McQuade Park

About

McQuade Park is a heritage-listed park and sporting venue at 361 George Street, Windsor, City of Hawkesbury, New South Wales, Australia. The park was set aside by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810, first surveyed by James Meehan in 1811, and re-surveyed and significantly expanded by G. B. White in 1827. It is also known as The Great Square, Church Green and Windsor Park. The property is owned by Hawkesbury City Council. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 14 January 2011.

The Hawkesbury region was inhabited by the Dharug people prior to European colonisation. The riparian area along the Hawkesbury River had been a source of food for the local Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years (it is known to the Dharug as Dyarrabin' or 'Deerubbin') and, with relatively frequent floods that spread enriched alluvium throughout the surrounding land, the region was known to be an abundant and reliable resource. It was also a place with strong social and spiritual significance.

Following the establishment of the colony of New South Wales, the new colonists quickly recognised the agricultural potential of the banks of the Hawkesbury River. This led to intensive farming of the area to supply food to the developing colony that was experiencing severe shortages in the early years. However, following flooding in 1799, 1800, 1806 and 1809, life for the colonists farming the flats of the Hawkesbury River was a hard one, fraught with potential devastation with any inundation of the river.

Governor Macquarie founded six new towns in the countryside of New South Wales during 1810, his first year of office. Unlike the first at Liverpool, the five towns on the Upper Hawkesbury and Lower Nepean (Windsor, Richmond, Wilberforce, Pitt Town and Castlereagh ) were primarily created to assist existing farmers who suffered recurrent losses on the flood-plain. The Governor intended the new towns to have some common features, including a centrally sited square. Windsor was unique among the 1810 towns in incorporating an existing government village, in the area called Green Hills. As a result, there was already a square inside the area designated for the new town, but this public area, named Thompson Square by Macquarie, was at the extreme north-east end of the town and another square was planned from the outset in a more central position within the new grid-plan. This second reserve, which Macquarie called the Great Square, evolved into McQuade Park.

James Meehan, the surveyor, started to lay out the new central square on 9 January 1811. At that stage he envisaged it as occupying two whole rectangular sections in the town, constituting the link between the narrow north-east end of the town and the regular, broader grid-plan of the south-west end, set at a slight angle to the north-east part. Meehan measured the Great Square as 15 chains (300 metres) in length by 15.5 chains (310 metres) in depth, although a chain would be taken off on each of the four sides for a street of standard width. The square would then be reduced to 280 by 290 metres, though later surveys show the area as considerably less, at around 4 hectares (e.g., SRNSW, Map 5967 of 1835).

The church and cemetery reserve in 1811 was to occupy land immediately to the north of the square, as an extension of the town grid. This is shown clearly on the 1812 plan of the town, signed by Macquarie himself.

Meehan, most unusually, commented in his Field Book about the purpose of the Great Square. It was, he wrote, "intended as a Square or Open Area - as a parade or park for the use of the Town". The reference to "parade" refers to the military contingent stationed in the town.

It is not known whether the area of the square was already cleared in 1811, but a panorama of Windsor painted in 1816 shows the area empty both of houses and of trees, while the detailed vista of the town painted by Joseph Lycett in 1821-1822, which shows St Matthew's Anglican Church, confirms that no trees survived on the site of the square. It is likely that the area was used at this time for grazing, for military parades and for the occasional game of cricket between the military and the farmers.

By 1827, when new plans were drawn, the area of the Square had been more than doubled and its shape was no longer rectangular. The original Square which Meehan surveyed in 1811 is shown in red hatching on the map below. The only part which remained the same by 1827 was the southern edge, along George Street, although the George Street frontage was now extended to the west to a total of about 230 metres.

The Square had become an irregular pentagon, and it has largely retained its 1827 dimensions. The road to Richmond flanking the west side of the square is now Hawkesbury Valley Way, which runs along William Cox 's original line. On the north, turning along the front of St Matthew's Anglican Church and its rectory (the 'Glebe House') is Moses Street, and the street on the east running almost at right angles from George Street up to the rectory garden is the present Tebbutt Street.

Although the Square was encircled by surveyed streets, the townsfolk from the populated part of the town to the north-east had by 1840 their own preferred informal pathway curving through the public space to the Anglican church and beyond to the Richmond road.

The inscription by Surveyor Galloway along the path he plotted through the Square around 1840 is: "Line of Road now used from Windsor to the Church". The north-south street shown running through the Square straight to St Matthew's is an entirely notional extension of Forbes Street north of George Street.

The square is on sloping ground and stumps from the early tree-felling remained a nuisance well into Queen Victoria 's reign, although they did not prevent occasional use as a cricket-pitch from Macquarie's time onwards. Unlike Richmond's central reserve ( Richmond Park ), Windsor's square was not used for markets, which were held instead to the south of George Street. Because of its position, the square was closely associated with St Matthew's Anglican Church and by the 1840s it was regularly known as the Church Green (e.g. Sydney Herald, 5 June 1841; Votes & Proceedings, Legislative Assembly 1858, III, 445, p. 26). The 8-hectare area seems to have remained without plantings until the 1870s. By the 1840s cricket was a more regular feature on the Church Green and Aboriginal men played for the town (e.g. Windsor Express and Richmond Advertiser, 21 March 1844).

In the 1860s there was a massive move in the New South Wales government to create public reserves, for public recreation either general or specific. In 1868 the State government made Church Green into a Public Reserve (21 acres and 1 rod), at the same time as two hundred acres between Windsor and Richmond was gazetted as a racecourse and the much smaller (7 acres, 3 rods 37 perches) Richmond Park was created "for public recreation". No trustees were appointed at Windsor, unlike Richmond. The Municipality of Windsor was created in 1870 and in 1874 the government granted the reserve, which was still on crown land, to the Town Council. The grant was made "upon Trust to use the said Land as a Site for Public Recreation and for no other use or purpose whatsoever". The Council was responsible for making rules and regulations and for managing any structures which might be erected. There was provision for forfeiture (to the Crown) if the conditions were not met.

A small rectangular part of the land was in fact resumed by the Crown in 1972, the part then, and now, occupied by Windsor Bowling Club with a frontage onto Tebbutt Street. After this change took place, the crown issued a new land-grant for the remaining 8.125 hectares to the Council in August 1972. Fulfilling the forecast of James Meehan in 1811, road alterations had already nibbled away small parts of the periphery of the reserve in 1932, 1957 and 1961.

Before Windsor Municipal Council was given formal ownership of the land, it decided to name the reserve McQuade Park. John McQuade was mayor of the municipality in 1872. He was an ambitious local magistrate, but his father had been a transportee, who as an emancipist had established an inn in Windsor close to the Square, on the corner of Tebbutt and George Streets. John himself had built a fine house, Auburn Villa, just across Moses Street from the reserve, while his brother, William McQuade senior, lived close by, across the Richmond Road, in the old Cox house of Fairfield. On 6 June 1872 the Councillors voted to name the reserve after John McQuade and transmitted their decision to the Department of Lands, which still controlled the reserve. At the same time, the Council fenced the reserve for the first time in 1872, with a few seats for the public soon donated by individuals such as the mayor. The Council also established a Park Committee.

On 16 April 1873 the Council rescinded the motion of the previous June and renamed the area Windsor Park. But the Department of Lands refused to accept this change and wrote to the Council saying that the name would remain McQuade Park. In August the Council debated the issue again and, by the casting vote of the new mayor (no friend of John McQuade), decided to abide by the name Windsor Park.

In 1874 the reserve was granted formally to the Council, while John McQuade was again mayor. On his casting vote, the rescission motion of August 1873 was itself rescinded. The Council restored the name McQuade Park and erected a signpost with the new name painted in gold letters. This was promptly vandalised and in March 1878, when William Walker, the local solicitor and politician, was mayor, the Council voted to restore the name Windsor Park. Since the land was now owned in freehold by the Council, the Department of Lands did not enter into the controversy.

It seems that the decision of 6 March 1878 has never been rescinded, so technically the name of the reserve should be Windsor Park, but the long shadow of the McQuade family seems to have ensured that the name McQuade Park has de facto acceptance. The historian of Windsor, the Revd James Steele, wrote wryly in 1916 that "the local park is sometimes, and sometimes not, called McQuade Park". But the McQuades seem to have won the war, even if they lost the last engagement with Council in 1878.

In 1874 south side of Moses Street part of park was fenced, trenched and planted with c250 trees (from Messrs. Ferguson of Camden & others); a roadway was made across water hole (formerly a bog) leaving another water hole (the present lake); the George Street entrance gravelled; a Tebbutt Street entrance was made with a circle shrubbery formed, fenced and planted; a new roadway was formed from George Street to Richmond Road with trees planted on each side, some 40' (13m) wide and parts of the park were levelled and filled in.