Gwambygine Homestead

About

Gwambygine Homestead is one of the earliest colonial buildings still remaining in Western Australia. Until the death in 1998 of the last occupant, Merton Clifton, the house had the reputation of being the oldest continually occupied house in the state.

Indigenous people were known to have frequented Gwambygine and the pool [ clarification needed ] for many thousands of years before European settlement. The fertile York district was explored by Ensign Robert Dale in August 1830. Dale found the cave with Aboriginal markings which gave its name to Cave Hill, part of the original Gwambygine land grant. A large corroboree was recorded there in 1841. Today there are no registered Aboriginal sites within the Gwambygine farm property, but the Avon River and the Pool do have mythological significance. In 1861, an epidemic of measles in the Swan River Colony reduced the Aboriginal population, some of whom had worked at Gwambygine Farm.

Gwambygine Estate is one of the earliest rural Land Grants of the Colony in Western Australia. The Reverend John Burdett Wittenoom (1788–1855), was the Colonial Chaplain to the new British Colony, founded by Lieutenant Governor James Stirling in 1829. The British feared that the French would claim the western part of Australia, prompting them to establish this colony.

Reverend Wittenoom saw the Swan River Colony as an opportunity for his sons to become owners of land and for him to carve out a new career. Wittenoom's first wife, Mary Teasdale whom he married in 1815, had died in England in 1824 following the death of their 5-year-old son Edward. Their deaths prompted John Burdett Wittenoom's decision to move to Swan River. At the age of 42, accompanied by his sister Eliza and four sons John, Henry, Frederick and Charles, Wittenoom left England on 14 August 1829 on the Wanstead, a barque bound for the Swan River and Tasmania.

In 1830 Wittenoom took up Location Z, on the bank of the Avon River south of the York townsite. In 1835 the 5,000 acres were surveyed. The name Gwambygine, bestowed by the Wittenooms, comes from the indigenous Noongar (Ballardong) name of the deep permanent pool in the Avon River. This pool influenced the location of the Homestead, and it survives today behind the Homestead on the eastern side. The local Aborigines named the area around the pool Gwarbanginning. This is believed to mean 'a good place to stay' and so it has proved for the three main families who have lived here, the Wittenooms, Hicks and Cliftons. In colonial times the pool was slightly brackish, fine for stock. Most drinking water was obtained from springs or rainwater.

In 1836 the teenage sons of Reverend John Burdett Wittenoom, together with Thomas Carter an early settler from Norfolk, started building the first sections of the house. They constructed the mud house on the same principles Carter had seen used in England. Initially, Carter worked on the property undertaking improvement duties for the Reverend Wittenoom, and farmed wheat and sheep. The boys' Aunt Eliza, who had emigrated with her brother, kept house for the boys through the late 1830s and early 1840s and was joined by her 68-year-old mother Elizabeth in 1839. Elizabeth died on the property in 1845 at the age of 74 and was buried in the old York cemetery.

The Reverend John Burdett Wittenoom's second marriage in 1839 to Mary Helms produced two daughters, Mary Eliza and Augusta Henrietta, and a son, John Burdett who died at the age of two years. Reverend Wittenoom died on 23 January 1855 at the age of 66 years, a distinguished and much renowned clergyman and prominent member of the Swan River Colonial community. Apart from being the first Colonial Chaplain to the civil establishment of the colony, and ministering to scattered congregations around the Colony, Reverend Wittenoom was also responsible for the establishment of St. George's Church, the new Church in Perth, completed in 1845.

Before his death, John Burdett Wittenoom divided the Gwambygine Estate into the following parts:

- 100 acres in the northeast corner of the Estate to his sister Eliza Wittenoom;

- 1,250 acres in the northwest corner of the Estate Knocklemony to his son John by his first marriage; John joined the police in the 1840s then left for the Victorian Goldfields where it is thought he died as no further record has been found

- 2,400 acres to his youngest son Charles including the Homestead, upon his marriage to Sarah Harding, daughter of Captain James Harding, Assistant Harbour Master, who had arrived in the Colony at King George's Sound in 1846 with his wife and four children; Charles and Sarah had four children Edward, Frank Rose and James.

- 2,250 acres to his son Frederick, who did not remain at the property, leaving the farm in 1840 to become a public servant and eventually Sheriff of Perth and dying unmarried in 1863;

- life residency at the Homestead for Henry, his invalid son, to remain at Gwambygine in the care of whoever occupied the Homestead. After the death of his 27-year-old wife Sarah and baby son James from measles in 1861, Charles Wittenoom leased Gwambygine to Joseph Hicks senior who acted as farm manager and blacksmith at Gwambygine. The Hicks family had arrived with the Australinders and come to York seeking work. Both Joseph senior and junior operated a smithy on the property and remnants can still be seen outside the stone barn just north of the Homestead. Aunt Eliza took the motherless children back to Perth and cared for them until adulthood. Eliza then went to live with her niece Augusta who lived at the Bowes near Geraldton where she died in 1867 at the age of 75.

On Charles' untimely death in 1866, aged only 42, he left the property to his two sons Frank and Edward Wittenoom who continued with the Hicks lease. Henry Wittenoom lived in the homestead with the Hicks family until his death in 1884 aged 64.

In May 1901 the Western Australian Government bought Gwambygine Locations Z and Y from Charles' son Frank Wittenoom for £7,650 for railway purposes after the opening of the Great Southern Railway. The land was then subdivided into about 60 'homestead' blocks.

In 1923, Joseph Hicks junior, who was married to Rosina, purchased a number of these blocks. Joseph Hicks junior put the titles to 519 acres, Lots 33, 34, 35 and Homestead Lot 36 of the Gwambygine Estate, which included the land around the Homestead, in the name of his unmarried daughter Henrietta Maria Hicks.

In 1899, Joseph Hicks junior's other daughter Florence married Claude Robert Henry Clifton, a northwest pastoralist. In 1901, Claude Clifton purchased 1,000 acres at Cave Hill. In 1925, Brian Merton Clifton, born in 1902 as the second son of Claude and Florence Clifton, was working on the Gwambygine property. In 1929, Merton, as he was known, married Gwenyth Compton. Merton rented Gwambygine Homestead from his aunt, and they resided there, improving and altering it to their needs.

When Henrietta Hicks died in 1952 the Gwambygine property passed to Brian Merton Clifton. In 1973 he converted the landholding back to 550 acres around the old Homestead. Brian Merton Clifton died in 1998, and Gwambygine Homestead was closed. The building has been unoccupied since that time.

The original, central, structure of the house is made of rammed earth, a mix of clay, sand and straw, with a mud and lime render. Later additions, including the chimneys, are of fired brick. The walls are mostly 300 mm thick. The Clifton's daughter, Mrs Margaret (Maggie) Venerys now owns the property.

After Merton Clifton's death in 1998 the building progressively deteriorated, with termites and water causing extensive damage. In 2004 Western Australian historian Pamela Statham-Drew, and Jacqueline O'Brien, a descendant of the Wittenoom family, began work on a new book on the history of the Wittenooms. Pamela's work brought her to Gwambygine and lead to an interest in having the homestead restored.