the original grey paint is still intact. Dividing the lounge room and dining room downstairs is a beautiful concertinaed cedar door, 108 | 109

which folds back to make the two rooms one. In the middle of this is another door, enabling access between the rooms when they are divided. Allowing light to stream into the living areas at the front of the home are magnificent Palladian or Venetian windows. The home also features several blind or ‘dummy’ windows—windows that don’t have an opening, but even have the glazing bars painted in. Downstairs are just two bedrooms; James Gordon and his wife never had children. However, at the western end of an enclosed courtyard is a two-storey convict-built section. This housed the original kitchen and granary but has now been converted to selfcontained accommodation should extra guests arrive to stay. James Gordon was born in Forcett, Yorkshire, and emigrated to Sydney to pursue a career in trade. He was appointed naval officer at Hobart Town in 1814, but left this posting a year later to focus on farming

his land grant. He was considered a highly progressive farmer but is blamed for the introduction to Tasmania of the spear or Scotch thistle, apparently doing so for sentimental reasons. Gordon was appointed district magistrate and coroner in 1826, and principal superintendent of convicts in 1828. From there followed stints as a police magistrate at Launceston and then Richmond, closer to home. His failure to keep proper financial accounts was his downfall. After several complaints and a number of inquiries that cleared him of fraud, he was forced to resign as police magistrate in 1832, and in 1835 he was also replaced as a member of the Legislative Council, to which he had been appointed in 1829. Gordon was a good friend of sealer James Kelly, who later became harbourmaster of the Derwent

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River. In 1815 Kelly set out in a whaleboat on a circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land, on which he discovered Port Davey, and Macquarie Harbour at Strahan. It is said that Gordon had given Kelly the whaleboat on which he explored the river at the mouth of Macquarie Harbour, and so it was named in his honour. James Gordon died in 1842 and left his estate to his wife for her distribution among relatives. Forcett House was owned for a time by the Harvey family, which was closely connected with George Adams’ Tattersall’s empire. Forcett House was bought a few years ago by Robert and Carmel Torenius. Carmel, the Mayor of Sorell, had secretly adored the home for years and could hardly believe her luck when the auction made her and her husband its proud new owners.

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High Peak When the Grant family made the move from their Hobart city home to High Peak in the 1950s, their friends threw a party to say a proper farewell. Which was very ‘Hobart’ when you consider that the new location at Neika was only about fifteen minutes’ drive from the old one in town. But situated high on the slopes of the spectacular Mount Wellington, there is a sense of isolation in this subalpine environment of forest and pristine creeks, and this is what made High Peak such a perfect summer retreat for generations of the Grant family from the late 1800s. Neika is about thirteen kilometres from Hobart along the winding old Huon Highway that was once the main thoroughfare between Hobart and the thriving Huon Valley apple-growing district. Charles Henry Grant, described as ‘pre-eminently a money making machine and successful speculator’, bought twenty-three acres of land here in 1888, and in 1891 he engaged prominent architect George Fagg 114 | 115

to design him a chalet for his family’s summer residence. Fagg remains highly regarded for his work on church buildings, including the chancel and chapel of Hobart’s St David’s Cathedral. The mountain chalet he designed is a grand, two-storey Victorian Tudorstyle building, with an asymmetrical roof featuring gables of different sizes with battened ends. The exterior woodwork is of rare King Billy pine— the trees were cleared on site—the windowsills are of Huon pine, the lower floor was built of rubble stone collected on the property, and the upper storey features stucco over timber lathes and wire mesh. The home, one of only a few heritage Tudor-style buildings in Tasmania, has a grand formal entrance hall, dining and drawing rooms, children’s playroom with separate entrance, a large kitchen, butler’s pantry, seven bedrooms, servants’ quarters, and a more recently built conservatory/sunroom living area. From the upstairs balcony, the views down over Kingston and the

Derwent River are perhaps only surpassed by those from the Mount Wellington summit. Exquisite stained-glass windows brought out from Belgium and featuring rare cranberry glass roundels adorn the front door. The home is decorated with Jacobean-style English oak furniture that was handcarved in France especially for this summer home. The house and tennis court at High Peak sit at the bottom of highly significant gardens, which have thrived in annual rainfall of over a metre (twice that of Hobart) and rich volcanic soil. Some of its rare species include monkey puzzle trees, or Araucaria araucana, native to the lower slopes of the Chilean Andes and so named because they would puzzle (as much as severely injure) any monkey that tried to climb them. It takes about eighty years before the monkey puzzle trees even produce seeds. Those in the garden of High Peak were bought by Charles Henry at great expense about 130 years ago, and it is from High Peak that the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens has recently received a monkey puzzle seedling. There are also sequoia trees or giant American redwoods, yew (which can live for thousands of years), other araucarias and conifers, yellow holly, spruce, cedar, Norfolk pine and the common macrocarpa pine. The formal gardens are laid out with extensive English box and pittosporum hedges, hydrangeas, and the Grants stopped counting the different rhododendrons at fifty-two. Thanks to the possums, the roses have to be kept in a separate area under protective nets but, nevertheless, springtime ushers in a carpet of flowers. The Duke and Duchess of York were entertained at High Peak in 1901, as were departing Antarctic expeditioners, and in 1902 High Peak hosted a garden party as part of the Australian Science Congress. Charles Henry Grant, a brilliant mathematician and engineer, came to Tasmania in 1872 to oversee construction of the Hobart to Launceston rail line. After the first train travelled the route in 1876, Grant pursued a range of business interests; some of his many directorships included Cascade Brewery, Hobart Gas and the Hobart Coffee Palace. He was returned unopposed twice as a Legislative Council member for Hobart, and was the driving force behind the Hobart Electric Tramway company. Such was the esteem in which C.H. Grant was held that when he died in 1902, flags on all public buildings in Hobart were flown at half-mast, and in 1914 the locality of Granton was named in his honour. 116 | 117

His son, Charles William Grant, inherited High Peak in 1912 along with the family tradition of playing a prominent role in public life. In addition to serving as a state and federal politician, C.W. Grant was foundation chairman of the Hobart Bridge Company, which built the first pontoon bridge connecting the eastern and western shores of Hobart in 1943. He was also chairman of Cascade Brewery, had involvement in Hobart’s first crematorium and was a director of Davies Bros Ltd, publisher of the Hobart Mercury newspaper. In the 1950s, C.W.’s son, Charles Henry, his wife, Gwen, and their three young boys decided to move from Hobart and make High Peak their permanent home, prompting the farewell party from their Hobart friends. Their son Jim and his wife, Annabelle, live here today. High Peak was lucky to survive the Black Tuesday bushfires that swept through southern Tasmania in 1967, claiming sixty-two lives. The fires came so close to the home that all the trees just below the formal garden were lost, and a man had to spend the entire day on the roof, putting out spot fires as the sparks landed. When High Peak was re-roofed in 2003, the Grants discovered that the whole length of a barge-

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board on a northern gable of the house was charred through, so close did it come to being another casualty of one of Australia’s worst disasters. Re-roofing is just one of the many updates that have occurred at High Peak since Jim and Annabelle moved here ten years ago from the property they named Off Peak, just down the hill. They repainted High Peak, laid new carpet, added a conservatorystyle living area, renovated the laundry and bathrooms and have spent hours sorting through the heritage stored in some of the old cupboards. A clean-out of the linen cupboard uncovered several elegant maids’ pinafores, cuffs and hats. In a small brown paper bag lying among old toothbrushes used for cleaning the silver was a stunning ivory silk presentation dress, with intricate bugle beading; it is thought Jim’s grandmother probably wore it when she was presented to the royal court in England. One of the biggest challenges is keeping the house warm. Jim is experimenting with double glazing and is so impressed with the initial results that plans are afoot to double glaze everything, even the fine stained-glass windows, to ensure that this grand old summer home continues to have a bright future, year-round.

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Highfield From the King of Iceland, to a convict explorer for the Van Diemen’s Land Company, with headquarters at Highfield, north-west Tasmania: this was just one of the many remarkable turns taken in the life of Jørgen Jørgensen, both in Tasmania and abroad. As a young Danish adventurer who idolised Captain Cook, Jørgensen was first mate on the Lady Nelson when it berthed in 1803 at Risdon Cove, just north of what was to become Hobart, where European settlement of Tasmania started. Back in the northern hemisphere six years later, Jørgenson arrested the Danish governor of Iceland and declared himself ‘His Excellency, the Protector of all Iceland’—a reign that was lavish for all of its nine weeks. There were stints in and out of London gaols, as a prisoner of war and a petty thief, and a spell as a British foreign office spy, until, in 1826, Jørgensen was sent to Hobart for a second time—this time as a convict, but one with impeccable connections. 124 | 125

Carrying letters of recommendation from two prominent London-based directors of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, Jørgensen soon scored himself a job with it. The company had to identify the 250,000 acres of land it would take up for a fine wool-growing enterprise in the colony, but there was a serious snag: it had to be somewhere in the largely unexplored north-west mountain and rainforest country. And so the man variously referred to as the King of Iceland, the Convict King and the Viking of Van Diemen’s Land became a Tasmanian explorer for a while. Neither Jørgensen nor any other explorer associated with the company ever found the massive swathe of grazing country it sought. Such land did not exist. So wretched were the north-west ‘wastelands’ that the company, after many bitter battles with Governor Arthur in Hobart, was eventually allowed to select 350,000 acres of land in separate parts of the northwest, but not much of that was considered any good.

Today the Van Diemen’s Land Company is the last Royal Charter company in the world still operating on its original lands, at its Woolnorth property at Cape Grim where it had selected 100,000 acres. It runs one of the southern hemisphere’s largest dairying operations and affairs are still handled in traditional fashion by a governor and court of directors. But in the 1800s, the company was regarded as one of the most unfortunate capitalist ventures of its time. The eleven wealthy London businessmen behind the venture—formed with one million pounds as seed capital in 1824—thought they would make a killing out of growing fine wool in the colony. It received its Royal Charter in 1825 and permission from King George IV to take up 250,000 acres ‘beyond the ramparts of the unknown’ in north-west Tasmania. The Van Diemen’s Land Company set up headquarters at Circular Head just west of Stanley and based another major outpost at Cape Grim, where there was some useful grassy land. But the rest of its grant was unsuitable for just about anything back then, and the expensive Merinos imported from Spain and Germany were lost to a combination of extreme cold and rain, marauding dogs, Tasmanian tigers (the company employed a full-time tiger hunter from 1830 to the early 1900s) and Aborigines. Many surviving Aborigines had retreated to the north-west coast as a last bastion of land untouched by Europeans, but they came off second best in frequent skirmishes with convicts assigned to the Van Diemen’s Land Company’s vast lands. The 1828 ‘Woolnorth massacre’ occurred when four convict shepherds shot a group of thirty Aborigines and hurled their bodies over the steep cliffs of Cape Grim. In 1830, as the stock and financial losses mounted, the company’s chief agent in Tasmania, Edward Curr, suggested the court of directors withdraw from the wool-growing enterprise, at least for the time being. When they refused, he decided to build himself a proper house. Visitors to Highfield Historic Site today are stunned by the outlook over wild Bass Strait, the position set atop an old volcano stump called the Nut, as well as by its preservation, the explanatory plaques and interactive features for visitors and the many stone outbuildings that surround it. In the 1830s, visitors marvelled at the modern, elegant Regency design of this home in its farflung location, quite distinct from the more robust Georgian mansions seen on most farming properties of the time. 126 | 127

The architect of Highfield was the company’s hapless chief surveyor, Henry Hellyer, and it’s thought his drawings were based on the very latest in London architectural designs. So even as the Van Diemen’s Land Company bled, its stature was at least assured in the form of the distinguished convict-built home. According to the historic site’s website, the home was designed to allow the ‘light of reason’ to shine into the main rooms through large French windows, as well as the unsurpassed views. Highfield also features English-made joinery and fittings (believed to make it unique in Australia), newly invented tongue and groove floors, timber tracery along the verandah, self-closing doors, marble fireplaces and a geometric staircase. Next door, the original wooden Highfield (which Jørgensen visited in between his exploring adventures) became servants’ quarters, and eventually other buildings were added, such as a stone chapel, stables, pigsties, slaughterhouse, barn, workers’ cottages and convicts’ barracks for some of the two hundred prisoners assigned to the company. Before the home was even finished in 1835, the company withdrew from fine wool and focused its attention on breeding rams, cattle and horses. In 1840 Edward Curr was dismissed and replaced by a young farmer, James Gibson. Gibson knew that so far as his company’s land was concerned, Governor Arthur’s 1834 declaration that the entire Aboriginal population had been rounded up and removed from Tasmania was somewhat premature. As chief agent of the company he asked that a special police constable be stationed at Woolnorth to ‘capture the natives’ that were still there. An elderly man, a woman and five boys were seized in 1842. William Lanney, or King Billy, was one of them, aged seven at the time. In 1869 he was the last tribal Aboriginal male to die in Tasmania (seven years before Truganini) and the mutilation of his corpse was a shocking scandal, even at that time. By candlelight, surgeon William Crowther crept into the hospital where Lanney’s body lay and removed his skull, which he sought for scientific purposes. From the hospital’s dissecting room he took the skull of a white man and tried to insert it under Lanney’s skin to cover his tracks. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work. When the hospital’s resident surgeon, George Stokell, discovered what had happened, orders were given to amputate Lanney’s hands and feet to thwart any further attempt by Crowther to obtain a specimen.

But after his ceremonial funeral, Stokell and others dug up Lanney’s body from its grave and performed further horrifying dissections, removing the flesh from his bones. Lanney’s skull was never found. Back at Highfield, new chief agent James Gibson also implemented a policy of bringing tenant farmers onto company land to try to turn the company’s fortunes around, but by 1851 the directors had lost enough, and the company sold all its stock, dismissed its staff and put all its land up for sale or lease. Highfield was leased and then sold and, after a succession of owners, began to decay. The company’s holding at Emu Bay became the City of Burnie, and land at the inland holdings of Hampshire and Surrey Hills eventually became prized for its timber, on which the region’s pulp and paper industry was formed. But the Woolnorth property at Cape Grim couldn’t even be given away, so eventually the company resumed farming there in the 1870s as surrounding Crown land was cleared and successfully farmed. Today the north-west coast is famed for its rich red soils and intensive agriculture. The New Zealand company Tasman Agriculture acquired a majority stake in the Van Diemen’s Land Company in the 1990s, and has now turned the Woolnorth property into one of the southern hemisphere’s largest dairy operations. It is also home to Tasmania’s largest wind farm and, according to the United Nation’s monitoring station, the world’s cleanest air. Highfield was in a sorry state when acquired in 1982 by the Tasmanian government for preservation. Using the original drawings by Hellyer, the homestead was extensively restored and is now open to the public. The ghost of Henry Hellyer is apparently a frequent visitor to the site. He committed suicide in 1832, the year work on Highfield commenced; some say he did so because of the disaster that was the land he had identified as suitable for grazing, others because of salacious rumours about his sexuality. As for Jørgen Jørgensen, he left the company in 1828 to become a ticket-of-leave police constable at Oatlands. For a time he oversaw the construction of the Ross Bridge, and it is believed that a prominent carving on its northern façade is of him, complete with a ‘convict crown’. He became a prolific writer and was fully pardoned, but died at the age of sixtyone in Hobart, a destitute drunk. Highfield is open to the public seven days a week between September and May, and on weekdays for the rest of the year. 128 | 129

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Hollow Tree At Llanberis, in the sleepy little hamlet of Hollow Tree, the next generation of Halletts is about to move in. But beforehand, there’s a little bit of work to be done. Such as rewiring—no easy task when you’re dealing with half-metre-thick sandstone walls. The unusual Gothic-style home is being repainted and re-pointed, and a chimney has been taken down, brick by brick, to be reassembled more securely. There have also been remarkable discoveries during the renovation, such as masses of horse hair padding out the walls and original flagstones under the laundry’s timber floor. Just down the road at the former Montacute homestead, on a hill commanding serene views of the Clyde Valley, St James is also enjoying something of a resurrection. The Halletts have taken it upon themselves to be caretakers of this little stone church since 1900. As for Sherwood, the long-since-unoccupied fourstorey sandstone mansion is boarded up, waiting for her turn to shine again. 132 | 133

Hollow Tree, near the Central Highlands town of Bothwell, largely comprises Llanberis, Montacute and Sherwood, all three owned by the Hallett family. In between managing what seems like a never-ending drought, they are faithful in tending to the wealth of cultural heritage in their paddocks. Although the drought has indeed caused some decline of the landscaped Llanberis gardens, enclosed by a giant cypress hedge. As Richard and Amy Hallett, with their three young children, prepare to move into this old family home, salvaging them is pretty much a case of redesigning the garden landscape with a view to the changing climate. So far as the house is concerned, it’s the focus of a busy Block-style blitz involving electricians, stonemasons, painters, plasterers and plumbers, all at work at once. And Llanberis has been kept in good shape, with each generation doing its share of the upkeep. Originally known as Calton Hill, Llanberis started out life as a stone cottage built in the 1830s by John

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Patterson as his matrimonial home, sited on a low knoll overlooking the Clyde Valley. The two-storey, twin-gabled front and timber verandah on three sides were added in the 1850s or 1860s. The property underwent a few ownership changes, and a name change, before it was bought by the Halletts in 1914. They had bought neighbouring Montacute about ten years earlier. Montacute had been a thriving pastoral settlement established by Captain William Langdon on land he was granted in 1823. As the operator of trading ships between Hobart and London, Langdon is somewhat dubiously recognised for introducing blackbirds to Tasmania; he also brought out pheasants and partridges. From Napoleon’s grave at St Helena reputedly came willow trees that he planted along the River Clyde. And by his door he planted a rose cutting from Montacute House in his home town of Somerset, regarded as one of the United Kingdom’s most glorious Elizabethan mansions. Langdon’s Van Diemen’s Land version of Montacute House was much more modest, although it boasted an expansive slate roof. His settlement also included cottages, barns and a garden enclosed by a high brick and stone wall to repel Aborigines and bushrangers. Langdon died in 1879 and the property passed to his son. When Michael Sharland, author of the 1952 publication Stones of a Century, paid Montacute a visit as part of his research, the wife of a shepherd living there showed him around and he admired ‘its tall French windows, front and rear, which opened onto a verandah with graceful poles and joists. Inside, the hall was flagged, the staircase and architraves were of cedar, and there appeared to be Huon pine doors to a few of the many rooms.’ However Montacute was apparently built of inferior stone and rubble and over the years it declined. Vandals heightened the indignity, taking off with everything from the staircase to the cedar doors, fireplaces and mantelpieces. Today it is a ruin, albeit picturesque. However the Montacute family chapel, which cost Langdon a small fortune to build in the 1850s, is still in use today. Consecrated in 1857, St James is part of the Southern Midlands parish of the Anglican Church and used for services from time to time; Richard and Amy’s children, nieces and nephew were all christened there in the last five years. The font was carved from a single piece of sandstone, the original organ is behind the back pew and many Hallett descendants rest in its grounds.

The Halletts restored the church in its centenary year, 1957, and have tended to it ever since; part of the cost of the recent roof replacement was met with a small heritage grant. The Anglican Church can’t afford to maintain some of its highest-profile heritage churches in Tasmania, let alone little St James at Montacute, and the amount of money, and skills, needed to maintain cultural heritage throughout Tasmania is a significant challenge. Sherwood is a good example of one of these challenges but it has at least been fully secured to guard against vandals, and is safe for now. Secreted deep in a valley on the River Clyde, Sharland wrote in Stones of a Century that its owner, John Sherwin, must have been a recluse: It was difficult to account for his taste so far as it concerned the situation of his home. Here was a stately house hidden in the depths of a narrow valley, almost in the nature of a gulch, on the edge of a river subject to flooding, and with access presenting difficulties for the transport of the day … But if, like [Captain William] Langdon, he expected the fertile valley to bring further settlement and neighbours, he was disappointed, for Sherwood has remained isolated and concealed by the folded hills for nearly 120 years.

Sherwin was a merchant who moved to Van Diemen’s Land in 1823 with his wife, daughter and three sons, and initially established a log house on the property that was destroyed by Aborigines in an arson attack. When he set about building a more substantial settlement, Sherwin did not scrimp on sandstone. The main house is a four-storey classic Georgian mansion (the cellar runs under the length of the home), with a kitchen, bakery and meat-house at the back. A coach-house and a barn are attached to the home, there were several stone cottages, and the ha-ha and dry-stone walls are considered excellent examples of their type. In 1843, notorious Tasmanian bushranger Martin Cash spied Sherwood from a hill with his telescope. He spent several days monitoring the comings and goings down below before making his move. Cash had already escaped twice from the supposedly escape-proof Port Arthur penal settlement, the second time with two bushmen, Kavanagh and Jones. Cash and Co., as they became known, targeted the well-to-do, and earned a reputation as ‘the gentlemen bushrangers’ because they didn’t use unnecessary violence.

Sherwin was in his sitting room, entertaining guests, when Cash struck one afternoon, taking fifteen servants hostage first and ordering them onto the sitting-room floor. In his autobiography, Cash recounted how one of these servants motioned him a message that tobacco was in short supply. And so Cash saw to it that tobacco was seized and divided amongst the servants. Cash continued: So another gave me to understand by signals that we could find some grog in the cellar, upon which I ordered a bucket of wine to be brought, and gave a cup full to each, assuring them that they should have no more in case they might get elevated, and that by doing so, we might be obliged to shoot some of them to keep the remainder in order. Mr Sherwin now requested me in a kind of whine not to give the men any more drink; I observed that when he was master of the premises, he might act as he pleased, but while I claimed the sovereignty, I would not be dictated to.

Cash seized some of the guns kept in the household, and then turned to the possessions of Sherwin and his guests, who included a founding member of the Hobart Quaker community Henry Propsting. ‘Mr Propsting gave up some money, protesting on his honour that he had no more in his possession, but this, as we learned subsequently, was untrue, he having concealed his watch and 70 guineas in his boots; on being appraised of this circumstance through the medium of the Press, we solemnly resolved to trust no more Quakers in future,’ Cash wrote. ‘We collected a very respectable swag, however, of both money and property.’ Legend has it that Cash buried a bottle of gold

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sovereigns on Sherwood Hill as he left, but despite the very best of efforts, they have never been found. Later that year, Cash was sentenced to hang for the murder of one of his pursuers, but at the eleventh hour was sentenced to transportation for life at Norfolk Island, later returning to Tasmania a free man. After a successful career in trade in Launceston, Sherwin’s son Isaac retired to Sherwood in 1845 and made his mark by installing an irrigation system that is still regarded as an engineering marvel. A fatherand-son team were tasked with excavating a tunnel through a sandstone hill above the River Clyde in order to transfer water into a channel system to irrigate the surrounding land. With only a pick and a shovel, they started at opposite ends, and when the two halves of the 150-metre long, one-metre deep tunnel met up in the middle, they matched almost perfectly. Isaac Sherwin was instrumental in lobbying the government of the day to store winter water in nearby Lake Sorrell and Lake Crescent to release into the River Clyde in summer and irrigate the surrounding crops. The Clyde River Trust, formed in 1857, still operates today, but a summer flow from the lakes is increasingly difficult to obtain. The Halletts acquired Sherwood in 1921. The house hasn’t been properly lived in since the 1950s, save for some rabbit trappers and farm-hands. In the 1970s the Sandy Bay Scouts made the restoration of Sherwood one of their projects, and they visited about thirty weekends a year. Since the scouts left, the Halletts have kept Sherwood in good repair and they may one day resurrect the property’s famous roast ox nights at the homestead on the first Saturday of spring. When Llanberis is done and St James spruced up a little more, their attention might turn to bringing Sherwood back to life as a home.

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Lake House When returned serviceman Bruce Wall won Lake House in a ballot as part of the post-World War II soldier settlement scheme in Tasmania, it was on the condition that he knock the uninhabitable homestead down. At the time, the austere Georgian mansion was being used as a barn. Its heavy cedar doors had all been removed, and possums and other wildlife had moved in. Mr Wall ignored the demolition order. Later, a leading member of Tasmania’s National Trust, he set about quietly restoring the home in the evenings, after his day’s farm work had ended. Now, Lake House is about to get a major new lease of life as a luxury boutique country hotel thanks to its most recent owner, Irish-born aviation entrepreneur Rob Sherrard. Lake House was built for Robert Corney, who came to Tasmania with his wife and seven children in 1821. Corney was a wealthy London shipowner and 142 | 143

merchant but, like so many others, suffered heavy losses in the depression that followed the Napoleonic wars, and decided to invest his last 5000 pounds in a new life in Tasmania. By 1828, notwithstanding serious financial losses resulting from attacks on his stock by bushrangers and Aborigines, Corney had built a log and weatherboard house, brick kitchen and dairy, granary, malt kiln, barn and other buildings on his land grant, Lake Farm, near Cressy. His grand home, Lake House, was completed in all its sandstone-rendered glory about 1830, the same year that Corney died. Lake House is described as being of true classical villa design, possibly taken from an architect’s pattern book. The simple two-storey main block is flanked by single-storey wings, where large dining and drawing rooms are located. Each bay is accentuated by being recessed and separated by pilaster piers. One of the most recognisable features of Lake House is its timber porch of pure Greek Doric order.

The same Doric order in cedar makes a stylish fireplace surround inside. The following description of Lake House’s interior is from Clive Lucas and Ray Joyce’s Australian Country Houses: Inside has a cruciform hall with bold arches at the crossing. Originally the walls were painted in imitation of slabs of granite. At the back, a geometrical stair rises to the chamber floor above and descends to the offices in the basement. The transverse hall leads to the two wings, which are handsome single rooms with high ceilings and tall embrasured windows. The joinery is all cedar, and the principal chimneypieces are, like the porch, in the Greek Doric order. The room to the left of the front door was Robert Corney’s library and has elegant flaxed and fitted bookcases balancing the chimney breast.

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Lake House is situated on a bank right above the low-lying, meadow-flanked Macquarie River, which teems with trout and meanders through surrounding agricultural flats. The home was built with its back to this magnificent vista, although the lack of river outlook will be addressed as part of its makeover. The property also fronts the Lake River, which claimed Robert Corney’s life. He and a servant were driving a team of bullocks to Launceston when the force of the current as they crossed the river swept the animals off their feet. Their cart was sent hurtling downstream but the servant was able to scramble to safety. By the time assistance arrived from the nearby settlement of Perth, two of the four bullocks were still alive. But with no means to draw them out, and the banks being too steep to allow them to escape, they soon perished.

The body of Mr Corney was found floating a little further downstream about two hours after the accident occurred. A Launceston Advertiser account of the tragedy on 11 October 1830 noted: ‘Thus has perished one of our most worthy, and most respectable, settlers; a good father and a tender husband, he has left behind him a large family, but we understand not wholly unprovided.’ The Corneys continued to farm Lake House for about thirty years before it was incorporated into the vast estate of nearby Connorville. For the next seventy years it was used as staff accommodation, and then as a barn. Lake House was one of a number of Tasmanian properties acquired post-World War II to establish soldier settlement farms for returned servicemen, and it was then that Bruce Wall received an 800-acre farm and the dilapidated Lake House homestead. Bruce Wall had a lifelong love of Tasmanian heritage, and he served on the state council of the National Trust continuously from 1961 to 1993. He

formulated the National Trust Register in the north of the state, and oversaw the creation of the Register of the National Estate, which had a significant impact on the recognition and conservation of Australian heritage. Having ignored the order to demolish it, Mr Wall tended to the many restoration and maintenance needs of Lake House. In 1963 it was named Mercury newspaper and National Trust ‘House of the Year’. Brendan Jordan now manages the Lake House farm, and his father, Cedric, worked it before him. They remember Mr Wall as a true gentleman, always willing to help others out. He never married or had children though, and Lake House seems to have lacked a female touch. The gardens remain undeveloped; there wasn’t even a driveway to the home until recently, it just sat in the paddock with the livestock. And despite his care, the bathrooms and kitchen remained extremely dated and there was a great deal of other work needed inside and out of the home.

When Lake House was auctioned in 2004, many of the bidders were there for the prime farming land, with its generous water rights from the Lake River, and not the least bit interested in what was by now a derelict and foreboding homestead once again. Rob Sherrard was keen on both; so keen, in fact, to purchase a fine historic Tasmanian property that he acquired Egleston at Campbell Town two weeks before the Lake House auction, just to make sure he didn’t miss out, and ended up with them both. Rob Sherrard is probably best known for co-founding Australia’s Virgin Blue airline. He and a mate, Brett Godfrey, first discussed the idea of establishing a new, low-price Australian airline over a few beers in a British pub during the 1993 Ashes series. Godfrey had just started working for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic, having previously worked for a Melbourne aviation company with Sherrard. Their idea was put to Virgin, but it went nowhere. When the pair caught up again in the late nineties, Godfrey had escalated through the Virgin ranks and was well known to Sir Richard Branson. So they put the idea to him directly, and the rest is history. Virgin Blue took off in 2000 with two aircraft and just one route, Brisbane to Sydney. It was the most successful start-up aviation company in history, with a load factor of 78 per cent in its first hundred days, and it now operates 2200 flights a week to twenty-two Australian destinations. Mr Sherrard got out of the business in 2005 to focus on his young family and many other pursuits, of which Lake House is just one. Extensive planning has gone into the Lake House rejuvenation, and the concept of a luxury hotel has evolved over time. Under the guidance of Launceston heritage architect David Denman, the interior will be fully restored to an ultra-high standard, and luxury bathroom facilities added to each of the ten bedrooms.

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An amazing extension will ensure that Lake House, at long last, takes advantage of its river outlook. Two new conservatory wings will extend out the back of the home in similar shape and form to the existing single-storey bays. These will form a morning terrace and an afternoon terrace, with a courtyard in between. The glass for the windows has been sourced from a seventeenth-century conservatory in France. A new portico will also be added to the austere back of the house, and the kitchen will never be the same again as it undergoes a conversion fit for the very best chef Lake House can find, so that the food here will be an experience in itself. The shearing shed will be transformed into a function centre, and there’ll be the sort of activities that befit a fine country estate such as this—including trout fishing, clay-pigeon shooting and, for the revheads, an opportunity to inspect Mr Sherrard’s rather impressive personal collection. Just a few of its pieces include a 1922 Delage Roadster (with fighter-jet engine), the Monaro that Peter Brock raced in his last win at Bathurst, a SauberMercedes C9 Le Mans car, and a few small planes and boats for good measure. The gardens will be completely developed, and other improvements also being considered include adding a lake and a small chapel to the property. One of the most exciting plans is removing the paint on Lake House’s façade. No one can remember Lake House before its white coat of paint, yet underneath it is brick with a sandstone render. The paint has given the homestead a more severe appearance, and it is time for the walls to breathe. A sample of the original render was sent to Melbourne to ensure a new batch was mixed up in exactly the same proportions as the old. It is expected that Lake House will start taking guests about April 2009, heralding an exhilarating new era for this stunning homestead that nearly didn’t survive.

Mona Vale It has hosted royalty on more than one occasion, a showbiz sensation and a famous World War I field marshal. Yet it’s the simplest things, and what it is today, that makes Mona Vale really shine: a family home, the hub of a modern farming business, a home that flourishes with ordinary day-to-day life—although it’s no ordinary home. You need a cherry picker just to clean the windows. Mona Vale is sometimes called the calendar house. It has a window for every day of the year, fifty-two rooms, twelve chimneys, seven entrances, and four staircases for the four seasons. It was designed by William Archer (architect and owner of Cheshunt) for his brother-in-law, Robert Quayle Kermode, and was completed in 1868, just in time to host a visit by Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Edinburgh, on the very first royal visit to Australia. This was a significant moment for Mona Vale, and indeed for Tasmania, as it was hoped that the royal visit 148 | 149

would lend a mark of respectability to the island and assist in burying its maligned convict past. So in addition to ensuring the palatial homestead, extensive gardens, conservatories and exquisite chapel were fit for a queen’s son, Mr Kermode went to the trouble of commissioning a royal bed, a four-poster with the arms of Edinburgh adorning its cedar footboard. People still sleep in this bed in the Duke of Edinburgh’s room, one of ten bedrooms on Mona Vale’s second floor. The Duke planted an oak tree in the gardens while he was a guest at Mona Vale, and it continues to thrive. The impressive visitors’ book continued well into the next century. In the 1920s, owners Eustace and Alexina Cameron entertained the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Mona Vale. Even earlier than that in 1912, the legendary Lord Kitchener paid a visit to inspect the empire’s troops, as the light horse regiment was based at Mona Vale for many years (the Cameron family have a long military history).

And then composer, actor and playwright Sir Noel Coward played the grand piano in the Mona Vale hall when he was in Australia raising funds for the Red Cross during World War II. Mona Vale was really quite the place to be and that’s exactly how Robert Quayle Kermode intended it. His father, William Kermode, was granted land at Ross in 1821, and it is thought the property was named after Monaoeda, the Latin name for his home, the Isle of Man. As a merchant, William Kermode made many trips to and from Tasmania before he settled on the land. The wealth he accumulated aroused some early gossip that he may have dabbled in the slave trade. On one of his voyages, in 1822, Kermode took a nine-year-old Aboriginal boy named George Van Die­ men back to England to be educated. In researching her Kermode family descendants, Jean Reiss published the following letter written by Governor Sorell to William Kermode on 15 September 1821: As you have expressed an inclination to take the native Diemenese George to England, in which disposition I most readily concur, it might be as well to tell you his history. About two and a half years ago, this boy, and one much younger, were found in the woods about New Norfolk, being at the time it appeared abandoned by their parents. They were both brought to Hobart Town and this boy remained under my care. The other died of a bowel complaint having been placed at nurse in the country. This boy who now goes into your charge has been christened George Van Diemen, and has been taught his letters, and his prayers, but although he has become obedient and tractable, there is little expression of intellect. I believe he is sufficiently impressed with the law of meum and teum [mine and thine], and would not take anything except to eat, with respect to which I am afraid he is open to temptation. You are of course authorised to leave him in any hands that you consider fit to insure his good treatment and education, and he would of course be allowed by His Majesty’s government a passage back to Hobart when he approaches or arrives at manhood.

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Aboriginal man contracted tuberculosis in smogfilled Liverpool and died at Mona Vale not long after his return. William’s wife and daughters joined him at Mona Vale in 1828. By 1834, Kermode had replaced a modest timber house with a substantial brick building, and many farm cottages and buildings were laid out. Kermode was considered a highly progressive farmer. Colonel Mundy, a soldier and author of Our Antipodes, or Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies, wrote that Kermode ‘must be the wealthiest Manxman now in existence’. Of his farming practices, he said: Mr K has nevertheless carried irrigation to a greater perfection than any other person perhaps in the Australian colonies. Here are 500 acres laid down in English grasses, divided by English quick hedges into convenient enclosures, along each of which are water-ducts with dam gates, by which he is enabled to throw the whole or part under water in the driest season. This valuable plot of ground, which will probably feed as many sheep as 15,000 acres of the native pastures, was originally a swamp, and was received under ostensible protest but with a secret appreciation of its real value by the proprietor. Indeed, if I remember correctly, the worthy old gentleman who has a hearty liking for a joke, chuckles complacently and openly about the fact that some additional land was thrown in by the authorities as a make-weight for the boggy allotment that has helped to make his fortune.

Robert Quayle Kermode first lived at Mona Vale cottage—now a glorious estate in its own right known as Lochiel—with his wife, Martha Elizabeth, and six sons. Martha was the eldest daughter of Thomas Archer, of Woolmers, and the marriage brought together two of the colony’s most distinguished and wealthy families, but she died in 1853, a year after William Kermode. It was about 1854 that Robert Quayle Kermode appears to have first contemplated building a grand new residence at Mona Vale and it seems that William Archer, his talented brother-in-law and long-time friend, had prepared some sketches by 1855. In 1859 Robert remarried in England, and in 1865 work began on the magnificent homestead at Mona Vale. It was designed to showcase both Robert’s wealth and William’s skill.

The stone was quarried on the property and it is impossible to fathom how these heavy pieces of rock were lifted to such enormous heights: the home is three storeys high, and also boasts an Italianate tower, from which are afforded magnificent views. In the three years it took to complete Mona Vale there was the occasional owner-versus-architect dispute—the verandah is one example. Dr Cliff Craig, in Historic Homesteads of Australia, wrote: ‘The main objection raised has been that the impingement of the verandah on the side of the porch has diminished its dramatic value. As can be seen, the verandah conceals the arches at the two sides of the house. The architect, William Archer, did not want a verandah, but he was overruled.’ The current owners of Mona Vale are pleased for that, and believe the verandah works very well. It’s unknown how much it cost to build Mona Vale, but no expense was spared, inside or out. Again, Dr Craig writes:

The main house is a magnificent specimen of its type giving, without undue ostentation, an immediate impression of splendour. It is in the form of a parallelogram with two wings running back from it, thus forming a court. Each storey is marked by a moulded string course, and the whole house is surrounded by a cornice, with carved trusses and by a frieze of scroll work.

He also quotes Mr Gorton Willing, an architect who made a special study of Mona Vale: The dominant influence in the three main façades of the home is early astylar Florentine Renaissance, without columns or pilasters, each course marked by a moulded string course, the eaves in the form of a cornice roughly proportional to the height of the building, rusticated quoins at all angles and set backs, and the windows framed by mouldings. However the set backs and asymmetrical balance of the façades,

the tower, the porch and the curved bay window, although Renaissance in detail, are all in the Gothic tradition, as also are the steeply pitched rooves of many of the minor buildings which otherwise are a simplified version of the main building.

The home looks out over a man-made lake and extensive gardens. An exquisite stone chapel was also completed in time for the Duke’s stay, and enormous conservatories were filled with lemon trees, camellias, pineapples and grapes. A newspaper reporter who covered the royal visit was able to provide a detailed description of parts of the interior of Mona Vale as it appeared in 1868: The walls of the [drawing] room are papered with a very rich moiré antique paper, white and gold, bearing a small pattern in gold. The cornices and centre ornament are of papier-mache, similar to those in the dining room, and from the centre depends a very elegant chandelier. The mantel shelf is of pure white Carrara marble, richly sculptured, and the grate, fenders, dogs and irons are all of the best Berlin metal. The hearth and cheeks of the fireplace are inlaid with porcelain … [The dining room] is a lofty and spacious apartment lighted by large windows looking southward and westward. The walls are decorated with a handsome paper most curiously built up. Over the range of panelling runs a frieze of very chaste and classic pattern—above this is an extremely rich cornice, having festoons of fruits and flowers, and in the centre of the ceiling hangs a very handsome ornament, from which depends a chandelier for kerosene lamps.

Of the entry hall: ‘On entering by the portico, the visitor is ushered into a spacious hall, the floor of which is tessellated with Minton’s caustic tiles, in variegated colours, after a very beautiful design.’ These rooms hardly look any different today. An unusual and innovative feature of Mona Vale is

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its laundry chute—effectively an elevator moved up and down with a rope pulley. It has landings on each of the floors and, as well as laundry, was used to deliver freshly polished shoes. It had a more recent use delivering a young man with a broken leg from one floor to the next. There is a range of historically significant farm structures and outbuildings, including a glorious two-storey sandstone home for the manager. At its peak, about a hundred people worked on the Mona Vale farm, most also living here. There was a school for the children, and Sunday services took place in the chapel, which is still used for Christmas carol singing and the occasional wedding or christening. Robert Quayle Kermode unfortunately didn’t get to enjoy his lavish residence for long. He died in 1870 at Mona Vale from ‘mis-assimilation of food’. His son, William Archer Kermode, inherited Mona Vale, and other children received properties that were part of the estate. But William closed the Mona Vale homestead up and moved to England with his five children, two years after his own wife died, returning in 1888. In about 1905 Mona Vale was sold to Eustace Noel Cameron, who lived there with his wife Alexina and their six children. The Camerons, a prominent Tasmanian pastoral family, returned Mona Vale to the state of grace that befitted it. Over time, stylish modern touches have been added, and essentials such as central heating. While cleaning the 365 windows of this calendar house is one heck of a chore, it looks as immaculate today as it would have when it literally gleamed for that first royal visit so many years ago. In fact, far from looking its years, the home almost seems to have taken on a new vitality with a fresh generation of children recently moving in. The place really is at its best when children are running down hallways, playing their music, or riding their horses through the courtyard.

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Old WesleyDale Chudleigh is a tiny ‘village of roses’ in a picturesque valley in Tasmania’s Central North. It is possibly the last place you’d go looking for an old stone fortress but, in the early 1830s, this area was the very frontier of the known world. And a former Irish army officer who, at the age of sixty-three, decided to go farming on the edge would have needed some protection from the powerful Aboriginal tribe that called this area home and controlled access to nearby ochre mines. The stone compound that was subsequently built in the bush has been described as the only extant relic of the fierce conflict between Tasmania’s early settlers and the Aboriginal owners of the land, a conflict that eventually prompted the forced removal of any surviving Aborigines to Flinders Island. The compound consists of three-metre high walls that surround a one-acre yard and outbuildings, including a colossal stone barn complete with gunslit windows. The homestead was outside the main 160 | 161

walls and, in its day, this farm compound would have been a place of frantic activity. Macaw breeders Scott and Deb Wilson were driving past Old WesleyDale one day in 1998 when they saw the ‘for sale’ sign out the front of the Georgian homestead. They had been wanting to escape the heat of their central New South Wales home, and even their majestic South American birds seem happier in the new climes. Old WesleyDale’s historic feel and scenic setting drew them in well before they had even inspected the homestead, which was probably just as well, considering the state it was in. A single-storey cottage adjacent to the main home was totally derelict, while the main house itself was dated and in need of maintenance, and the garden comprised a few old elm trees and a clothes line. The Wilsons spruced up the homestead and restored the cottage, in the process unearthing the original cobblestone floor of what was once a dairy.

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The cottage is now self-contained accommodation for tourists. The neglected gardens have been totally transformed into a two-hectare oasis of flowers, hedges, fruit and vegetables. The stone compound was built to last and has always been in excellent condition, but there really isn’t much use for it nowadays. Retired Irish army officer Lieutenant Travers Hartley Vaughan was granted this land in 1829 and he built the stone cottage that forms the back half of the existing homestead. Accounts vary as to whether he or the property’s next owner, the larger than life Henry Reed, were responsible for the construction of the fortress. Those who favour Vaughan point to the distinctly Irish stone columns at the entry to the compound; round buttresses also feature on the single-storey cottage. In A History of the Chudleigh Valley, John Hawkins says the columns compare excellently to rounded columns constructed by hand of stone and slate at the entrance gates to Castlefreake Castle, in County Cork, circa 1825. Further, by the time Vaughan sold to Reed in about 1837, the vast majority of Aboriginal inhabitants had been killed or removed, and the perceived need for such a compound would have been considerably diminished. Sir Hudson Fysh, co-founder of Qantas and grandson of Reed, had a different take on their origin in his book Henry Reed: Van Diemen’s Land Pioneer, where he wrote: However it does seem that the compound device and buildings were erected in Henry Reed’s usual fashion of doing something big and unique, a fullblooded, no half-measures project … Perhaps, after all, Reed’s idea was to keep his valuable stock safe from bushrangers and cattle thieves, as these gentry still abounded in the district, and for small stock, it provided a protection against the Tasmanian tiger, or marsupial wolf, and the snarly little Tasmanian devils, both of which unpopular marauders abounded in the rugged country bounding WesleyDale.

In any event, at three metres in height, and about sixty centimetres wide, the walls of the compound did the trick in terms of keeping the unwanted out. They were constructed of dolerite stone quarried on the property, with mortar of burned limestone from the famous Mole Creek caves nearby. Sir Hudson Fysh wrote that great use was made by his grandfather

of probationary convict labour from the government depot at Deloraine. According to Sir Hudson Fysh, one of the reasons Vaughan was keen to sell up after only a few years was because of frequent run-ins with Aborigines and so that part of his grant known as Native Hut Corner was sold to Henry Reed about 1837. A devout Wesleyan Methodist, Reed renamed the property WesleyDale after his spiritual leader. Henry Reed arrived in Hobart as a twenty-oneyear-old emigrant from Yorkshire. With no money to even buy himself a horse, he walked the 123 miles to his chosen destination of Launceston. He received a land grant near Deddington that he named Rockliff Vale, after his mother, Mary Rockliff, but so little of it could be cultivated that in 1829 he commenced farming on a new grant near Longford. From there, Reed branched out into a range of other business activities that brought him massive success and wealth, including shipping and whaling. His ships were integral in carrying migrants, livestock and stores from Launceston to the new settlement at Port Phillip, Melbourne. He was also fervently involved with the nonconformist revivalist mission work of the 1830s, and he began his forty years of preaching under a wattle tree at WesleyDale one Sunday soon after he bought the property, rustling up all the locals to attend. Sir Hudson Fysh suggested that the vice and depravity that reigned in the colony before the last convicts were brought out in 1853 spurred Reed, and others like him, to try to save them. Reed held predawn prayer meetings, summer and winter, preached all over the north, and spent time with convicts in their cells on the night before they were due to be executed. Back in England, where he returned twice, Reed assisted William Booth in founding the Salvation Army, and, in Tasmania, founded the Launceston Christian Mission Church. He also helped his kinsman Henry Rockliff emigrate to Tasmania, and made him overseer and manager of WesleyDale. Rockliff’s brothers followed Henry to Tasmania and the family eventually settled further west in the virtually untouched area of Sassafras, where many descendants remain today. After a twenty-six-year stint back in England, during which he built two stunning homes in Tunbridge Wells and Harrogate, Dunorlan Park and Dunorlan Villa, Reed and his family returned to Tasmania in 1871, buying Mt Pleasant in Launceston, still one of the finest homes in northern Tasmania.

At WesleyDale, Reed also built a grand thirty-sixroom summer holiday home that he named Mountain Villa, and the original homestead became known as Old WesleyDale. Mountain Villa was completed only shortly before Reed’s death in 1880 and ended up in the Cameron family, where it remains. In comparison to both of Reed’s later Tasmanian homes, Old WesleyDale is modest; more country cottage than colonial mansion, although it has two levels and eleven rooms. It’s believed that Vaughan built the back half of the house, while Reed added the front section. Reed also built a church on the property, but only the foundations remain. In between tending to the macaws, the garden and B&B guests with his wife, Scott Wilson also works for

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nearby heritage-property owner John Hawkins. After buying Bentley five years ago and performing an amazing revival of it, coupled with his rich knowledge and appreciation of Tasmanian colonial history, John Hawkins has been credited with recharging the whole Chudleigh district. For example, thanks to Hawkins bringing out experts from England, Wilson has been trained in the old arts of hawthorn hedge-laying and dry-stone walling. Wilson’s handiwork is also starting to bear fruit at Old WesleyDale, where he has built a new dry-stone ha-ha wall. He has also shaped the row of box honeysuckle hedges where the front fence once stood into a row of marching elephants, a barrier that could not seem more at odds with the fortress nearby.

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Quorn Hall A wapiti is a North American elk. And a wapiti can be a very handy thing to have around, as Thomas William Henric Clarke of Quorn Hall, Campbell Town, discovered on one of his many extraordinary hunting trips in the late 1800s. Stranded in a blizzard, deep in Native American Rocky Mountain country, T.W.H. gutted the large wapiti he’d shot and spent the night inside its carcass. Its head is exhibit number sixteen in the ‘Big Room’ at Quorn Hall, in Tasmania’s Northern Midlands. One of three extensions to the 1830s U-shaped mansion, this hall-like room was built in 1900 so T.W.H. could showcase the spoils of his hunting adventures, which included a four-year stint in North America as a cowboy, and four safaris in the wilds of Africa, accompanied only by teams of native porters and bearers for company. About 150 trophies, all catalogued, cram the Big Room, which is thought to be the largest private collection of its kind in the southern hemisphere. 168 | 169

They include three Ammodorcas clarkei, or Clarke’s gazelles, the new genus of gazelle T.W.H. discovered on one expedition in Somaliland, which he claimed to have been the first white man to enter. There’s a stuffed grizzly bear, upright and annoyed, two of her tiny startled babies, heads of rhinoceros, wart-hog, impala and hartebeest, the skulls of a hippopotamus and a thylacine, candlesticks carved from hooves, vases supported by eagles’ talons, and a lion’s skin that represented one very close shave. When the current owner of Quorn Hall, Thomas Colin Clarke, was growing up, this was quite a television room. Today it’s more of a museum, the not-for-the-fainthearted end of a beautifully maintained mansion where the conservatory, drawing room, freshly renovated kitchen and landscaped gardens all make for easier places to relax. Built in 1834 in Georgian style and of ashlar stone, the then 10,000-acre Quorn Hall had three owners before it entered the vast estate of William John

Turner Clarke, T.W.H’s grandfather, in 1844. The lavish lifestyles of the two previous owners had sent them broke, but there was no chance of that happening to W.J.T. He was regarded as the richest man in the country before he died in 1874 with an estate of 2.5 million pounds and 215,000 acres of freehold land in Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and New Zealand, most of which he left to his firstborn, William Clarke. Sir William Clarke went on to build Rupertswood in Sunbury, Victoria. One of that state’s most elaborate homes, it was where the English cricket team spent Christmas of 1882 following their shock defeat by the Australian XI at the Oval Cricket Ground, in London. On Christmas Eve, William’s wife, Lady Janet Clarke, presented English captain Ivo Bligh with a small pottery urn that she said contained a burned cricket bail, and the Ashes urn came into being. W.J.T.’s second son, Thomas Biggs, inherited Quorn Hall but died only a few years later, when T.W.H., his son, was just eighteen. He leased out the farm to pursue his hunting interests, not taking a more active interest in the running of the property until 1894. He was still hunting in Rhodesia at the age of sixty-six, and documented all his trips in journals. ‘Should anything befall me out here,’ he wrote from Nairobi in 1911, ‘please forward all my things out to Quorn Hall … also all heads shot and rifles. Also, to put a plain solid stone in graveyard.’ As it turned out, T.W.H. died at Quorn Hall, aged seventy. He fathered five children, and it’s thought that while he was off hunting for many months at a time his wife stayed with relatives in England, not at their Tasmanian estate. The current owners are the sixth generation of Clarkes at Quorn Hall. They moved to the homestead from a small but modern house on the same property about eight years ago. While it was in good order, they’ve added necessities such as a heat pump, a modern kitchen and up-to-date bathrooms. They run sheep, beef and crops on the property, now some 7500 hectares. For now the Big Room is entered mainly for housekeeping and, as the trophies are cleaned, the Clarkes can but imagine the tales their great gamehunting ancestor could have told about each.

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Summerhome Moonah is a bustling working-class suburb five kilometres north of the Hobart CBD. It’s an unlikely location for an old Tasmanian country mansion. But 170 years ago this was rural Tasmania, and it’s where one of Hobart’s most illustrious early entrepreneurs, Henry Hopkins, took his family for summer holidays. The paddocks and bush that surrounded Summerhome in the 1830s have long since given way to industry and suburbia. But Summerhome has stood still while everything around has changed. Handpainted 1850s wallpaper from France still adorns the walls. Original furnishings are intact. And the Hopkins family have not left. Hopkins came to Tasmania from Kent, England, for the promise of a better life. He amassed huge wealth as a particularly entrepreneurial merchant and was credited with the entire export of wool from the colony in 1822.

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He also founded the Congregation Church in Tasmania and Victoria. His Hobart residence, Westella, was built in 1835 on the instruction that it be the grandest home in all of Hobart, surpassing the Government House of the day. By all accounts the builders delivered, and it is now government offices. Summerhome was a former boarding school for boys when Hopkins bought it for his summer residence in about 1840. A two-storey building of brick and stucco was added to the original stone cottage. When Hopkins died in 1870, his son-in-law, the Reverend George Clarke, took on the property and it has been a home for four seasons to their descendants ever since. The years are showing at Summerhome. Funds raised from opening the gardens for weddings and other functions will be put towards restoration works.

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Valleyfield, Epping Forest The sandstone homestead at Valleyfield was a bit of an accident. The elongated 1838 building was designed to be coach-house, granary and servants’ quarters, but the Taylor family ended up moving in, and it has been the main residence at this famous Saxon Merino sheep stud ever since. Valleyfield is therefore quite distinct from other homes of its era. The low, two-storey structure more closely resembles a military barracks than your typical Georgian mansion, and the dimensions of the original part of the home are highly unusual; thirty-five metres in length and just five and a half metres in width. The northern side of the building, which faces onto majestic gardens, has no fewer than twenty windows and doors. A verandah that spans the entire length was a later addition. The southern side of the home is solid stone, with one solitary window, although a modern sunroom/ living area has also been added to this side, bordering 182 | 183

formal English-style gardens and orchards that are as magnificent as they are expansive. Valleyfield was the first Tasmanian home of the Taylor family, who went on to become some of Australia’s most revered superfine wool producers. Their Saxon Merino studs occupied vast swathes of land across the northern Tasmanian Campbell Town district, much of which remain in the Taylor family to this day and still produce some of the exceptionally superfine wool for which Tasmania is so renowned. George Taylor, sixty-two, arrived in Hobart from Scotland in 1823 with his wife and children, and was granted 800 acres on the Macquarie River that he named Valleyfield. His sons George Jr, Robert and David were each granted 700 acres nearby, while a fourth son, John, who emigrated a little later, received 500 acres and also acquired nearby property St Johnstone. With bullocks and wagons carrying all their worldly possessions, the Taylors made the trek from Hobart

to their new land grant in the north of the state, a difficult journey that would have taken several days to complete. There they pitched tents not far from the Macquarie River, eventually replacing these with huts and cottages, and then the long stone building. Valleyfield had more than its fair share of brushes with bushrangers and Aborigines. It’s said that in 1824 George Taylor Jr was perched in a tree, ‘bent on improving his mind by reading the bible’, when he was ambushed by a gang of escaped convicts-turnedbushrangers, who were on the run from Macquarie Harbour. He was taken hostage and forced to lead the villains to the Taylor home. As they got closer, George wrenched himself free from the bandits’ clutches and raised the alarm to a household that was apparently already on alert, because the dogs had been behaving so uneasily. The household repelled the bushrangers with a barrage of musket fire, the ladies of the household assiduously reloading the musket nozzles. Two gang members were captured by the Taylors, another was badly wounded but escaped. The only loss of life was the Taylor carpenter, who had apparently cowered in an outbuilding during the battle, only to pop his head out the door during a lull in firing, whereupon he was promptly shot by one of the outlaws. George Jr was seriously wounded, some reports suggesting he lost an arm. But the Taylors were lauded for the bravery they had shown in defending Valleyfield. Governor Arthur wrote to the family to express his appreciation, and to assure them that should it unhappily be the case that George Jr’s wound proved mortal, ‘every circumstance of alleviation will accompany the mournful event from the reflection that you were struggling for the common safety of your family.’ Fellow colonists also wrote to Taylor offering their congratulations and a silver plate, and George Jr eventually received an additional 500 acres of land for his efforts. George Jr was also well known for his kindly disposition towards the local Aborigines; by all accounts he endeavoured to communicate with them and brought them gifts of sugar and tobacco. But in 1826, he was speared to death by a group of Aborigines as he passed by their camp while rounding up sheep. Robert Taylor succeeded his father, George Sr, at Valleyfield; John established himself at St Johnstone; while David Taylor carried out a land swap with Roderic O’Connor, of Connorville, and started farming Winton. It was in 1835 at Winton that Australia’s 184 | 185

first registered sheep stud was established, and this then formed the basis of the famous Valleyfield stud. The Taylors, and Tasmania, can largely thank Eliza Forlonge for some of the purebred Saxon Merino sheep that helped found the state’s superfine-wool industry. This amazing Scotswoman decided her family should emigrate to the warmer climes of Australia after one of her two surviving sons started to show signs of tuberculosis; four of her other children had already succumbed to the disease. But beforehand she did some homework, noting firstly that wool was one product that appeared capable of being successfully grown in the colony, and secondly that Saxon Merino wool was quite clearly the best and attracting premium prices. The Saxon Merino is without peer in terms of the quality of the wool it produces, and it is still sought after by the textile industry for the most expensive garments. The Merino was bred and developed in Spain, and in 1765 their king gifted a flock to his cousin, Elector Frederick August of Saxony, where they were crossed with Saxon sheep and flourished. The Saxon farmers took great care to protect the purity of the line. So Eliza Forlonge and her two sons moved to Saxony, while her merchant husband stayed home in Glasgow. There the trio learned German, one son attended school and the other learned the ropes in a Leipzig wool business. Then she set off on foot across Saxony to select a flock to take to her new home. Each sheep was hand-picked by Mrs Forlonge, and payment made with gold coins that were stashed in a bag sewn under her skirt. When one hundred sheep had been selected, the Forlonges herded them to Hamburg for shipment to England and then Australia. The Forlonges were destined for New South Wales, but when their ship stopped en route at Van Diemen’s Land, they were persuaded to stay with a 2500-acre land grant near Campbell Town. Eliza returned to Germany to select more stock. However, the family’s land grant had a major flaw in that it did not front water. So in 1835 they sold part of their flock and leased their property to David Taylor, of Winton, and eventually sold the property to him when they moved to Victoria, where Mrs Forlonge founded that state’s fine-wool flock. The Valleyfield stud was formed in 1888 with ewes from St Johnstone and Winton, both properties in the Taylor family. Wool from Valleyfield would

frequently set Australasian and even world price records, and it was easily regarded as one of the select few top studs. After the collapse of the wool industry in the 1980s, it is one of many Tasmanian properties that turned its attention to cropping. And in 2005 there was a major break with Taylor family tradition when the property was sold to local farmer David Downie. He is securing water for irrigation, pursuing crops and grazing and, with his family, relishing living in such an amazing old home. David Downie is excited about the potential for the homestead into the future. The kitchen looks out across gardens to a historic stone wall. The sunroom area affords modern and relaxed living, with the added bonus of being much broader than the formal five-and-a-half-metre wide living rooms in the original homestead.

Upstairs, a hallway stretches the thirty-five-metre length of the home, with seven bedrooms and bathrooms leading off it. The living area downstairs comes to a stop about three-quarters of the way along the house length, where it is interrupted by a coach-house, now a workshop. Once the verandah went on at the front of the home, there was no chance of a coach, or later a car, getting through the verandah posts and under cover. At the very end of the home is an abandoned twostorey granary section, which is set for renovation into another living area. It wasn’t all that long ago that this end room of the house was still being used to store grain.

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Valleyfield, New Norfolk Trade journals of the late nineteenth century often said the brewing industry was the most accurate way to gauge economic times: people would drink more beer when things were good, and less when they weren’t. Which made for tumultuous times at Valleyfield in New Norfolk, near Hobart, the birthplace of Australia’s commercial hop industry and where fortunes were in no small way linked to the nation’s consumption of beer. From the very first days of colonisation of Australia, huge importance was attached to trying to get English hop cuttings to grow, so as to encourage the more wholesome consumption of beer by the early settlers and stamp out all the evils associated with the rum trade. There were many false starts in the harsh, dry Australian climate, not helped by confusion over which time of year to plant hops on the southern side of the world. But, finally, paydirt was struck when hops were planted in the fertile soil of Tasmania’s 190 | 191

Derwent Valley and irrigated throughout summer courtesy of an abundant supply of water from the majestic Derwent River. And so it was that Valleyfield became the first place in Australia to commercially produce the treasured hop under irrigation in the 1850s. Hops and orchards were the mainstay of this property, and the Derwent Valley region, until the 1970s, when international hop and apple markets collapsed and about 150 local hop growers were pared back to just one major producer located at nearby Bushy Park. Located on the outskirts of New Norfolk in an idyllic setting on the banks of the Derwent River, these days Valleyfield grows the fruit for Cascade Brewery’s blackcurrant syrup. The bountiful supplies of Derwent River water nourish a magnificent garden, and two old hop kilns hark back to the days when this property helped give Tasmania its reputation for producing some of the world’s greatest beer.

From the bottom corner of the two-hectare garden, which sweeps from the homestead down to the river, you can cast a fly for trout in water that starts at Australia’s deepest lake, St Clair. A succession of rose arches is modelled on those at Claude Monet’s Giverny garden. And if you clamber around old trees laden with pome and stone fruits, you will find yourself in an almost secret garden in the middle, where exquisitely espaliered pear, apple and crab-apple trees sit in lavender- and herb-filled beds surrounded by perfectly manicured box hedges. It has been said that the Valleyfield homestead is the longest continually inhabited building in the southern hemisphere. Whether that’s true or not, owner Richard Warner says it’s hard to say, but it definitely has been inhabited since 1822, when it was the Kings Head Inn. The intricate trelliswork on the Valleyfield verandah dates back to the 1830s, when the Kings Head became a family home for the first time. This was the touch of British army colonel Richard Armstrong, who retired

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to Tasmania from the East India Company’s Bengal service, and apparently wanted a feature on the building to remind him of his British Raj home. But perhaps the most identifiable, and certainly most photographed, feature of this property is the circular red-brick oast house in the front yard, used for drying hops. There was no shortage of hop-growing expertise in Kent, England, from where the Shoobridge family hailed, and where hop-growing had been an integral part of the landscape since the fifteenth century. With the colony struggling to establish a viable hop industry, William Shoobridge emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in 1822 with his family, including two-year-old son Ebenezer. It was no easy task to keep alive the hop plants that accompanied them during the voyage out. Shoobridge had a hop garden at Providence Valley, now North Hobart, but eventually gave up because of the dryness of the soil. Attempts at growing hops at Glen Ayr, Richmond, also met with limited success.

It was clear that to thrive in their strange new environment, hops would need watering over the summer, and so in about 1855 at the age of thirtyfive, Ebenezer Shoobridge bought Valleyfield with that aim. The round oast house was built in 1883 by his son Robert to complement the brick kiln that had burned down while drying hops at the height of the previous season. It was modelled on the very latest in oast house designs in Kent but, thanks to the durability of local eucalyptus wood used in the framing, was about twice the usual size. Robert and his brother William were also largescale apple growers, overseeing the first export of Tasmanian apples to London in 1887 and pioneering new cold-storage techniques to preserve them during shipment. With Valleyfield producing about 40,000 bushels (72,000 kilograms) of apples a year, this property was also pivotal to Tasmania earning the moniker Apple Isle.

A beer without hops is like a wine without grapes, and the quality of a beer is directly related to the quality of the hops. Tall climbing plants that grow as vines, hops are very selective in terms of conditions tolerated and succumb easily to elements such as wind, heat and rain. Hops must be dried on the same day they are picked, hence the proliferation of oast houses, or hop kilns, in areas where they are grown. The round kiln at Valleyfield could dry 10,000 kilograms of green hops a day on each day of the six-week picking season. The hop cones would be laid on haircloth spread over slats at the top of the kiln while, six metres below, two ‘oasties’ would keep eight coal fires going for the eight- to ten-hour drying time. Oast houses also made for good fruit-storage areas when they were not being used as kilns. The Valleyfield oast house was still being used commercially in the 1970s, and it was fired up again only recently when Mr Warner flirted with the idea of

using it to dry malt for whiskey. But it seems barbecue brickettes smoke an awful lot more than coal ever did, and the fires were put out before the fire brigade would surely have arrived. New Norfolk is so named for all the Norfolk Island residents who were evacuated there after 1807, when it became clear that the British colony established on the island in 1788 was not going to be sustainable in the long term. William Abel was one of those who relocated, and it’s thought he was granted the land at Valleyfield in 1813. What he did immediately after this is unclear, but in 1822 Abel was granted a licence to trade at the Kings Head Inn. As this was before a hop industry had been established, the ales he served are likely to have been home-brewed from all manner of ingredients. Abel’s brick and rubble inn was long and slender, comprising four main rooms on the lower floor and three in the loft. The kitchen, with its enormous fireplace, was added about 1832, and the rear skillion section of the home about 1900. Tragedy struck one night in 1826 when Abel heard what he thought to be an intruder. In a time when the threat of attacks from Aborigines and bushrangers was real, Abel took his pistol and shot the supposed intruder dead, only to discover that it was his young son, Henry, sneaking in late. Heartbroken, Abel gave up the Kings Head and it was taken over by George Lowe, who built the Valleyfield coach-house and stables, and started the first coach service between New Norfolk and Hobart Town in the 1830s. In 1835 the Kings Head was acquired by Captain Armstrong, but he was penniless within ten years and the property changed hands again. It was Ebenezer Shoobridge who named the property Valleyfield when he acquired it about 1855. Shoobridge installed elaborate and innovative irrigation schemes to water his hops, and in 1864 bought a second property at Bushy Park, a short way upstream from New Norfolk.

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Eventually the Shoobridges consolidated their operations at Bushy Park, which today remains Australia’s largest hop-producing area. Valleyfield was sold to one of the young farm workers, Hugh Ashton Warner. Hugh became a leading hop and apple grower and chairman of Tasmanian Hopgrowers for a time. His sons James and Frank followed in his farming footsteps, while Denis became a well-known war correspondent. As the hop and apple industries flourished, so too did Valleyfield, but things went awry after the 1960s when the apple and hop export industries collapsed, and the government acquired half the farm for public housing. When James’ son, Richard, took over Valleyfield in 1971, the hop market became difficult, causing a rapid decline in the number of producers to just one major grower. Valleyfield ceased hop production in 1985. Richard turned his attention to intensive highvalue agricultural products, such as seed production and blackcurrants for juice. Over the years, unsympathetic additions had been made to the Valleyfield homestead, all of which have now been removed. The historic outbuildings have been stabilised and maintained, occasionally playing host to weddings and conferences. Inside, the homestead is in immaculate order, with eucalypt floorboards and cedar skirting setting off fine antiques and artworks. The original loft area is still bedrooms, and the giant fireplace in the kitchen is supplemented by central heating to ward off the cold. The more recent skillion section overlooks the romantic garden and river; in true Antipodean style, the inn was built facing away from the river. The future of Valleyfield lies in the commercial but sensitive adaptive reuse of the buildings. Such a philosophy will not only conserve the site but provide an economic driver into the future. The Two Metre Tall company specialises in the handmade production of ‘real ale’ using locally grown hops and barley—and what better place for their brewery than the old Valleyfield hop kiln.

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Vaucluse The tables were turned on Robert Bostock when he was convicted of slave-trading and sentenced to transportation to Sydney Town, but it didn’t set the thirty-year-old back for long. Pardoned two months after he arrived in 1814, Bostock got stuck into trade, the family business he knew so well from back home in Bootle, Liverpool—although this time, minus the slaves. The British Empire banned slave-trading in 1807 and based a navy fleet at its colony of Sierra Leone to enforce this. It was there that Bostock was caught redhanded in 1813 and he was convicted by the Court of Vice Admiralty in Freetown. Bostock fought back. He argued that he had bought his slaves across the border in Liberia, where British law did not apply. By the time this appeal was accepted, he had already been shipped to Australia. In 1821 Bostock and his wife made for Hobart, and in about 1826 Bostock acquired the Northern Midlands property Vaucluse, near Conara. 198 | 199

After the MacKinnon family moved here in 1917, Vaucluse became synonymous with success and social status. A premier Corriedale sheep stud, Vaucluse clips regularly fetched northern Tasmanian and Australasian price records, and the grand house that Bostock had designed fitted perfectly with such prosperity. Vaucluse is a four-storey brick and stucco mansion built about 1840, itself added onto an existing twostorey brick building that the Australian Heritage Register says dates back to 1823. It has nineteen generously proportioned rooms, and wide, elaborate cast-iron Victorian verandahs on two sides. These are paved with flagstones and command spectacular views over the South Esk River and across to the magnificent mountain Ben Lomond. The grounds feature large stand-alone cobblestone stables and servants’ quarters, a stone blacksmith shop complete with bellows, a large stone barn, a croquet lawn, a swimming pool and an exquisite glasshouse in a large, picturesque garden.

There were no fewer than three pianos in the place during the 1900s, and Vaucluse was reputedly also quite the place for tennis parties. The court was replaced by a swimming pool in the 1970s. Hunts at Vaucluse were renowned, picnics took place on the riverbanks, and the governor would stay here when visiting the northern part of the state. Michael and Susie Warner bought the property in 1997 and set about restoring it to its former glory. Michael grew up at Valleyfield, New Norfolk, went to Western Australia to farm in his twenties, and had for years been looking for a good Tasmanian property to which he could return. Their renovation blitz took about a year. Everything in sight was given a good lick of paint, carpets were laid, heating installed, and layers of brown wallpaper were removed with excruciating difficulty. The gardens were recharged and one and a half hectares of new lawn laid. Even in drought they are astonishingly lush and luminous, and never more than half a week from being mown by Michael. The glasshouse in the garden was restored, lined with plants, and turned into an indoor/outdoor eating and relaxation area. Farming the 2600 hectares of land at Vaucluse well has always been Michael’s number-one focus, and that is certainly evident. Having secured water for the property, he has diversified into poppy, potato, wheat and ryegrass-seed production, as well as wool and beef. But back to the beginning of this grand home’s story. When Robert and Rachel Bostock first arrived in Hobart, they took up residence at Vaucluse House, in South Hobart. It’s unclear exactly what the Vaucluse connection was with Bostock, but it extends to the grand Sydneyside estate Vaucluse House, courtesy of his extraordinary mother-in-law, Elizabeth Rafferty. In 1795, Elizabeth Rafferty was convicted in Dublin of treason. She spent eighteen months imprisoned on a rotting hulk at Cork before she was sent out to Australia in 1797 on the Britannia II. This became known as the ‘hell ship’ for the appalling treatment of its passengers, six of whom died as a direct result of the punishments meted out by Captain Thomas Dennett. One of those received 300 lashes one day and 500 the next, while tied to the ship’s mast. Elizabeth was shielded from the horror thanks to the friendship she struck up with Captain Dennett, and this saw her housed in the captain’s quarters for the duration of the voyage. When she arrived in Sydney, she was pregnant with his child. 200 | 201

Captain Dennett saw to it that Elizabeth was pardoned soon after her arrival in Sydney, but according to The History of James Ruse the Convict, written by Bill Jocelyn, the pardon was worded in such a way as to have Elizabeth stay away from Ireland, where his wife lived. Jocelyn continues: Before leaving, Dennett purchased a row of houses at ‘Sydney town’ and farms which are now the site of Vaucluse House, an important historic building a few kilometres from the city. These properties were intended to provide income for Elizabeth and to accommodate him during future visits to Sydney. Unfortunately he did not make use of them as he died before having an opportunity to return.

Back in England, Captain Dennett told his friend Captain Robert Rhodes about Elizabeth Rafferty when the two were exchanging stories about women they had met on voyages to Sydney. When Dennett died, Rhodes took it upon himself to deliver the news personally to Elizabeth, and he quickly picked up where his late friend had left off. In 1800 their daughter, Rachel, was born. Captain Dennett’s will spelled out that Vaucluse and the Sydney properties were to be left to the ‘unborn child conceived by me on the body of Elizabeth Rafferty left by me pregnant at Sydney’. But the executors of the estate had different ideas and saw to it that the Vaucluse lands were sold in 1803 to Sir Henry Brown Hayes, for whom the original Vaucluse House was built. Elizabeth and her son, Thomas Dennett II, spent years fighting that decision, but to no avail. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s daughter, Rachel, met Robert Bostock in Sydney and married him at the age of sixteen. They had a brief stint back in England before they moved to Tasmania, although it was several more years before they settled on their land at Vaucluse. Rachel died in 1837, giving birth to her eleventh child. Unlike most families of the era, Robert Bostock did not leave his estate to one male heir when he died in 1847 but dictated that it be divided equally between his nine surviving children. This led to Vaucluse being sold for about 9000 pounds to John Bayles, of Rokeby at Campbell Town, and he acquired the property adjoining Vaucluse, Glen Esk, soon after. His son, R.H. Bayles, a bachelor, was unsure of who to leave Vaucluse and Glen Esk to. So one day he paid a visit to his sister and brother-in-law, Charles

Headlam, at Egleston, to discuss the matter and it was decided that whichever one of their boys was the first to open the gate for him as he left that day would become his heir. Robert Headlam succeeded his uncle in 1883. After his death the property was sold to the MacKinnon family and then, eighty years later, to the Warners. It is said that Thomas Dennett II finally obtained the evidence he needed to prove the Sydney Vaucluse land was his when he returned from England in 1821,

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with the deed for it in his hands, but he never prevailed in his suit. In 1822 Dennett boarded a ship to visit his sister, Rachel Bostock, in Hobart and died on the way. One month later, Elizabeth Rafferty is also thought to have boarded a ship to come to Van Diemen’s Land to live with her daughter, but she did not reach Hobart and was never heard of again. It’s believed that none of Bostock’s children or Tasmanian associates ever knew of his slave-trading past.

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View Point When Andrew Gatenby arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1823, it wasn’t just with his wife and seven children. Also crammed on board the Berwick were Gatenby’s wheelwright and blacksmith, millstones, cloth and wire for mill sails and much more—all part of his grand plan to build a flour mill on a farm in the colony. Granted 1500 acres on the Pennyroyal Creek, now known as Isis River, near Campbell Town, Gatenby and his sons didn’t waste any time. By 1825 their Penny Royal mill was grinding neighbours’ flour for a shilling a bushel and exceeding all expectations in terms of demand. The effort required of convicts to construct this mill would have been colossal. It reportedly involved some 6000 freestone blocks weighing more than 1800 tonnes, giant timber beams sawn by hand and many other materials that had to be transported to the riverbank site over very difficult terrain. A canal was also cut and a reservoir built in the Isis River to supply this breadwinner with water. 208 | 209

So impressed was Governor George Arthur with the endeavour he witnessed at the property, which had become known as Barton, that he gave Gatenby a further grant of land as an example to other settlers. According to Campbell Town, Tasmania: History and Centenary of Municipal Government, the term ‘Gatenby farmer’ was coined to describe other farmers who met the governor’s lofty standards. Additional land in the area was granted to the Gatenbys four times, including a 500-acre reward to George Gatenby for shooting a bushranger on the property. As his prosperity grew, Andrew Gatenby also bought up the properties of less successful neighbouring settlers, to ensure there was sufficient land for his five boys to farm. By the time he died in 1848, his sons owned seven estates. View Point, along with adjacent property Bicton, formed the nucleus of these, and today comprise about 4500 hectares, still farmed by Gatenby brothers.

David and Louise Gatenby are ready to leave View Point to make way for their son Nicholas, the eighth generation of Gatenbys on this land. View Point is a beautiful home, built in about 1860 by a grandson of Andrew Gatenby. The Australian Heritage Database describes View Point as a very fine, grand, transitional Georgian/Victorian homestead in an almost original state. The main four-storey homestead is built of 92,000 bricks, with four brick pilasters that extend two storeys, large twenty-fourpaned windows on the ground level, and twenty-paned windows on the second. Most of the materials came from the property. Adjacent is a two-storey rubble-stone former kitchen wing and servants’ quarters. The two buildings were previously connected by an open verandah but have now been joined internally by the current owners, giving the homestead an L-shape. From the back flagstone-paved verandah, the outlook is of a series of stunning Gothic Revival outbuildings, with the Western Tiers as their formidable backdrop. The buildings include a large two-storey brick barn and stables, with old sidesaddles still hanging inside. There are pointed sandstone quoins at the corners and around the doors, a gabled roof with a curved pattern open fretwork bargeboard and a large ornate finial. The skins of rabbits and possums used to be pegged in the barn on the top floor, and the wires used for doing so still hang on a wall. Baltic pine fittings feature in the original shearing shed, which is near an old sheep wash that David would like to restore. Before scouring mills came into being, sheep had to be washed before they were shorn and washes like this would have been prevalent throughout the Midlands. Other outbuildings include a blacksmith cottage, an old cookhouse, and a carpentry shop that was converted to shearing quarters in the 1950s. It wasn’t all that long ago that during busy times on the farm, such as shearing, there were thirty-five mouths to feed. David and Louise Gatenby moved into View Point in 1975. David had grown up at Bicton and View Point had been occupied by workmen for the previous twenty years, so getting it into a more liveable state was a priority.

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The hallway linking the homestead’s original back door with the front door created a tunnel for bitter winds blowing straight off the Western Tiers, so much so that there were fiercely cold days when fires couldn’t be lit inside because of all the smoke and soot this would create. The wide verandahs around the home also made it dark, and one of the most overwhelming needs confronting the Gatenbys when they moved in was for an area in the home that removed the wind-tunnel effect, and was light, comfortable and warm. To the chagrin of the National Trust, the Gatenbys added a sunroom to the back part of the home; this is where they have predominantly lived ever since. They’re still amazed at how a sympathetic addition that has made the home so much more amenable was frowned on by the authorities; in any event, sunrooms seem to be stock-standard later additions to homes of this era since they were largely absent from the original versions. The Gatenbys also opened up the kitchen, and added three internal bathrooms. Some of the home’s interior features include enormous brass curtain rods above the windows, and Baltic pine floorboards on the first-storey ceiling, while a large cellar underneath includes shelves cut into the sandstone, and a large pickling bath for meat. View Point spans from the Isis River to about a quarter of the way up the Western Tiers, where spectacular botany and wildlife abounds. There have been times when snow has covered everything in sight. But it’s been a long time since it snowed at View Point … and since it rained. It was a sad day when the last cattle left the farm recently, but it is expected that cropping will be the way forward for future generations of Gatenbys on this land. The Penny Royal flour mill that brought the family its initial success thrived for fifty years. It could not compete when steam roller mills were established in the 1880s, and it was effectively abandoned until 1971 when, in a surprise move, developers bought the building. Stone by numbered stone—all 3500 of them—and beam by giant beam, they disassembled the 1825 mill. It was all taken to inner-city Launceston, where it was reconstructed to within a quarter of an inch of its original dimensions and turned into the Penny Royal Motel.

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Further reading Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition, <www.adb.online. anu.edu.au> Australian Heritage Database, <www.environment.gov.au/heritage/ahdb> Backhouse, James and Charles Taylor, The Life and Labours of George Washington Walker, of Hobart Town, Tasmania, A.W. Bennett, London, 1862 Chick, Neil, The Archers of Van Diemen’s Land, The Archer Historical Trust, Pedigree Press, 1991 Cowles, Christopher Alan and David Walker, The Art of Apple Branding, Apples from Oz, 2005

Lucas, Clive and Ray Joyce, Australian Country Houses: Homesteads, Farmsteads and Rural Retreats, compiled by Elaine Rushbrooke, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1987 Mundy, Lieut. Col. Geoffrey Charles, Our Antipodes, or Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies, Richard Bentley, London, 1857 Pearce, Helen R., The Hop Industry in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 1976 Pink, Kerry and Annette Ebdon, Beyond the Ramparts, Circular Head Bicentennial History Group, 1992 Prevost, Joan, From the Epping Banks to the Esk, 1988

Craig, Dr Cliff, Historic Homesteads of Australia, Australian Council of National Trusts, Cassell Australia Ltd, 1969

Robertson, E. Graeme, Early Buildings of Southern Tasmania: Volumes I and II, Georgian House Pty Ltd, 1970

Fysh, Hudson, Henry Reed: Van Diemen’s Land Pioneer, Cat and Fiddle Press, 1973

Robertson, E. Graeme and Edith N. Craig, Early Houses of Northern Tasmania, Georgian House Pty Ltd, 1966

Highfield Historic Site, <www.historic-highfield.com.au>

Ryan, Lyndall, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996

Historical Committee of the National Trust Australia (Tasmania), Campbell Town, Tasmania: History and Centenary of Municipal Government, Campbell Town Municipal Council, 1966 Jocelyn, Bill, The History of James Ruse the Convict, <www.jamesruse. nsw.edu.au/img/pdfs/jr_history.pdf>

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Sharland, Michael, Stones of a Century, Oldham, Beddome & Meredith Pty Ltd, 1952 Sprod, Dan, The Usurper, Blubber Head Press, 2001