Graeme Barrow This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991. This republication is part of the digitisation project being carried out by Scholarly Information Services/Library and ANU Press. This project aims to make past scholarly works published by The Australian National University available to a global audience under its open-access policy. Canberra region car tours Graeme Barrow

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Australian National University Press Canberra, Australia, London, England and Miami, Fla., USA, 1981 First published in Australia 1981 Australian National University Press, Canberra © Text and photographs, Graeme Barrow 1981 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Barrow, Graeme: Canberra region car tours.

ISBN 0 7081 1087 8.

1. Historic buildings — Australian Capital Territory — Guide-books. I. Title.

919.47’0463

Library of Congress No. 80-65767

United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East, and Africa: Books Australia, 3 Henrietta St., London WC2E 8LU, England North America: Books Australia, Miami, Fla., USA Southeast Asia: Angus & Robertson (S.E. Asia) Pty Ltd, Singapore Japan: United Publishers Services Ltd, Tokyo

Design by ANU Graphic Design Adrian Young Typeset by Australian National University Printed by The Dominion Press, Victoria, Australia

To Nora and Jane, patient tour companions Contents

INTRODUCTION

ROUTES

1 Canberra—Captains Flat—Michelago—Canberra l 2 Canberra—Bungendore—Collector—Lake George— Canberra 13 3 Canberra—Bungendore—Bundong Station—Lake Bathurst—Tarago—Canberra 24 4 Canberra—Bungendore—Gidleigh—The Briars— Hoskinstown—Canberra 34

5 Canberra—T arago—Bungonia—Goulburn— Canberra 43 6 Canberra—Gundaroo—Nanima—Hall—Canberra 53 7 Canberra—old St Luke’s—Sutton—Amungula— Air Disaster Memorial—Canberra 63 8 Canberra—Gundaroo—Bellmont Forest—Gunning— Breadalbane—Collector—Canberra 68 9 Canberra—Uriarra Crossing—The Mullion—Mountain Creek—Uriarra Homestead—Canberra 75 10 Canberra—The Mullion—Glenrock—Murrumbidgee River—Mountain Creek—The Mullion—Canberra 84 Introduction

Scenically the Canberra region is among the loveliest in New South Wales while in many of its old buildings it has reminders of the early days of British settlement. A large number of these are visible from the road, but few are open to the public. There are sound reasons for this although the growing opinion of tourism as a panacea for economic ills makes it surprising that individual owners and local bodies are not attempting to stimulate interest in what the region has to offer, both scenically and historically. One way to do this is for the owners to open locked doors and gates. Another is to restore old buildings which are being allowed to fall down before our eyes; yet another is to clean up nineteenth century cemeteries whose overgrown state is a shame and an indictment of those churches or local bodies neglectful of the heritage they are allowing nature to despoil. Few signposts in the region point the way to scenic delights or historically important places or buildings; wall plaques giving details of the owners and developers of notable buildings and properties are rare; there are few tourist brochures on the attractions of the Canberra region and its lively history. Implementing measures such as these need not be outrageously expensive. Yet any one of them would heighten the enjoyment and education of travellers. In themselves they would assist the cause of tourism in the region and thus the region’s economy. They would also help prevent the unthinking destruction of our tenuous links with our nineteenth century predecessors. Tasmania is showing what can be done. Enterprising entrepreneurs in that State, whether government or private, are exploiting its history and scenery with dash and flair. They even run ‘graveyard tours’ which take visitors around colonial burial grounds in Hobart and Launceston, with a few historic homes thrown in. The Canberra region has much to offer, yet old cemeteries are reverting to bush and nineteenth century homes remain shut to outsiders. Readers of this book will find details of ten routes which should prove attractive to travellers wanting to explore the region’s byways rather than its highways. Retracing one’s steps on the individual routes has been avoided as much as possible although in some tours getting to the interesting parts means initial travel over roads used for other routes. Each of the ten journeys can be made in a day, most of them with ease. Distances were calculated using the Canberra City Post Office as the starting point. Detailed maps are often useful although the directions given in the text and the sketch map provided should be adequate. For those wanting their own maps, those indicated at the start of each chapter are from the Commonwealth’s national mapping project, the 1 : 100,000 series. These are available at several government and retail outlets in Canberra. Travellers should not interpret references to the history of private properties as invitations to walk in uninvited. Some owners justifiably resent people wandering over their properties, others are willing to allow visits provided arrangements are made beforehand. Most churches in the region are kept locked as a deterrent to yahoos although often a key can be obtained from a local parishioner should the clergyman live elsewhere. Among the many people who helped me in some way with the preparation of this book I wish in particular to thank the following: the Reverend Peter Brown, Mr and Mrs J.R. Colquhoun, George Gundry, Philip Morgan-Giles, Jim Gibbney, Inge Giese, John Hyles, Merval Hoare, Mrs A.W. Hyles, Shirley Faulder, John Woolly, Stuart Hume, Dr W.B McAdam, John de Salis, Father Albert Havas, and the staff of the following: National Library of Australia, Australian Archives, Mitchell Library, Division of National Mapping (Department of National Development and Energy), National Trust of Australia (NSW Division), Department of Defence, NSW Registrar-General’s Office, NSW Archives Authority, NSW Soil Conservation Service, NSW Geographical Names Board, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Many other individuals and organisations also gave valuable assistance at various times and for this I express my sincere appreciation. Finally I would like to thank the historian Errol Lea-Scarlett who kindly read the manuscript and made several helpful suggestions.

To Goulburn

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P a leran g/□ R oute 1 Canberra—Captains Flat—Michelago— Canberra Distance (round trip): approximately 180 km. Road conditions: excellent to good. Largely unsealed Captains Flat—Michelago section is dusty in summer and tricky in the wet. Map references: Sheet 8727 (Canberra) and Sheet 8726 (Michelago).

This route takes travellers through often dramatic hill country and settled farmlands. Historic houses and churches may be seen, as well as the township of Captains Flat and the hamlet of Michelago. Drive from Canberra to Queanbeyan and then take the Kings Highway (commonly known as the coast road) in the direction of Batemans Bay. The turnoff to Captains Flat is well signposted and is about 4.5 km from Queanbeyan. The road to Captains Flat, from the turnoff on the Kings Highway, climbs, dips and swings, initially through thickly wooded countryside then, as pockets of grazing land begin to break up the bush, through rolling paddocks. At times the landscape resembles an English park in its open, lightly wooded appearance, while here and there modern houses dot the hillsides for this district is becoming a retreat for hobby farmers. About 11.5 km from the turnoff the Molonglo River can be seen on the left, snaking through a valley between rolling hills. Golden willows make this spot a lovely one in autumn. About 1.5 km further on, after the road climbs a hill, the Molonglo Plains, wide and long, come into view, given a dramatic backdrop by mountain ranges whose appeal changes with the weather. On fine, clear days they are blue, pure, inviting; when cloaked in mist or rain they are sombre, mysterious and unwelcoming. The botanist and explorer Allan Cunningham, who was the first white man to see these splendid plains, discovered them in April 1824 while leading an expedition into southern New South Wales. He left Parramatta in March with three government horses and three men and in 1 seven weeks covered 450 miles. Eleven years later his younger brother Richard, the NSW Colonial Botanist, had the misfortune to be killed by Aborigines and Cunningham replaced him. He only lasted a few months, finding it distasteful that among his duties were the growing of vegetables for the Governor and the supervising of the ‘Government Cabbage Garden’. At the bottom of the hill, 13.5 km from the turnoff, a dirt road to the left takes drivers to Bungendore or Hoskinstown (dealt with elsewhere in this book) while the Captains Flat road swings right to run along the edge of the flatlands. Soon the red roofs and tall chimneys of the nineteenth century Carwoola homestead and its outbuildings can be seen—the same sight, in fact, as that which greeted bone-shaken travellers of the 1800s because in those days Carwoola was a nineteenth century version of today’s motels and service stations, meeting, as it did, the wants of settlers and travellers. It was once numbered among the finest properties in the Canberra region, but over the years it has been reduced in size and the two-storey homestead, the outbuildings and the grounds are in a state of some disrepair. The present owners have carried out restoration work at Carwoola and the NSW Government has placed a permanent conservation order on the homestead and its outbuildings, so this historic place should be saved for posterity. (Carwoola is not open to the public). Use of the name Carwoola dates from at least 1850 and it is probably a derivation of the word ‘Carrowillah’, mentioned as early as 1827. Carwoola or Carrowillah is said to be Aboriginal for ‘the meeting of the waters on the plain’, a lyrical, singularly apt title because the station lies on river flats between hills through which the Molonglo River, fed by numerous streams, runs. Today the property retains some 3.5 km of Molonglo River frontage. The meaning could lie also in the fact that the Primrose Valley Creek, a southern tributary of the Molonglo, meets this river a little to the north-east of St Thomas’ Church, which was built on Carwoola land not far from the homestead. However, a noted historian, the late Dr Frederick Watson, wrote in 1938 that ‘The Molonglo River was known to the aborigines as the Yealambidgee, meaning a chain of waterholes, and the plains on the watershed of this river above Carwoola Gap as 2 Moolinggoolah, which name has been corrupted into the modern Molonglo. Moolinggoolah was subdivided by the aborigines into Carwoola (still retained) and Enwoola (now Foxlow) meaning the centre and the end of the plain below and above the junction of the Tirralilly River’. Carwoola homestead was built on land which formed part of an original grant to the brothers Henry and Charles Smith who arrived in Sydney in 1827. Nine years later the land, totalling at that time 2560 acres, came into the possession of an Irish migrant, William Rutledge. In 1839, his brother Thomas, who was to figure prominently in the Carwoola story, also sailed to Australia and was appointed the station’s manager. He was only in his early twenties and as the years went by he developed extensive pastoral interests including the purchase of Carwoola. His brother William settled in Victoria where he became known as ‘Terrible Billy’ for his explosive temper and unreserved use of ‘the language of a centurion’. Others, however, were said to find him ‘warm-hearted, courageous, generous’ even if he was ‘outspoken’. Thomas married his first cousin, Martha Forster, in 1849 and it is thought that Carwoola’s main homestead may have been built just before the wedding. By 1877 Carwoola and another Rutledge property nearby, Gidleigh, totalled some 90,000 acres and Carwoola homestead was being described as architecturally ‘of the modern style’. It was said that it ‘comprises two stories, and is built of the best materials, with a verandah round three sides . . . All the usual appurtenances belonging to a well- appointed station are here also, such as store, post office . . . Telegraph office . . . and several cottages for the hands employed’. Thomas Rutledge became a prominent breeder of fast racehorses and at the time of his death in 1904 at the age of 86, was called ‘a great sporting enthusiast . . . He owned and bred some of the best horses in the district’. In keeping with his stature as a major landholder he was active socially and politically. In 1848 he gave a ball at Carwoola, one of the guests being Stewart Mowle who had to ride through a frightening windstorm to get to the homestead. An extract from Mowle’s diary, describing the storm, says that ‘. . . Macquoid and myself encountered the most furious gale, and were nearly 3 blown off our horses’. Mowle, who managed Yarralumla station in the Canberra district for some years (at the age of 18, in 1840, he was in charge of ‘some fifty or sixty men with 25,000 sheep’), but was an unsuccessful grazier in his own right, did not like Thomas Rutledge although he had accepted his hospitality on the occasion of the ball. His diaries include several references to the Rutledges. Giving details of his friends Mowle mentions ‘. .. and the Rutledges of Molongo [szc] — but this last family I never cared for . . .’. In 1851 Mowle, an active young man who loved singing and dancing, was riding at the Bungendore races and describing the owner of Carwoola in these uncompromising terms: ‘. . . Rutledge, a very common North of Ireland man, as the Rutledges are . . .’. Others saw Rutledge differently. Apart from the extract from the report of his death mentioned earlier an obituary described him as Tn character Mr Rutledge was most hospitable, generous, sympathetic and broad minded’. Another obituary described him as ‘Coming from a stout, old fighting, dare-devil breed . ..’. In November 1876 Rutledge attended a dinner in Queanbeyan for a party of visiting Ministers. These days Australia’s politicians jet about the world, but in 1876 the arrival of a Ministerial party from Sydney, presumably on horseback or in coaches, had the whole town agog. They were met five miles out of town by ‘a large company of people in buggies and horsemen. Three miles from the town a procession was formed, with the Queanbeyan brass band leading the procession, extending over a quarter of a mile. They entered Queanbeyan, and went round the town, being received everywhere very heartily. The houses were dressed with flags, flowers and bushes’. Rutledge’s wife, Martha, survived him by only four years. In 1907, a year before she died, Martha recollected her voyage to Australia in the Harriet, ‘a very small vessel’, in 1829, and in doing so gave a striking example of the cruelty of the times. 'I think I was a special favourite [of Captain Buckle], as I remember often sitting on his knee and playing with his whiskers, but on one occasion he set me down to cross the deck to give the ropes [szc] end to our poor cabin boy, who was crouching past him on the opposite side and hoping to pass unnoticed after which I was always afraid of and never liked him nor cared for his notice’. 4 Weed-infested Rutledge plot, St Thomas'

5 Carwoola passed into the hands of a South Australian, James Frederick Maslin, in 1907 and at the time of the sale was a station of 40,000 acres carrying 12,000 sheep. In 1929, the homestead was described as a ‘comfortable two-storied stone building . . . The house has 16 rooms in the main building, including a magnificent billiard room . . . Outside the home one finds pretty gardens laid out in striking formation, above which tower beautiful English trees, including the elm, oak . . Today the trees remain, but the ‘pretty gardens’ have disappeared.

Stile, St Thomas', Molonglo

Thomas and Martha Rutledge lie today in the small graveyard of the Anglican church of St Thomas’, Molonglo, whose iron roof and steeple can be seen from the Carwoola entrance gate. The cemetery is overgrown and the haunt of tiger snakes and in 6 one corner a grotesquely twisted pine tree, the victim of a violent windstorm, seems destined to topple any day into the graveyard or the church grounds. Most of the graves are neglected and the inscription on Thomas Rutledge’s is almost indecipherable. The weed-infested Rutledge plot is a shame, given Thomas’ solid con­ tribution to the development of the district, as a pastoralist and benefactor. It was he, after all, who enabled the church to be built, having set apart Carwoola land for the building at the instigation of a colourful church architect and builder, the Reverend Alberto Dias Soares, Rector of the Parish of Queanbeyan which then included what is now the Parish of Bungendore. Soares has been described as an ‘enthusiastic and pugnacious Latin’ and was an engineer and a merchant before he took cloth in 1857. Construction of St Thomas’ began in 1872 and the church was opened for worship in 1874. It is possible that the graveyard may have been in use before that because one plot commemorates several Dunlops back to 1863. Evidently not as many worshippers as expected attended the opening because the Queanbeyan Age tartly observed that ‘There was a tolerably large congregation present, although we called to mind the many residents of the district who we thought ought to have been in attendance on the interesting occasion’. (One can tremble today in imagining how last century’s Age would thunder at attendances these days. Sometimes there are only two or three worshippers, occasionally two dozen. But bigger congregations do come along for weddings, baptisms and funerals.) The Age said the ‘total cost of the church so far is about £1000’ and that the principal cost had been borne by Thomas Rutledge and George Osborne, of the nearby Foxlow property. This lovely church stands on a rise a short distance down the Captains Flat road from Carwoola. It is surrounded by a hedge of privet and hawthorn while several twisted and gnarled pine trees regularly shower thousands of needles on to the rough green surrounds. It looks exactly like an English village church translated into the Australian bush, if one can erase the image of the iron of the roof and steeple. A quaint stile, presented by Mrs F.B.S. Falkiner, who is said to have had a love of English stiles, gives access to the grounds should the gate be locked. Mrs Falkiner and her husband, of the Foxlow property, also lie in St Thomas’ churchyard beside the Rutledges. 7 The church was built of random stone in the Gothic style and its pews can hold 150 people. It is kept locked and its windows are protected by ugly wire mesh—an essential device since fifteen windows (including three memorial ones) were damaged by vandals in April 1967, a disgusting act recorded for posterity in the church register. Part of the damage was caused to the prominent east windows of St Thomas and Christ where a section of one of the panes was broken and has not been repaired. These windows were presented by Sir Edward and Lady Martha Knox, of Edgecliff, who made annual visits to Carwoola, Martha being Thomas Rutledge’s sister. Sir Edward Knox was one of the founders of the CSR company and thus a pioneer of the Australian sugar industry. Jim Maslin, the 21-year-old son of James Maslin, who, it will be recalled, bought Carwoola in 1907, was killed in action in France in 1917 and is remembered in several places in the church. One memorial, a window depicting a uniformed soldier, was presented by his father who also gave the church a harmonium in memory of his son. An inscription on the window says, ‘A young life nobly ended’. A wall plaque, erected by Alice Thornton Mills, also commemorates Jim Maslin. After leaving St Thomas’ the road cuts through the plain which begins to narrow 15 km from Captains Flat. Foxlow homestead can be seen at this point but is mostly hidden by century-old pines and elms. The station is a Poll Hereford stud and once formed part of Thomas Rutledge’s property before it was bought by George Osborne. In 1920, Mr F.B.S. Falkiner bought the estate and went to work with great zeal demolishing the old homestead and erecting a ‘concrete bungalow, white walled and red roofed’. A writer in 1929 was enthusiastic: ‘The house as it stands now is charming — the wide verandahs and pillared porch, trailing roses and wisterias. The living rooms are panelled, ceilinged, floored and furnished in oak . . .’. Even the outbuildings were inspirational: ‘One can hardly leave Foxlow without remarking the outbuildings. As a rule on a station these erections are an eyesore; here they are things of beauty. All rebuilt of concrete, white walled and red roofed they stand in order and precision to the four winds of heaven’. Foxlow homestead and its surroundings present a picture of 8 tranquillity especially in autumn when the golden poplars and elms contrast vividly with the dark green of the pines. But it has had its share of drama. During the 1850s digging at Foxlow led to the finding of gold specimens. Then in 1865-66 the notorious bushrangers, the Clarke brothers, raided the property three times. In recent years Foxlow and Carwoola suffered when Molonglo River floodwaters bearing toxic heavy metal wastes from the abandoned Captains Flat mine spilled into their paddocks, destroying vegetation. Towards the end of the last century the Osbornes of Foxlow lost a long struggle to prevent the opening of a road ‘from Bungendore to Hoskingtown [since changed to Hoskinstown] across Osborne’s plain paddock’. Selectors and townsfolk were jubilant over the road opening in 1890 and feted their local MP, Mr E.W. O’Sullivan (who had fought zealously against the squatters) at a banquet at Hoskinstown. A cavalcade of ‘at least two hundred persons’ travelling in buggies, coaches, on horseback and on foot escorted O’Sullivan from Bungendore to Hoskinstown. He told those at the banquet that with him ‘ “vox populi” was “vox Dei”, that is, the voice of the people was the voice of God’. The fencing off of freehold lands by the squatters ‘even when traversed by roads older than anyone could remember’ was a cause of great animosity in the community last century. After passing Foxlow notice the white road bridge across the Molonglo to the left. Near it is a disused rail bridge across which trains once hauled ore equivalent in value to an oil sheikh’s ransom. Proposals to build the railway were first discussed in 1928 but a leisurely decade passed before it came into being, linking Captains Flat and its mine with the Sydney-Cooma line at Bungendore. Today its rails rust in the sun, waiting vainly, as do the residents of Captains Flat, for more rich lodes to be discovered and the dawning of a new minerals age. Nearing Captains Flat the bush begins to close in again and rugged hills replace the plains. On the outskirts of what is now a village the road winds past huge piles of tailings covering 15 ha and then crosses the Molonglo River. Until recently these giant brown and red dumps were a dramatic sight for the picture of sheer desolation they created: mountains of the moon in the middle of a eucalypt forest. But today restoration is ridding 9 Captains Flat of this eyesore although simultaneously it is removing a spectacular creation of barbaric man. A visiting British expert on the revegetation of toxic mine wastes once called these dumps ‘as nasty a sight as could be found’. The restoration efforts are a joint Commonwealth-NSW project and the total bill will be about S2.5 million. Bulldozers were brought in to reshape and terrace the dumps, some of which had collapsed and polluted the Molonglo River, and contractors worked round the clock for a year to pour millions of tonnes of clay, rock and topsoil over the slag heaps, creating in effect three stabilising blankets over them. Then soil conservationists planted couch, bent, clover and rye on the new surfaces. Slowly the wounding of nature is being healed and it is likely that one day little that is visible will remain of this particular assault on the Australian landscape. Captains Flat gives the impression of being a ghost town in the making, merely waiting for its last inhabitants to flee. At the 1976 census 413 people (76 fewer than the number there in 1891) were living in its mean-looking houses huddled on tiny blocks; overall the place is a melancholy sight with its vandal-stricken shops, empty houses and general appearance of poverty-ridden seediness. It was not always like this. Back in 1897 the Sydney Mail's ‘Special Correspondent’ described the Flat as ‘flourishing’ and ‘here to stay’. The town had a population of 800 (another source says the 1897 figure was between an estimated 4000 and 5000), ‘buildings are going up every day ... I venture to prosphesy that within 12 months — nay, in half that time — there will be no more flourishing town in New South Wales’. This enthusiastic optimism was unfounded. Two years later the first Captains Flat boom was over — the ores were there but presented too many technical problems to be exploited, given the knowledge of the times. Gold was found in the vicinity of Captains Flat in the second half of last century, but it was not until a rich copper lode was discovered in 1882 that this first boom was launched. Copper, silver and gold were won until 1899 when the seemingly inevitable fate of all mining townships occurred — the boom burst. There was little activity until 1937 when, the technological problems having been overcome, Captains Flat again scaled the dizzy heights of a new boom. The railway link with Bungendore 10 was built, new buildings went up and old ones came down. On this occasion the good times lasted until 1962 when the ore bodies ran out leaving a dazed, unemployed populace existing in the shadows cast by the giant slag heaps. Large quantities of lead, zinc, copper and iron pyrites had made fortunes — but not for the hapless workers of Captains Flat. Should you wish to visit the village cemetery take the turning to Braidwood to the left just before the hotel. Drive 2.5 km up a gravel road until you reach an unmarked gate on the right. A rutted track forms a barrier to most vehicles and takes about 10 minutes to walk. The cemetery is located in an enormous paddock although only a few headstones can be seen; other graves may be unmarked. In the early days Anglicans from Captains Flat were buried at Carwoola while Catholics were taken to Hoskinstown. The seal ends 5.5 km from Captains Flat on the road to Michelago and the dust can be choking in the dry and difficult to negotiate in the wet. The road snakes, climbs and drops through hills and pasture. About 16 km from the Flat it plunges to the floor of a valley, providing a scene of pastoral beauty that, unlike Captains Flat and its mine dumps, does prove that man and nature can work in harmony. Sherlock Creek runs through this valley, a lovely stream worth exploring on foot. The turnoff to Michelago can easily be missed. It occurs at the Mirrabinda property, 22 km from Captains Flat, and in keeping with the often absent-minded habits of country road builders, is not signposted. Turn right at this property and drive another 4 km to Boolboolma Crossing where an occasionally tricky ford is a means of getting across the Queanbeyan River. The drive offers no better place for a steak than this spectacular river valley. The road climbs high into the Tinderries from this point, flattens out, then 42 km from Captains Flat begins the steep, tortuous descent leading towards Michelago. This lasts 4 km with the prize for the traveller being views of grazing lands, densely wooded hillsides and giant rock faces. At the bottom turn right then soon afterwards left to return to the seal and reach the hamlet of Michelago. The tiny, white weatherboard Anglican church of St Thomas’ is worth a look although the building is kept locked. It was built in 1902. Thirty-six years earlier, on 1 June 1866, five bushrangers held up Michelago and escaped with ten or twelve bags of loot 11 after getting drunk at Thomas Kennedy’s public house and brawling among themselves. Nothing equalling that day of drama disturbs the rustic sleepiness of this twentieth century village although the public house still exists in mute memory of that infamous occasion. Once you reach the Monaro Highway down the road from Michelago turn right for Canberra and after passing St Patrick’s Roman Catholic church find a two-storey white-washed building on the right. It presses hard on the edge of the road and tall, dense trees and shrubbery mean that little can be seen. This was once Kennedy’s Inn. Across the road are the ruins of what was once the Michelago bakery and it seems that last century the village heart may have beat in this spot. With thecoming of the railway Michelago probably gravitated to its present site. No-one lives at the inn these days although it is still owned by the de Salis family who bought it in 1900 when it became the homestead of their Soglio property, named after a village in Switzerland from which the de Salis family originated. Behind the present St Patrick’s Church is another link with nineteenth century Michelago in the form of the original St Patrick’s — a stone structure built in 1865. These days hay and firewood are stored where Masses were said and priests made their home, for clergymen lived there before the Presbytery was built in 1897. They occupied a few small rooms incorporated in the church as a teacher’s residence when the church also served as a school. When the old church proved too small for the Catholic population the present large structure was designed and built of brick, said to have been made on site from local red clay. A plaque beside the altar records that St Patrick’s was blessed and dedicated on 28 April 1907 by the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Moran, but the ceremony was actually performed by Monsignor John O’Gorman, sickness preventing the Cardinal from attending. Everything had been prepared, including the plaque, so the ceremony went ahead anyway. One of the parish priests, Father Matthew O’Donoghue, appointed in November 1917, made the transition between the horse age and that of the motorcar. He was the last parish priest to use a horse and sulky and the first to use a motorised vehicle — a ‘T’ Model Ford. Michelago has little more to keep the Canberra-bound traveller and the capital beckons, some 55 km away. 12 Route 2 Canberra—Bungendore—Collector— Lake George—Canberra Distance (round trip): approximately 175 km. Road conditions: excellent to good, unsealed portions bumpy in places. Map references: Sheets 8727 (Canberra), 8827 (Braidwood), 8828 (Goulburn), 8728 (Gunning).

A rural village, historic churches and beautiful scenery are among the diversions available to travellers on this route. Bungendore’s old buildings are interesting for those concerned with the past, while Lake George, which occasionally disappears, is a phenomenon which ensures conversation among travellers. Drive from Canberra towards Sydney on the Federal Highway for about 28 km before reaching a prominent crossroads. Take the turning to the right. Until a few years ago the road to Bungendore off the Federal Highway was dry and dusty and a bone-shaker to drive on, but the seal has transformed it into a pleasant rural road. It passes through typical Southern Tablelands pastoral country — hilly, rolling, tree-dotted — which is becoming more closely settled. City people have found that it is within easy commuting distance of the capital and new houses are numerous. The Bungendore road arrives at the crest of a hill 13 km from the turnoff on the Federal Highway and the steep descent gives travellers stimulating views of flat lands, foothills and ranges. One of these lovely scenes is framed by sloping hillsides through which the road threads its way and is particularly memorable. Another, halfway down the descent, just before the road turns sharply left, frames a pleasant pastoral scene of plains, the village of Bungendore and a backdrop of hills. Just beyond the end of the descent a side road to the left leads into Lake George, but it is a dead end and after 3 km ends at a gate leading into private property. Bungendore is only a short distance further on and travellers 13 should stop here and saunter around the village, established as a town by government notice in 1837 but now designated as a village. Although bigger, it is a quieter place today than when a surveyor, James Larmer, visited it in 1837. Each of the four families living there was selling sly grog or indulging in other lawless practices. He considered it ‘a dangerous place to remain in or even pass through’. By 1861, 195 people were living in Bungendore and until recently progress was slow although there had been a few bursts of activity such as the arrival of the railway line in 1885, the extension of the line to serve the Captains Flat mine before World War II and a low-cost housing scheme initiated in the 1960s. Construction of the Canberra-Batemans Bay highway, which passes through Bungendore, brought some extra cash into the village although these days the number of travellers stopping in Bungendore is not great. At the 1976 census 601 people were living there, a sharp rise of 17 per cent on the 1971 figure (514), reflecting the continuation of the low-cost housing scheme and Bungendore’s appeal to Canberra and Queanbeyan commuters. No fewer than fourteen buildings in Bungendore were included in the 1972 register of historic buildings published by the NSW division of the National Trust. They are: Barn, 3 Gilraltar St.; butchers shop, cnr Ellendon and Malbon Sts.; former Commercial Bank of Australia, cnr Molonglo and Gilraltar Sts.; courthouse and police residence; former hotel, cnr Ellendon and Malbon Sts.; Elms Villa, Molonglo St.; house, 7 Gibraltar St.; railway station; Royal Hotel, Gibraltar St.; St John’s Presbyterian Church; St Mary’s Roman Catholic church and hall, Turalla Tee.; and St Philip’s Church of England. This last-mentioned church alone is worth a visit to Bungendore for the handsomeness of its Gothic structure and a superb stained glass window which occupies the east wall above the altar. The foundation stone was laid in October 1864 and the design of the church, as with so many other fine church buildings in the Canberra region, was the work of the Reverend Alberto Soares, Rector of Queanbeyan. The present stone building replaced an earlier brick church, the shell of which was erected about 1843-44, but not completed until some years later. Considerable cracks became evident in its west wall and these no doubt explained the need to have it replaced by something more 14 St Philip’s, Bungendore solid and lasting. Bishop William Broughton, who made periodic visits to Bungendore, complained in 1847 that the first church remained unfinished although he himself had provided the doors and windows. The stone for Soares’ church was quarried from ‘The Gib’ (Gibraltar Hill), a prominent landmark nearby which has many rocky outcrops. Today St Philip’s dark-tiled roof is in pleasant harmony with the weathered brown stone of the structure. Giant elms, about eighty years old, enhance the Englishness of church and site, but are a hindrance to photographers in spring and summer because they hide the building, making satisfactory pictures of it hard to obtain. In autumn though, when their falling leaves make a carpet of golden flakes around the church and the branches are bare, most of the building is revealed. For 15 those with imagination the beat of the distant drums of Empire can clearly be heard inside the church. One plate commemorates Second Lieutenant E.F.F. Osborne, of the 16th (Queen’s) Lancers, who died at Lucknow in 1895 from enteric fever. Osborne was the fourth son of the Osbornes of Currandooley Station, and the brass was erected by ‘his brother officers as a mark of respect’. A marble plaque, erected by ‘His friends and comrades of the District’ commemorates A.D. Campbell, killed while serving with Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts in South Africa in 1901. Yet another plaque remembers H. Forster (Pat) Rutledge, second son of W. Forster Rutledge, of Gidleigh. Young Rutledge, only 25, went to his Maker in the cold early light of dawn on 9 October 1917 at Passchendaele. A Rutledge commemorative stained glass window on the west wall depicting St Michael trampling the dragon was given by Jane, Thomas and Elma Rutledge in 1918. This window, although of some interest, does not bear comparison with the quiet beauty of the stained glass window occupying the East Wall above the altar. Light colours, among them delicate shadings of yellow, red and blue, were used in this window, the work of the noted stained glass artist, David Saunders. It was erected in memory of members of the Osborne family of Currandooley, and depicts Christ, Noah and St Paul. It is at its loveliest in the late afternoon when sunlight streams in from the opposite West Wall and enhances the subtlety of the colours chosen by the artist. Some viewers have expressed their abhorrence of the protective wire mesh partly visible through the window, but this is necessary to protect this substantial work of art from rock-throwing vandals. David Saunders was responsible for another small side window in the church and this, which depicts pleasant flowers, also reinforces his reputation as an artist of stature in stained glass. St Philip’s Church is undoubtedly Bungendore’s outstanding building yet many of the others mentioned earlier warrant inspection, if only from the outside. The old Commercial Bank building with its verandah, white plaster walls and iron roof is conspicuous on its corner while not far away Elms Villa, two stories, white, with grey shutters, stands out. The police station/old courthouse, opposite St Philip’s, complements it nicely for it was built of the same local stone. 16 After touring Bungendore return to the old Commercial Bank and take the Tarago road. About 27 km further on, after an easy journey on a good road which alternates between dirt and seal, a turnoff to the left points travellers in the direction of Currawang and Collector. About 5 km down this road to the left is the giant Woodlawn opencut mine, producer of copper, lead, zinc and silver. It cost S78 million to establish and employs 270 people. The seal gives way to dirt just past the mine and 6.5 km later the buildings of historic Willeroo Station are visible on the left. This station was established by the Cooper family, said to have been the first white settlers at Lake George, having received a grant for Willeroo about 1825. An unconfirmed report says that James Cooper built a cottage at Willeroo and was helped in the management of the station by his nephew, Francis Cooper. Presumably this Francis Cooper was the father of Sir Pope Cooper, born at Willeroo in 1848, the son o f‘Francis, squatter’,

Mausoleum entrance, Willeroo 17 and'one of Australia’s most distinguished jurists. Willeroo was sold in 1894 to a member of the Osborne family, prominent pastoralists in the region. The old homestead occupied by the Coopers stood on a hill overlooking Lake George but today only what is thought to have been the kitchen block remains. Fine old stone from the homestead was used to build the stables which make a solid and eye-catching addition to the Willeroo outbuildings. The stables look more substantial than the present homestead itself. Directly opposite Willeroo homestead, on private land, stands one of the oddest structures in the district — the Cooper mausoleum. Set in a grove of trees, it was built in the shape of a pyramid topped by a stone plinth. This in turn is surmounted by what appears to be a type of urn bearing male and female effigies. The mausoleum stands in what even today is known as the Vault Paddock. It has a stone entranceway which years ago had a simple gate leading into the tomb. The story is that shearers’ rouseabouts used to doss down in the mausoleum and the scandalised owners took the gate down and bricked the tomb up. Some fifty-five layers of thin, hand-made bricks make up each side of the pyramid which is about 4 m high; the plinth rises about another 1.5 m. There is no indication how many Coopers, if in fact any, are buried there although an inscription on the plinth commemorates a young boy, Francis Brown Cooper, born at Willeroo 1832, died at Sydney 1838. Perhaps it was intended merely as a memorial to the Coopers. It is possible to catch a glimpse of the mausoleum from the road, but you have to be quick. Just before reaching Willeroo the road makes a slight descent and the pyramid can be seen in its clump of trees to the right on a rise in the paddock ahead. From the mausoleum itself the still waters of Lake George can be seen, while far in the distance, directly above a white farm structure near the lake, is an intriguing ruin. This, too, is on private property but I was able to arrange a closer inspection which indicated that many years ago this was a house. It stands in a lovely location on Kennys Point overlooking Lake George (Kennys were among the pioneers of the district) and is gradually surrendering to the destructive forces of wind and rain. The walls of stone and rubble are about 30 cm thick and the fireplace is visible still. 18 Ruins of dwelling, Lake George

About 5 km down the road from Willeroo, past a turnoff to the left to Collector, St Matthias’ Anglican church stands on a rise just after the road swings sharply left. Its origins are obscure although in 1875 the Diocese ofGoulburn did grant £25 towards its erection. There is doubt over the correct dedication also — it could be either St Matthew’s or St Matthias’ (the latter name is engraved on the collection plate and is the one by which the church is known today). As with so many other churches in the district, St Matthias’ is a solid structure of stone and brick although architecturally dull. An entry in the register reveals the disappointment of the clergyman who on 29 August 1926 wrote: ‘Heavy rain, only one came’. The collection was recorded as nil. So although the lone parishoner was stoical enough to endure the downpour, he or she was somewhat mean. The small graveyard attached to the church contains an intriguing stone erected in 1936 which is inscribed, ‘A loving tribute to my dear aunt A writer of sweet verse’. The poet of long ago was Bertha Boyd — known as Bertha of Argyle — who died in 1872 at the age of 35. In the 1860s, apparently, she wrote poems which were printed in the Goulburn Herald. So impressed was one reader that he 19 Currawong church offered to send Bertha to Europe for a course of study. Another author of several books called her ‘One of the sweetest poetesses that ever sung’. After leaving the church the road climbs Telegraph Hill where the ruins of an old pise dwelling on the left make an interesting stopping place. One empty window frames the blue waters of Lake George. About 4.5 km from the Currawang Anglican church stands the Roman Catholic church of St Lawrence O’Toole, Spring Valley, built in 1888. It is an imposing solid stone building although its interior, light and airy, is generally uninteresting. A bigger cemetery than at Currawang is located behind the church with the oldest grave apparently being that of Sarah Sykes, born in the eighteenth century, died in 1853 aged 82. After leaving Spring Valley drive back 7 km to the turnoff on the right to Collector (see Route 8). The drive to Collector is short, about 13 km, and passes through grazing lands, valleys and hills. Some 9 km past Collector is the large sheet of water known to the Aborigines as ‘Wee,ree,waa’ and given the dreary name of Lake George by the British in honour of King George IV. 20 Remains of pise dwelling, Telegraph Hill

Governor Macquarie, who visited the lake in 1820 and named it after the king, described it this way: ‘At the distance of about 4 miles from it, and from the top of a hill on the left of the road, we had a partial view of the great lake, which even at that distance looked very fine . . . we were all most highly gratified and delighted with this noble expanse of water . . . after dinner we drank a bumper toast to the success of the future settlers of the shores of Lake George, which name I have given to this grand and magnificent sheet of water in honour of His present Majesty’. Macquarie is remembered today on the lake’s eastern side, where Governors Hill is named after him. The lake was discovered in 1820 by an illiterate bushman, Joseph Wild, employed by the surgeon and pastoralist Dr Charles Throsby, who had heard o f‘Wee,ree,waa’ before giving Wild the assignment of discovering it. A clerk with Wild’s party, Sylvester Hall, reporting Wild’s success to Throsby, said that ‘a strong westerly wind occasioned a heavy rolling Surf like the Ocean’. 21 A former English sea captain, William Hovell, who saw the lake in 1824, was warm in his praise: ‘Until now, I thought Goulburn Plains to be the most delightful spot of country I had seen in the Colony, but having seen Lake George from one of the highest hills, close to its banks, I must decide in its favour; the immense sheet of water, the high surrounding hills, with lofty mountains at a distance, and here and there studded with plains, give it a most beautiful and picturesque appearance’. The lake has dried up several times since it was discovered, leading to fanciful explanations of why this should happen. Scientists are more practical people, however, and say the changes in the lake can be fully explained by seasonal and long­ term variations in rainfall, evaporation and the inflow of streams. Lake George has a catchment area of approximately 900 km2, about six times the size of the lake itself. A Southern Tablelands identity, the bullock driver, Charles MacAlister, recorded that towards the end of a long drought last century Lake George was as ‘dry as a bone all over’ and ‘Fat-hen’ was ‘as high as the pony I was riding, and up to the backs of the bullocks . . .’. Notwithstanding MacAlister’s experience, a number of people have died in the waters of Lake George, among them five Duntroon cadets, drowned in 1956 when three sailing boats overturned. Early in 1958, a family of five drowned when their motor boat was swamped by waves springing up from an otherwise calm surface. The lake is so shallow that choppy and treacherous seas can develop very quickly. One witness in 1973 told of watching a large surge of water about 500 yards offshore. It appeared to be about 4 ft high, but other areas of the lake were calm and waveless. Apart from sudden changes in its mood Lake George possesses its own Loch Ness monster — or it did back in 1866 when it was noted that ‘a large animal, somewhat resembling a seal, and which comes occasionally to the surface to breathe, has been seen in its waters’. A few years later Lake George reached its ‘highest recorded level’ of 25 ft. The local populace, starved of water sports, built jetties, held boat races, and watched spellbound as a steam yacht graced the waters of the lake. Alas, the fickle lake did not remain constant, although early next century it was being seriously considered as a possible site for Australia’s national capital. A painting was said to depict a dream city of imposing buildings along the low-lying and floodprone eastern shores. 22 Dreams so often disappoint, and so does Lake George. Apart from its habit of disappearing its brackish waters have been poisonous at times — in 1972 there were warnings that the amount of salts in the lake had risen to a dangerous level, putting stock at risk. Birds love it though. One ornithologist in 1974 counted no fewer than forty-nine species of birds in a 2 km walk. The list goes on and on . . . swan, pelican, duck, plover, kookaburra, crimson rosella, magpie, hawk, eagle. Lake George has excited the imaginations of many. In 1886 a surveyor envisaged a forty-two-mile canal from the Molonglo River with an outlet tunnel from the lake leading into another canal to irrigate the Yass River valley. The proposal did not proceed because of its ‘enormous difficulties’. Fifty years later Lake George was dry and Collector residents were notifying the famous racing motorist Sir Malcolm Campbell of its wonderful possibilities as a speedway. They expected 100,000 cars to bring visitors to Lake Geoge to watch attempts on the world land speed record. An appeal for funds was launched, but everything fizzled out. The lake and its miles of level ground remained dry until in 1949, after a month of record rains, it filled again. About 40 km down the Federal Highway from Lake George is the modern city of Canberra which if some people had had their way would have been built on its shores rather than on a treeless plain. If this had eventuated the national capital might have been called Weereewaa, certainly a more imaginative and picturesque name than the prosaic Lake George.

23 Route 3 Canberra—Bungendore—Bundong Station— Lake Bathurst—Tarago—Canberra Distance (round trip): approximately 200 km. Road conditions: excellent to fair, unsealed section corrugated in places, dusty when dry. Map references: Sheets 8727 (Canberra), 8827 (Braidwood).

This route is scenically rewarding and includes fine views of a large sheet of water, Lake Bathurst. It takes travellers past Bundong Station where the first church service was held in the southern districts in 1820. The hamlet of Lake Bathurst is interesting for its old church and tiny schoolhouse while Tarago village has a welcome watering hole in the form of the Lake Bathurst Hotel. Drive to Bungendore following the same directions as in Route 2. Alternatively drive to Queanbeyan and take the Kings Highway. Bungendore is about 23 km down this road from Queanbeyan. Leave Bungendore by the Kings Highway which bisects the village and travel almost 22.5 km in the direction of Braidwood. The hills are bare and the paddocks empty immediately after Bungendore except for the occasional copse. About 4 km out from Bungendore rise the rocky, tree-covered slopes of Gibraltar Hill. The eucalypts, gnarled and greyish white, mix with the granite outcrops to give ‘The Gib’ a forsaken appearance. The highway runs in switchback fashion through a succession of bare hills until some 10 km out from Bungendore when the hilltops become forested. The road is more interesting now as it threads its way through bush, the tall eucalypts casting cool shadows on the road. Occasionally there is a tantalising glimpse of massive blue ranges in the far-off distance. The road begins to flatten out about 17 km from Bungendore and near here a side road to the left to Palerang is worth exploring. About 1.5km down this road is Palerang homestead, a pleasant iron-roofed stone structure glimpsed through trees. Another 3.5 km further on a tiny 24 graveyard marked by a solitary poplar can be seen on the left. Palerang was once known as Hylands Retreat, one of the oldest holdings in the district, and two of the people buried here are Hylands — Thomas (died 1863) and Mary (died 1852). Directly in front of these graves is an open empty vault, a faded cross on its back wall, debris littering the floor. A short distance down the road from these graves the gutted, roofless shell of an old stone building is worth investigating. Return to the coast road, cross Long Swamp, and 5 km further on the turnoff to Goulburn is reached on the left. Take this road and find that the countryside is undulating, tree-dotted, a picture of serene pastoral beauty. On a hot summer’s day a glimpse of Reedy Creek, 3.5 km from the turnoff and half-way down a hill, with its quiet waters, rocky bed and tiny sandy beaches cools the senses. A bridge crosses Reedy Creek at the bottom of the hill and about 13 km from the turnoff the hamlet of Boro is reached. In this area, in 1830, the notorious bushranger, Frank Gardiner, was born. His most outrageous act of banditry was the hold-up of the Lachlan Gold Escort in 1862 and the theft of about £14,000 in cash and gold. Tarago is glimpsed in the distance, 17 km from the turnoff, and 5 km further on the two-storied Lake Bathurst Hotel is reached. Turn right here at the signpost pointing to Bungonia. Less than 1.5 km afterwards the road tops a rise and on the left are the blue, glinting waters of Lake Bathurst backed by humpy, bald hills. The seal ends 4 km from the Lake Bathurst Hotel and the road divides. For our purposes take the left-hand fork. A ricketty sign about here warns ‘Beware of sheep’, and, indeed, sheep are wandering all over the place. The waters of The Morass come into view and for a time the road runs along the edge of this sheet of water. Swans and ducks in large numbers feed in the shallows, plunging their heads beneath the surface in search of delectable morsels. About 11 km from the Lake Bathurst Hotel there is a turnoff to the left leading to Bungonia. Take this road. Another 5 km further on another turnoff to the left points in the direction of Lake Bathurst township. The open, flat countryside gives the impression of vast distances and this is heightened by the clear air, unsullied by pollution of any description. Bundong Station (‘Bundong’ was the Aboriginal name for 25 what became Lake Bathurst) is reached 5 km from the last turnoff and, although private property, contains within its boundaries one of the district’s more important historical features. It was to this area in 1820 that Governor Lachlan Macquarie came on his journey of personal discovery, and it was on land now occupied by Bundong Station that the first Christian service in this region was held on Sunday, 29 October 1820. A memorial commemorating the service stands about 5 km from Bundong homestead on the eastern extremity of Lake Bathurst. The site is enclosed by a wire mesh fence and the memorial consists of a tablet of granite supporting a granite cross. This tablet is in turn surrounded by more wire mesh supported by four pipes. The whole looks quite ugly; one could be forgiven for believing that here, of all places, there should be a distinctive, imaginative memorial, given that what is there commemorates the most important date in the Christian church’s mission in southern NSW. Around it are sheep paddocks with the waters of Lake Bathurst about 400 m away. The memorial is weed-infested and said to be the haunt of tiger snakes in summer. Visit it on a day when the air is very still and all that you will hear is the twitter of birds. The memorial was dedicated on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1935, and it is unlikely that the scene is much changed from Macquarie’s time although there was more timber about then. In his Journal of his expedition Macquarie describes his reaching Lake Bathurst on Monday, 23 October 1820, as follows: .. At 6 p.m. we arrived at the north west end of the lake and at 7 we reached the eastern extremity of it, just at dark,. . . The first view we had of the lake was really magnificently fine, from the heights to the north west of it, appearing quite a little sea, covered with innumerable flocks of wild ducks and a great many black swans, which last looked most beautiful floating on the surface of this grand piece of water which is perfectly fresh and good.’ Macquarie pitched camp at Lake Bathurst and waited for several days for Commissioner J.T. Bigge with whom he was to rendezvous. Bigge had been sent from England in 1819 to inquire into the state of New South Wales and at this time was on the way from the township of Bathurst. 26 Bigge did not arrive until Thursday and on the following day Macquarie visited Lake George, 20 km to the west, returning to Lake Bathurst on Sunday, 29 October. At 4 pm that day ‘the whole of our party, including our servants, carters etc. being assembled in, and immediately under the fly of my large ten t. .. the Revd Mr Cartwright performed Divine Worship, and gave us a very excellent appropriate sermon, strongly impressing the justice, good policy, and expediency of civilizing the aborigines, or black natives of the country and settling them in townships’. This parson, Robert Cartwright, was a remarkable man in his own right. He was born in England in 1771 and came out to NSW in 1810 after serving for fourteen years as a curate at Bradford in Yorkshire. He held several appointments in the Hawkesbury district, Liverpool and Sydney but by 1838 he was carrying out his priestly duties in the southern districts of NS W, at that time a sparsely populated region. He built a church on his own land at Collector and the inset stones at the base of the Macquarie memorial are from the ruins of this church. The inscription on the memorial says the church was built in 1838-40 but another source calls it a chapel and claims it was built in 1843 or 1844. In an address at the unveiling ceremony on 30 November 1935, Mr W.A. MacDonald, a keen historian who conceived the idea of the memorial, said his appeal for funds was limited to descendants of those present at the first service and of the earliest settlers. He raised £70/4/0 from fifty persons. Those who con­ tributed included fourteen descendants of Robert Cartwright. Mr MacDonald said that surveyor Robert Dixon made the first survey of Lake Bathurst in 1828 and the memorial was erected on the spot where a tree marked by Dixon stood, marking the approximate site of Macquarie’s 1820 camp. The camp would have been a ‘fairly large one, accommodating probably about 50 men in all . . Lake Bathurst was discovered by the surveyor, explorer and settler James Meehan on 3 April 1818 when he was searching for a route from the Sutton Forest district to Jervis Bay. He named it after Earl Bathurst, Secretary of State for the Colonies, a commendably patriotic act by one who was transported for his part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. He received an absolute pardon in 1806. Meehan called it a large lake exceeding ten miles 27 in circuit and said the quantity of ducks and other wild waterfowl on the lake and marshes was beyond description or comprehension. The lake covers an area of about 1450 ha and holds water more consistently than its bigger neighbour, Lake George, although it is said to have been dry in 1844. When the botanist and explorer Allan Cunningham came this way in 1824 he was told by a female Aboriginal who had a smattering of English that she had lived all her life near Lake Bathurst and could remember a time when it was a mere sandy flat, perfectly dry. Seven years after Macquarie’s visit, in 1827, there was a case of cannibalism in this area when a shepherd was killed and, it was alleged, eaten by an Aboriginal. The next year there was a complaint by the Sydney Monitor that ‘The black who killed and did eat J. Taylor at Lake Bathurst has been loosed out of gaol and has returned to the lake for similar acts and human feasts’. Not far from the memorial near Lake Bathurst is a copse of poplar and hawthorn trees marking a small graveyard where three stones are visible. They commemorate Francis Jane Hall, died 7 December 1878, aged 9 years and 4 months, Mary Victoria Hall, died 9 October 1873 aged 18, and George Mercer Hall, who died in April 1860, aged 7 weeks. The stones are tumbledown and wearing with age which is a pity, if only because these children may have been descendants of the pioneer Sydney newspaper proprietor and political reformer Edward Smith Hall, the first settler in this area, or of a cousin of his, Henry Hall, with whom he had a quarrel, claiming that Henry had settled on part of his land. The matter was finally resolved when the Crown provided Henry Hall with land elsewhere. Edward Smith Hall journeyed to NSW with his family in 1811 after having been granted free passage in the female convict transport, Friends, by the Earl of Liverpool. Following Governor Macquarie’s visit to Lake Bathurst in 1820 he recommended to Hall that he settle ‘on a triangular piece of land bounded on the eastern side by a morass, and on the western by Lake Bathurst, the base being enclosed by the forest’. Hall set off from Sydney in 1821 in a cavalcade consisting of ‘ten assigned Servants, two hundred head of Cattle, and a waggon and three carts laden with provisions, implements and stores’. The journey through the bush was a nightmare — heavy rain turned the track into a bog 28 and in one period of nine days they travelled only twenty miles; the whole journey took three weeks. Hall lost a horse and an ox on the road and because the journey took longer than anticipated the party ate more of the expensive provisions than he had allowed for. Then when he reached the lake he found that both Lake Bathurst and The Morass were fuller than when Macquarie visited them and part of the land he expected to settle on was submerged. Let us leave Hall and his troubles and return to the present. After leaving Bundong Station, Lake Bathurst can be seen to the left, a handsome sight, backed as it is by hills and ranges. Soon afterwards the dirt road is left behind and the village of Lake Bathurst is reached, a hamlet which, although tiny, does contain a few points of interest. One of them is St John’s Church of England which stands on a rise above the main road. Graves flank each side of the track leading to this small, neat church whose foundation stone was laid in 1859. The church itself was opened in 1860, but the present sanctuary was not erected until many years later when the parents of Frank Bishop Reynolds, killed in France in 1917, erected it in memory of their son. As with so many Anglican churches in the Canberra district there is a distinctly military air about St John’s. As well as the Reynolds memorial an honour board remembers nine men who served in the war, two of whom died. Four plain windows mark Gallipoli, Anzac, Lonesome Pine and Bridges, possibly Major- General Sir William Bridges, the founder of the Royal Military College at Duntroon, Canberra, who was shot by a sniper at Gallipoli in 1915. Several members of the Gore family, former owners of nearby Gilmour Station last century, are buried at St John’s although Graham Gore, the most famous of the sons of Rear-Admiral John Gore, of the Royal Navy, does not rest here — he was lost on the ill-fated expedition of the distinguished explorer, Sir John Franklin, which set out in search of the North-West Passage in 1845 and disappeared in the Arctic wastes. This expedition was one of the great disasters of world exploration, two ships and all 129 officers and men being lost. One historian says the flower of the Navy volunteered for the expedition and the pick of these was chosen. Graham Gore was First Lieutenant of the Erebus (the other ship was the Terror) and his leader, Sir John Franklin, the 29 former Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, held a high opinion of him. ‘The more I see of Gore’, Franklin wrote, ‘the more convinced am I that in him I have a treasure and a faithful friend.’ Rear-Admiral John Gore entered the Royal Navy in 1789 and had attained the rank of captain when, accompanied by his wife Sarah, his son, Edward, and three daughters, Ann, Charlotte and Eliza, he arrived in Sydney in the City of Edinburgh in 1834 and

St John’s Church graveyard, Lake Bathurst requested land under regulations concerning grants to retired and half-pay naval and military officers. Under this system officers wanting to become settlers were entitled to a remission of the purchase money according to a graduated scale which took into account their rank and length of service. This system had at least two advantages in the eyes of the authorities: it was an inexpensive gesture by Britain to those who had borne arms for her and meant that land was being obtained by a certain class of applicant welcome in the colony for their social standing, character and industry. A clergyman, the Reverend James S. Hassall, who was 30 appointed to Bungonia in 1849, recorded holding afternoon services at ‘Tarrago, the residence of Admiral Gore’. He said the ‘Gores were members of an old Devonshire family. Mrs Gore had been bedridden from rheumatism for nine years, but was always lively and happy. A son and two daughters lived with their parents’. After dealing with the loss of Graham Gore in the Arctic, Mr Hassall wrote: ‘The British Government paid all back salaries to the friends of the deceased and the Gore family received a large sum of money, which was a godsend to them at the time’, indicating that the Gores were in straitened circumstances. John Gore, as a retired Captain, and then a retired Rear- Admiral, received only £\ a day from the Navy. He had served for six years before he was appointed a lieutenant in 1795 and for another thirteen years before he became a commander (in 1808). He was promoted to the rank of captain in 1821 and under seniority provisions became a rear-admiral in 1852 — a year almost to the day before his death. He was not retired from the Navy as a captain until 1846 — twelve years after his arrival in Australia. Three letters of 1837, written by Ann Gore, survive in the manuscript collection of the National Library of Australia in Canberra and give tantalisingly brief descriptions of the family’s life at Gilmour. One mentions that her mother had been confined to her bed all the winter ‘as the unfinished state of our house was unfit for her and the weather has been very cold’. They were finding it ‘rather dull now Edward has left us as he was our constant companion and used to ride out with us’. In another letter, Ann writes of the monotonous scenery — ‘a great many of the trees having white stems gives them the appearance of being white washed’. Ann had little sympathy for the Aborigines, saying ‘the Native Blacks are I think the ugliest race I ever beheld and there are no means of civilizing them — preferring there [sic] roaming kind of life to a settled habitation; their chief covering is a blanket, which Government allow them or else a kind of Mantle made of the Opossum skin which they wear over the shoulders . . . we took one of the little Black Girl [sic] thinking to bring her up but, she only remained two days rejoining her tribe on the second day’. In this letter Ann, born in 1811 and in her mid-twenties in 1837, muses that T shall never 31 change my name, the ladies here marry very young I have heard of several being only sixteen . . She never did marry, dying on 24 May 1891, aged 80, still Ann Gore. (Her sister Eliza did find a husband, marrying a police magistrate, George Stewart, of Goulburn, at Gilmour in 1839. Charlotte, though, remained a spinster, and she and Ann lie together in St John’s graveyard at Lake Bathurst. Charlotte died in 1885, aged 71.) In the third of her letters Ann regrets that ‘Society we have none as there are not a great many families residing so far in the interior and what there are reside twenty miles off. When we first came up we found great amusement in Music but unfortunately our piano is now out of tune so much so that we are unable to play and there is no possibility of getting it repaired’. In these days of rapid communications there is a certain appeal about living in remote places such as Lake Bathurst. But what could have possessed a man already in late middle age to bring his young family to such an isolated and desolate place as the Lake Bathurst of last century? He died at Gilmour on 6 March 1853, aged 78, his wife Sarah surviving him by four years, dying on 7 April 1857, aged 80. Today they rest together in the old St Saviour’s cemetery at Goulburn under the bleak walls of the city gaol. A modest stone, hard to find, marks the Gore grave and slowly the elements are making the lettering indistinct. Not far away is the grave of another British seafarer, the explorer William Hovell, who has both his wives, Esther (died 1846) and Sophia (died 1876) to keep him company. Adjoining St John’s Church at Lake Bathurst is the hamlet’s former public school, a tiny stone creation of 1881, now a private residence and including additions dating from 1903. The present owner bought the school and about 1.5 ha of land for £15,000 a few years ago. He faced spirited bidding at an auction attended by about eighty people some of whom arrived in Mercedes, Volvos and Rolls-Royces. When the school was built last century the contractor was paid £344. Leave Lake Bathurst and travel south in the direction of Tarago, a village about 7 km down the road. Tarago was once known as Sherwin’s Flats while Lake Bathurst was called Terrago. Adding to the confusion over nomenclature is that Tarago has a pub dating from 1912 called the Lake Bathurst Hotel. Tarago is a sleepy place, its only oddity being an 32 Old Schoolhouse, Lake Bathurst enormous railway station whose size would not disgrace a sizeable town. The seal ends shortly after Tarago and the road is bumpy in places on the way to Bungendore although here and there are patches of tar. It is hilly sheep and cattle country with intermittent lonely vistas. About Bungendore the country is flat and naked. Within 10 km of Bungendore, Lake George can be seen in the distance to the right. Bungendore itself is reached about 32 km out from Tarago.

33 Route 4 Canberra—Bungendore—Gidleigh— The Briars—Hoskinstown—Canberra Distance (round trip): approximately 150 km. Road conditions: excellent to fair, unsealed sections bumpy in places and dusty in the dry. Map reference: Sheet 8727 (Canberra).

Scenically there are better drives in the Canberra region than Route 4 although parts of it are pleasant. It is more interesting, however, for its historical connotations and the opportunity it gives travellers to see the Mills Cross radio telescope, a huge scientific undertaking which listens to the heavens. Travel to Bungendore by the same way as in Route 2 or take the Queanbeyan alternative. The corner of Malbon and Ellendon Streets in Bungendore is a good starting point for the drive to Hoskinstown. On this corner stands a former hotel now known as The Carrington, a solid brick structure with an iron roof and a white paling fence. Drive down Ellendon Street and within a minute or two you are in open countryside, travelling along a sealed country road flanked by bare paddocks. It can be desolate in winter—a long featureless plain with cattle, sheep and horses standing mutely and stoically in the ice-touched wind. Here and there shelter- belts of trees provide little resistance to the wind as it funnels down the valley between low hills. Less than 3.5 km from Bungendore is a turning to the left which is worth taking because it leads travellers into Gidleigh, one of the oldest properties in the Canberra region. It is worth a look at for this reason although it is not open to the public. The homestead is about 4.5 km down an unsealed road from the turnoff and lies in a trough in the ground surrounded by many trees. Tall chimneys, iron roofs, pinkish walls are among the immediate impressions it makes on the viewer. A few cottages are scattered about the homestead. 34 Phillip Parker King, son of the third Governor of NSW, Philip Gidley King, obtained the property in 1834, his eldest son, known as Philip Gidley King the younger, writing in his memoirs that it was a ‘small freehold my father had put together, the land being brought [sz'c] from Government and on the purchase money he was allowed a considerable remission of about £600, I think according to his naval rank. At that time Government in England was glad to induce naval and military officers to settle in the Colony, their doing so giving a tone to Colonial society, many receiving important appointments in the Colonial Service’. Phillip Parker King was born on Norfolk Island in 1791 (his father was the island’s Lieutenant-Governor), and after sailing to England with his parents in 1796 entered the Royal Navy in 1807. He made surveying expeditions to Australia and South America (he has been called the ‘greatest of the early Australian marine surveyors’) and in 1855 was promoted to the rank of rear-admiral (retired) having been paid off by the Navy some years earlier. He was the first Australian to attain this rank. His family came from Cornwall in south-west England and the Gidleigh property may have been named after his father’s maternal grandfather, a local attorney, whose surname was Gidley. Phillip Parker King was his father’s only legitimate son although before his marriage to Anna Josepha Coombe, of Devonshire, P.G. King, had two natural sons by Ann Inett, a convict from Worcestershire, when he was Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island. At her trial in March 1786 Ann was originally sentenced to be hanged for breaking, entering and stealing clothing and shoes, but instead she was transported in the First Fleet. She was one of six women convicts ‘of good character’ in the small party of convicts, soldiers and free men commanded by P.G. King when he was sent to Norfolk Island to establish a settlement in February 1788. The first of the two illegitimate sons, Norfolk, was born on 8 January 1789 and was the first child born on the island. The second son, Sydney, may have been born on Norfolk or in Sydney. Both boys entered the Royal Navy and both died within a year or so of each other, Norfolk in 1839 and Sydney in 1840. Ann Inett had left Norfolk Island before 1792 and eventually married. P.G. King by then Governor of NSW, granted her husband, trans­ ported for life, an absolute pardon in 1804. 35 It* has been claimed that overseers and convicts developed Gidleigh in the early stages. Whoever it was, the first durable building constructed was the stable while a two-roomed cottage of stone and roughcast, still standing, and now used as the office, was built before 1840. One of the convicts assigned to the Kings was William Westwood, better known as Jacky Jacky, described as ‘one of the most daring and impudent of the bushrangers and one of the most pitiable’. Jacky Jacky was quite young when he first tangled with the law in England. At the age of 15 he was sentenced to 12 months’ gaol for highway robbery and a short time after his release was arrested on a charge of robbery and sentenced to 14 years’ transportation. He was assigned to the Kings at Gidleigh and later described Phillip Parker King as ‘a very hard and severe man’. He absconded twice only to be recaptured and then ran away a third time. He engaged in a succession of hold-ups and robberies before being caught at Bungendore. Jacky Jacky escaped again after being given the sentence of transportation for life to Norfolk Island but was recaptured at the Black Horse Inn near Berrima. He eventually found himself on Norfolk Island, reserved for convict incorrigibles and a place where rigid discipline was being applied after a humanitarian Commandant’s attempt to reduce the brutality of the settlement had failed. Jacky Jacky led a riot among the convicts in which clubs, reaping hooks and pitchforks were used, but the outbreak was quelled. He was hanged on 11 October 1846, along with eleven others, for murder, the convicts being executed in two batches of six while the remainder of the prisoners watched the grisly scene. To return to Gidleigh. Eventually the Kings left the Bungendore district and in 1855 Gidleigh was sold to Thomas Rutledge, of Carwoola, a large property to the south (see Route 1). Gidleigh was run as an outstation of Carwoola for about twenty years before being made over to Rutledge’s eldest son, William Forster Rutledge, in 1874. The Rutledges named a creek crossing Halfway, presumably because it marked the halfway point of their Carwoola and Gidleigh holdings. Maps of today show a Halfway Creek and a Halfway Hill in this area. William Forster Rutledge built the northern end of the house in 1882 although his father considered it a ridiculous house for a bachelor 36 to build and is said to have ordered that every room be made 2 ft smaller. The ‘almost bizarre’ result, with ceilings and doors unduly high, was commented upon by neighbours. W.F. Rutledge did not remain a bachelor for in 1887 he married Jane Morphy, whose mother is said to have been engaged to one of the Kings before changing her mind and marrying a Richard Morphy. It is ironical that the daughter should have come to live in the house her mother possibly refused. After leaving Gidleigh return to the Bungendore-Hoskinstown road and continue driving south through undulating sheep country. The land becomes more hilly after the Woodlands property is passed on the right, 100 m or so beyond a crossing of the now dis­ used Bungendore-Captains Flat railway line. More trees are seen but the road soon reaches the bare flatlands again. About 2 km past Woodlands the wide silver arms of the Molonglo Radio Obser­ vatory, or Mills Cross radio telescope, add an almost absurd science fiction touch to what is otherwise a quiet bucolic scene. The arms spread across the plain in the form of a cross, precisely north-south and east-west, each arm being a mile long. The Observatory was built at a cost of SI million in 1965, is owned by the University of Sydney, and the telescope was named after its inventor, Professor Bernard Mills. It has been called Australia’s ‘biggest ear’ and is one of the world’s major radio telescopes, having the ability to pick up radio signals from the limits of our known Universe — a mind-boggling range of 70,000 million light years. Closer at hand, it has discovered more than 60 per cent of all pulsars, those remnants of collapsed stars throughout the Milky Way sometimes called ‘beeping lighthouses’. It sits on the plain, its silver arms glinting in the sun, while nearby travellers might see a housewife, oblivious or uncaring of its great contribution to astronomy, hanging washing on a line next to one of its huge arms. Such a commonplace action brings the whole endeavour back to earth, so to speak. Birds treated the Cross with contempt when it was erected, the arms proving to be ideal perches on the virtually treeless plain and cockatoos finding the radio cables and polythene insulators irresistible. Strong beaks tore hundreds of metres of cable and about 1000 insulators to pieces although, fortunately, the cockatoos’ vandalistic habits did not last and they have ignored the Cross for the past decade. These days magpies make wire nests in the framework. 37 Just before the radio telescope a road to the right is worth exploring although for the purposes of this account it eventually means retracing your route for a few kilometres. The road is sealed initially, but this soon gives way to a dirt surface of good standard. It runs through an avenue of hawthorn bushes, on which, if you visit in June, you might see thousands of white cockatoos perching, filling the air with their wild screeching and screaming. About 4 km from the turnoff a property called The Briars is reached, with the last kilometre or so of road bordered by giant elms, their gnarled, twisted, bare branches thrusting blackly to the sky. The Briars, historically, is among the most interesting of the properties in this area, an early occupier having been William Balcombe, the son of an English merchant of the same Christian name, who for a time was the exiled Napoleon’s host on the tiny island of St Helena in the southern Atlantic. Balcombe snr owned an estate on the island called The Briars and the Emperor lived in a pavilion there before moving to a property called Longwood, originally built for the Lieutenant-Governor. Balcombe snr was regarded as at least a dupe of the French and was abruptly dismissed from St Helena in 1818. Five years later the authorities relented to the extent that he was appointed Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales, arriving in Sydney in 1824. Balcombe is said to have been promised a land grant as compensation for financial losses due to unproven charges of negotiating Napoleon’s bills and secretly transmitting Napoleon’s letters. One account says the grant was 6000 acres at Molonglo and another, in 1835, describing the progress of settlement, says ‘At Molonglo Plains are the farms of Balcombe, Captain Rouse, of White, Smith . . Balcombe had died in Sydney six years before and this would be a reference to his son, also named William Balcombe. (In letters written after Balcombe’s death Governor Darling reported to the British authorities that Balcombe ‘had long been subject to severe Attacks of Gout . . . About four months since, he was attacked with Dysentry . . . and he continued to decline gradually until last night . . .’.’ I directed soon after the death of Mr Balcomb [sic] that the eldest son, who has hitherto managed and resided on his Father’s Property, should receive a Grant.’) 38 Directly behind The Briars’ dwelling is Balcombe Hill which rises 953 m. A moss-covered cairn is said to have been put there by the Balcombes to mark the highest point of the property. William Balcombe snr is credited with having introduced willows to the Molonglo Plains district after having brought cuttings with him from Napoleon’s tomb on St Helena. One account of the Emperor’s life and death says, ‘The funeral was conducted simply, but with due propriety, in the Rupert Valley, where Napoleon had sometimes walked, beside a stream in which two willows are reflected’. The story of the willows is of doubtful authenticity, however, because Napoleon did not die until 1821, three years after Bacombe had left St Helena. The property has changed hands several times down the years but some former occupiers cling to The Briars to this day because they are buried there. About a kilometre from the house, on a hillside overlooking the Molonglo Plains, with the blue ranges far in the distance, is a burial plot whose granite stone is inscribed with six names — Mary Shanahan (died 1853, aged 35), Thomas Valentine Shanahan (died 1866, aged 7), Catherine Shanahan (died 1882, aged 97), Jane Josephine Cranney (died 1932, aged 77), Sydney James Shanahan (died 1930, aged 80), and his wife, Ellen Margaret Shanahan (died 1920, aged 67). Behind the plot rise grey-green hills, thickly clothed in eucalypts. The rustle of the wind and the harsh screams of cockatoos are the only sounds. Sydney James Shanahan was the grandson of Thomas Shanahan, of Tipperary, Ireland, who bought The Briars property in 1845. It remained in the possession of the Shanahan family for almost a century, being sold in 1936 to a stock and station agent, John Francis Donnelly. A son of Thomas Shanahan, also called Thomas, married three times, on each occasion to a woman named Mary — Mary Fallon, Mary Ann Carroll and Mary Mulcahy. Thomas had eight children by his third wife (one of them Sydney James) and one by each of the others. His first wife, aged 35 when she died in 1853, is reputed to be the Mary buried at The Briars. Both his second and third wives were buried at Bungendore. Mary II died in 1861 at the age of 24 while Mary III survived into the twentieth century, dying in 1911 aged 67. Another of those buried at The Briars, Catherine Shanahan, was the wife of Thomas the first, although oddly enough both Thomases are buried at Bungendore. 39 A long avenue of hawthorns, reputed to have been planted by Thomas Shanahan the first, leads up to The Briars buildings which are in something of a dilapidated state. As with other country holdings The Briars is private property and not open to visitors.

Shanahan Plot, the Briars

The return journey to the main Bungendore-Hoskinstown road is only about 4 km, and after the turnoff is reached the hamlet of Hoskinstown is only 7 km up a dirt road. Through this hamlet, at the turnoff to Captains Flat, is a Roman Catholic church, no longer used, and a small cemetery. Ignore the Captains Flat turnoff for the moment and continue about a kilometre up the road to the tiny Anglican church of the three names, a quaint stone building containing only ten pews. It 40 is known as St Mark’s although various local and diocesan records refer to it as St Luke’s and St James’. One authority says there is ‘considerable doubt as to the correct designation of this church . . . Although its earliest name was undoubtedly St Mark’s.’ This authority is also unsure of the year in which it was built, putting a question mark after his reference to 1871 although its centenary was celebrated on 14 March 1971. Curiously, the first entry in the church’s Service Book, written by the Reverend A.D. Soares, in handwriting flowing, legible and with large letters, concerns a service on 24 November 1871 in which Mr Soares led the prayers and gave the sermon. The evening collection was 3/4d. An oddity in the church is a framed testimonial to Edward and Mary Daniel (who settled at Forbes Creek, near Hoskinstown), signed by Henry C. Powles, curate of Whitchurch, Herefordshire, England. The Daniels migrated from Whitchurch, embarking in the ship Edie and Oliver at Birkenhead on 23 August 1856 and arriving at Port Jackson on 23 November. Mr Powles’ testimonial certifies that the Daniels and their five children had long been residents of his parish and both parents had borne ‘excellent and unimpeachable characters . . . for honesty, sobriety and industry, and general good conduct’.

Anglican church of three names, Hoskinstown

41 Ayre memorial arch, Bungonia

42 (Such a testimonial of good conduct would not apply to the modern-day vandals who about 1974 smashed or damaged all of the windows in this charming little church, possibly by shotgun blasts.) Return to the Hoskinstown-Captains Flat turnoff and drive about 5 km through undulating, tussocky sheep country until reaching a causeway across a pretty stream. The road goes left to Rossi and right towards Captains Flat. Take the right-hand turn and after about a kilometre a pleasant small lagoon is visible on the right. The country is hilly with plenty of trees. About 3 km further on the rear of Foxlow Station can be seen on the right and soon afterwards the sealed Queanbeyan-Captains Flat road is reached. Turn right for Queanbeyan, and then Canberra, 52 km distant.

Route 5 Canberra—Tarago—Bungonia—Goulburn— Canberra Distance (round trip): approximately 300 km. Road conditions: Excellent on seal, fair to good on dry, dusty, dirt roads. Map references: sheets 8727 (Canberra), 8827 (Braidwood), 8828 (Goulburn).

The village of Bungonia and the nearby Bungonia Gorge are highlights of this route which also includes spendid scenery and some fascinating historical sidelights. Take the same route from Canberra to Tarago as described in Route 3. After reaching Tarago take the road opposite the Lake Bathurst Hotel pointing to Bungonia. Travel along the same route as used in Route 3 but this time ignore the turning to the left to Lake Bathurst, 16 km from Tarago. The lonely, windswept countryside gradually becomes lusher, greener, and near here you might be lucky enough to see two teenage girls on motorbikes, herding sheep. Drive straight on when reaching crossroads 4 km 43 from the Lake Bathurst turnoff. Just past here, to the right, are lovely views of mountain ranges formed by fold after fold of hills rising gradually to a jagged line across the sky. A short distance past the crossroads the Roberts’ private cemetery is visible to the left. Members of the Roberts family, at one time owners of Bronte Station, are buried here. Among the graves are those of two small children of E. and A. Frost who died within a few days of each other in October 1893, a bitter month indeed for their parents. The dirt road threads its way through a valley and the country­ side remains typical sheep and cattle country. A sloping ford 8 km

Roberts' cemetery from the crossroads can be tricky when the water is high. Some 12 km further on the road reaches a T junction. Turn left for Bungonia and after 4 km the Bungonia cemetery can be seen on the right, some distance from the road. Nearby is a concrete cricket pitch, where a lusty six hit could easily disturb the sleepers in the graveyard. As with other country cemeteries it is infuriating to find inscriptions fading away to nothing and graves becoming weed infested. The inscription on the grave of pioneer settler Robert Futter, which is surrounded by an iron fence, cannot be read from outside the fence yet it is a mini biography of and testimonial to this one-time Royal Navy lieutenant who came out to New South Wales in 1823 and took up land at Bungonia which he called Lumley Park. The inscription speaks of his ‘strictest integrity’, ‘zeal and intrepedity’ and ‘impartiality’, gives his birthplace, year of his birth and date of his death, the facts that he was a naval officer, a magistrate, and a husband and father who left behind his ‘widow and surviving children’. Buried with him is his son Robert Lumley Futter who died at the age of 11 in 1836 and predeceased his father by three years, Robert Futter dying in his 46th year. This pioneer was followed to the Bungonia cemetery about a year afterwards by another, Dr David Reid, a naval surgeon, who developed Inverary Park on which one of the district’s notable homesteads stands today. Stone from the property was used to build the colonial homestead in the 1830s, but Dr Reid enjoyed his new dwelling for only a limited time, dying in 1840 at the age of 65. The small Anglican Christ Church, consecrated in 1893, stands on a knoll to the right a short distance from the cemetery. It was built of stone, has a high wooden ceiling and plaster walls, and is deliciously cool in summer. Among the several lovely stained glass windows are memorials to Thomas, Jane and Rachel Chapman and the Reverend H.F. Hawkins, Rector from 1935 to 1954. Memorial plaques remember two victims of World War II, Pte Archie E. Armitt and Pte John Allan Cook, and Mary Jones who was a regular worshipper in the church for 42 years and ‘its devoted caretaker’ for many years. The building of a permanent church at Bungonia was a drawn- out affair. The Sutton Forest chaplain was making half-yearly visits to the district as early as 1833, but by 1840 work had begun and stopped on a permanent structure which, according to Bishop William Broughton, would have been ‘a very handsome object’. It remained somewhat ugly for when it had reached ‘a considerable height above the foundation’ the contractor failed and as well there was a dearth of mechanics to finish the job. Appointment of the Reverend George Napoleon Woodd as the first Rector of Bungonia plus Jacqua and Marulan saw a wooden building erected in 1841 but this did not please Bishop Broughton who in 1845 called it a ‘poor temporary structure’ and promptly laid the foundation stone for a permanent church — at least the second such stone laid at Bungonia. Nothing happened 45 lr£, Hffi s r ."

Clemenger memorial, Gundaroo

46 although by 1865 funds were being raised for a new church. Yet another foundation stone was laid in 1877 but it was another sixteen years before the present church was built and consecrated. Rather oddly the laggardly parishioners then found themselves in such a rush to use it that they filled the window openings with calico rather than wait for the arrival of glass. The most notable of the early Rectors was the Reverend James Samuel Hassall, grandson of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, missionary priest and farmer, who took over from Mr Woodd in 1849 and stayed at Bungonia for six years. Mr Hassall recorded that his district was ‘about a hundred miles in length and fifty in breadth. The income was £300 a year, and there was a large stone-built parsonage, with forty acres of good land’. Mr Hassall said he had been ‘used to the saddle from my boyhood’ and it was just as well because he rode nearly 500 miles a month in his first year, or almost 6000 miles in the whole year. Once he rode 80 miles between 7 am and 7 pm. In his love of horseriding he imitated his father, the Reverend Thomas Hassall, the Church of England’s first Australian candidate for ordination, who was called the ‘galloping parson’ because he rode so much. Almost opposite Christ Church and across the creek the old Rectory can be glimpsed through trees. Built in rough stone, even from this distance it looks a solid structure. Mr Woodd, who took up residence there in 1840, was the first occupant, while when he was the Rector Mr Hassall grew wheat and oats on its forty acres. Each year T 5 to 17 men’ would cut the wheat crop, taking no pay although they ‘were glad of a glass or two of grog during the day . . .’. The parsonage is one of the oldest buildings in Bungonia, the general area having first been seen by white men in 1818 when an exploration party led by the surveyor and explorer James Meehan passed through the district. Grazing rights were issued to William Bradbury and James Richard Styles in 1821 while these two and others secured ‘tickets of occupation’ in 1823-24. A town plan was gazetted in 1833 but Bungonia did not progress, being by-passed by the new south road and then missing out again when the rail­ way was extended from Marulan to Goulburn in 1868. Down the road from Christ Church is the public school, built in 1882 and now closed, although visiting groups frequently use the solid buildings which are kept in good repair. High on a hillside 47 Stands another church, St Michael’s, built for the Roman Catholics and according to a church historian ‘perhaps the oldest Catholic church in Australia which is still serving its original purpose’. It had its origins at a meeting in 1840 in the Lynch home (where Masses were said in Bungonia), at which a subscription drive was launched for the building of a church. Construction began in 1841 and although Mass was probably being said there in 1842, it was not completed until 1847. Any day trip to Bungonia is not complete without a journey to the Lookdown, 11 km from the village, which provides splendid views of Bungonia Canyon. Deep caves are a lure for speleologists in this area. The dirt road from Bungonia is clearly signposted and after 4.5 km passes the Brisbane Meadow property, owned early last century by a retired officer of the Kent Militia, William Mitchell, who migrated from England in 1815 and took up land in the Bungonia district in the 1820s. His wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter of Gabriel Louis Marie Huon de Kerilleau, reputed son of a French nobleman, and a ‘Catholic Gentleman and a Scholar’, who fled to England from revolutionary France in 1791 and three years later arrived in Sydney as Private Gabriel Lewis, of the New South Wales Corps. After discharge he became a landowner and was apparently living in the Bungonia district in 1826. What is said to have been his house, Caarne, still stands today, 2.5 km from Brisbane Meadow and near the entrance to the Bungonia reserve. It is a tiny cottage of crude slab construction, surrounded by a paling fence seemingly in danger of collapsing at any moment. Its owner, who fled the blood-seeking revolutionaries of France, met a lonely death which was not as quick as losing one’s head on the guillotine. Book in hand he went out for a walk one Sunday morning and was never seen by his family again, being lost in the steep-sided gullies and dense bush around his home. The road to the Lookdown is unsealed, dry and dusty but the journey is well worthwhile for the spectacular scenery and caves within the reserve. It is impossible to do it justice in a brief stay, but those pressed for time usually make do with peering into Bungonia Canyon from the Lookdown on the Walls of Troy. A rocky creek bed threads through the grand canyon far below and veins of great rugged, tree-clad hills plunge to the canyon floor. 48 Caarne Cottage, Bungonia

The only view that jars is that of the grossly ugly quarry almost opposite the Lookdown. Six tiers have been gouged out of the canyon face and rubble has been allowed to spill down the quarry sides, completing the spectacle of man-made destruction absurdly at odds with the magnificence of the natural spectacle. Equally as insensitive, if on a much smaller scale, is the crude rusty wire fence designed to stop people toppling over the cliff. John Henderson, a lieutenant in Her Majesty’s Ceylon Rifle Regiment, might have written differently in his book published in London in 1851 had the earth-ripping machines of modern man been available in his day:'... I made an excursion to the ‘Shoal- haven Gullies’ ’, the name given to the bed of the Shoalhaven River, which here passes through deep and almost inaccessible ravines. This certainly is a grand and romantic place. The stream is seen from the edge of a magnificent precipice, winding like a silver thread far below. On each side, within a few yards of the water, rise high, rugged, and perpendicular rocks, most pictur­ esque in appearance, from the fantastic shapes which the grey projections assume, and from the gnarled gum, and formal, but oriental, grass-tree . . . the place seems sacred and untrod by the foot of man. This is one of the few situations where anything really fine or grand is to be seen in New South Wales .... 49 Bungonia Canyon is a narrow defile 800 m long in the main Bungonia Gorge which is 8 km long. The canyon is about 305 m deep and is probably the deepest limestone canyon in Australia. The five deepest caves on the Australian mainland have been discovered in this area. Among its many caves, one of them, Drum Cave, was probably first entered by white men in 1824. It was given this name because a stalactite in it sounded like a drum when struck. Return to Bungonia (this name and its variations, Bunguunia, Banganya and Bunganga, are said to be derived from the Aboriginal word Bun-gunyah, meaning either ‘good campsite’ or ‘camp on creek’), cross the bridge, and drive straight on, ignoring the turning to the right. The road is dry and dusty and initially travels through pleasant farmlands succeeded by dense forest, cool and green. After 7 km the seal is reached and nearing Goulburn the countryside becomes bare and uninteresting. Cross the Mulwaree Ponds bridge just past a curiously turretted structure on the right and then turn left, taking the Braidwood road, 26 km from Bungonia. About a kilometre from the turnoff is historic Garroorigang, a private home open to the public and containing a marvellous collection of Australiana and Victoriana. Furniture, pictures, books, kitchenware and an astonishing assortment of bric-a-brac jostle for space in this homestead, which intrigues and delights the visitor. Unlike some other houses of its type open to tourists it is not a stuffy, genteel museum. This is a lived-in home, warmly loved by its owners, Mr and Mrs Stuart Hume. Mr Hume is a collateral descendant of the explorer Hamilton Hume whose epic journey, from Appin near Campbelltown, New South Wales, to Port Phillip, Victoria, in 1824-25, is remembered on a memorial outside Garroorigang. Hume, his co-leader, the former English sea captain William Hovell, and party travelled some 1200 miles through unexplored country and did much to bring to public notice the exciting potential of Victoria. Among their discoveries were the Murray River and the rich agricultural and grazing lands between Gunning in New South Wales and Corio Bay in Victoria. The party actually called at what is now Garroorigang on 12 October 1824. It was then the site of Broughton’s Yards. The Garroorigang buildings were first an inn, from 1857 to 1868, then a private school, from 1868 50 Hume monument, Garrooringang to 1883, and, when the school closed, a private home. Desks used during its period as a school are on show today. Garroorigang became a tourist attraction about four years ago when Mr Hume heeded a general plea for the owners of historic buildings to open them to the public. Since then more than 16,000 children alone have visited the house; the visitors have been remarkably honest for among all the hundreds of pieces on display only two small items of little value have disappeared. A short distance past Garroorigang, to the right, is the 51 entrance to The Towers, a private home looking quite baronial with at least one tower and other unusual features. A flamboyant storekeeper, Charles Rogers II, who had a passion for towers, acquired the site towards the end of last century. The first home had been built in the 1830s by the Thorne family, and Rogers is said to have erected three towers — one at each end and another in the middle, although this is not apparent from the road. After Rogers became bankrupt The Towers was sold to John Mitchell, whose family included the famous soprano Dame Nellie Melba. It eventually became the property of the Roman Catholic church before being sold to the present owners. The hamlet of Tirranaville is some 5 km past The Towers. It has a small stone church no longer used and the inevitable graveyard. One of those buried here is Arthur Blomfield who in 1887 at the age of 55 had the misfortune to fall off his horse and die from the injuries he received. About 9.5 km from Tirranaville a tiny, inconspicuous noticeboard on the right, easily missed, marks the location of an epic gun battle between four teenage brothers and the bushrangers Ben Hall, John Gilbert and John Dunn on 6 February 1865. According to the sign, erected by the Wild Colonial Days Society in 1964, the four teenagers were Percy, George, Monty and Reginald Faithfull. During the fight Gilbert accidentally shot his horse dead and took cover behind a fence post. The sign records that ‘Percy, covering his brother’s retreat, fired, the bullet striking the post. This sign marks the exact location where the fence post stood’. Stand here on a quiet morning and it is possible to imagine that you can hear the rattle of gun fire and the zing of bullets although more likely what you will be hearing is the cry of birds, wheeling and darting about this lovely pastoral landscape. The hamlet of Lake Bathurst is only 13 km away and after that Tarago, Bungendore (all described elsewhere in this book) and Canberra.

52 Route 6 Canberra—Gundaroo—Nanima—Hall— Canberra Distance (round trip): approximately 140 km. Road conditions: excellent to fair, unsealed sections occasionally have corrugations and plenty of dust.

Map references: Sheets 8727 (Canberra) and 8728 (Gunning).

This route provides splendid views of Lake George and the opportunity to look around the nineteenth century village of Gundaroo. It passes the Nanima property, taken up in the 1830s, and proceeds to the village of Hall which has two interesting churches on its outskirts. After leaving Canberra, drive some 54 km towards Goulburn along the Federal Highway before reaching a well-signposted turnoff to Gunning on the left. Take this road. The Gunning road immediately heads for the Cullerin Range of low, tree-dotted hills but after 1.5 km turns abruptly right near a white and grey farmhouse on a rise to the left. The road climbs steeply from this point and soon the first of several panoramic views of the plain far below opens out to the left. Cars zip along the highway bisecting the plain while to the south the waters of Lake George fade into the distance. The lake is a natural phenomenon possessing human-like moods. Sometimes it is sullen, and cold, a grey expanse backed by brooding, mist-hung hills. But on fine summer days the waters glint warmly in the sunshine and the hills are blue and stark against the often purple, white-streaked sky. Near the top of the range, 3 km from the Federal Highway turnoff, a road to the right takes travellers to Gunning. For our purpose drive straight on. The sealed road becomes dirt, dusty in the dry but otherwise of reasonable standard. Lake George is closer now, fuller and wider, seemingly sitting in a basin almost surrounded by hills. The road twists, rises and falls along the top of the ridge 53 through monotonous grey-green eucalypts although in spring hundreds of yellow wattles enliven the dull background with vivid splashes of colour. About 5.5 km from the Federal Highway the road begins to descend. Miles away to the south­ west the ranges are blue-grey, their summits enticingly white in winter while in summer occasional blobs of snow linger on the tops. Some 3.5 km further on the road provides what is its grandest view of Lake George, now seemingly close enough to touch. The immensity of this sheet of water, framed between hillsides green with healthy trees or grey through ring-barking, can be more easily grasped at this spot. More dramatic scenes open up ahead and to the right where the countryside rolls away in a succession of forest-topped hills split by gullies and ridges. To the left is what appears to be a thin, white hypodermic syringe jabbing towards the narrow veins of a streaky sky. This is the Black Mountain telecommunications tower, a man-made creation in the heart of Canberra visible for many kilometres around the city but from here made puny by its background of swelling mountains. About 19 km from the Federal Highway the dust is left behind as the seal returns. The country alternates between bush and cleared grazing land; some paddocks are tree cemeteries, their headstones the grey stumps of destroyed forest. Rosellas, magpies, cockatoos and kookaburras dive, dart and glide across the road, but with farmers busy pushing back the bush their habitat is under threat. After driving some 25 km from the Federal Highway, travellers reach a T in the road, Gundaroo being to the left. The explorer, Charles Throsby Smith, who saw this country in December 1820, said of it that ‘this is the finest country as ever was seen’. He wrote that almost without exception ‘the whole country is a beautiful forest country thinly wooded . . . admirably watered and a fine rich Black Soil fit for any purpose either for grazing or agriculture’. Much of this land was to be taken up in the immediate succeeding years as settlement began. The hamlet of Gundaroo is sited only a short distance from the turnoff. It is a quiet, somnolent village, smaller than Bungendore, its twin to the east, and without the charm of this other early settlement. The reason is that Gundaroo has few buildings of much interest. One of these, a red-roofed white 54 Gundaroo Pub structure on the right, once the Royal Hotel, now known as the Gundaroo Pub, is a restaurant frequented by pseudo­ sophisticates from Canberra. Other diversions include a craft shop and a wine bar, especially popular at weekends when trendy blue-jeaned idlers, their necks festooned with fashionable chains, lounge about Gundaroo’s main street creating a din and sometimes asking indignant villagers the location of the gas barbecues. Nineteenth century Gundaroo does not have any. The name itself is an Anglicised version of three similar Aboriginal words — Condariro (blue crane), Gondoroo (big waterhole) and Gondera (a camp near trees). The Royal Hotel was built in 1865 by a Presbyterian, William Affleck, who, somewhat curiously for a publican, was an advocate of total abstinence. Like other wowsers he had a ready explanation of his embracing of what appeared to be a double standard. He wrote in his Reminiscences: ‘Ministers and others said I was the right sort of publican, for I would not encourage men to drink. I would on no account stand in the bar talking to customers, nor drink with them. I only supplied them with what they wished and retired’. Affleck’s wife, Catherine, died within a few years of their marriage and he disposed of the Royal with some alacrity. There has been speculation that his wife’s death 55 Derelict Presbyterian church, Gundaroo 56 57 was heavenly retribution for his ‘sin’, though why poor Catherine should have been singled out as the target for Divine wrath and not Affleck himself I cannot imagine. Affleck was born in Scotland and was a pastrycook in his younger days. After migrating to New South Wales and settling in Gundaroo he became ‘mixed up in nearly everything established in Gundaroo and had the title of King Billy daubed on to me’. About a year before he opened the Royal Hotel ‘King Billy’ was busy with the construction of a Presbyterian church whose gutted shell can be seen today not far from the Gundaroo Pub. It was completed in 1864 and Affleck’s marriage to Catherine Campbell Cameron, of Ginninderra, in 1865, was the first such ceremony to be performed in the church. Less than ninety years later Presbyterianism was well and truly dead in Gundaroo and the church was abandoned. Today the interior of the church is open to storm and tempest and graffiti are scrawled across walls that once looked down on the Gundaroo burghers at prayer. Will the same fate overtake St Mark’s Church of England nearby? These days only three or four adults and some children attend the monthly service, held where criminals and petty offenders were once paraded to hear the penalties they had incurred for affronting the Law. For St Mark’s was once the Gundaroo Courthouse, a solid, high-ceilinged structure built last century when some folk believed the hamlet had a bright future and planned and built accordingly. The first charges were read out in the Courthouse in 1876 but by 1935 justice was being dispensed elsewhere, Gundaroo’s general lack of progress, and subsequently little crime, making a local court superfluous. The big white building was sold to the Anglicans in 1940, converted for church use, and opened and dedicated in 1941. It is rather commonplace inside and has little to make the visitor exclaim. Next to it is Sally Paskins’ Store, a tiny timber slab building in which last century a Gundaroo identity, Mrs Sarah (Sally) Paskins (Affleck calls her Parkins in his Reminiscences) had a store which children loved to visit, not only for the goodies on sale but also because Mrs Paskins kept a tame cockatoo on the counter. The store was opened in 1886 but these days it is open only at weekends when old-fashioned sweets and jams are among the commodities sold. 58 - r

Plot in scrub-filled Roman Catholic cemetery, Gundaroo

59 Across the road is Crowe’s wine bar, something of an oddity in a hamlet such as Gundaroo or, for that matter, any small town. It is a sizeable building but half-a-dozen people toasting each other would make the minute bar crowded. Business is brisk especially at weekends or when there is a function at the Gundaroo Pub down the road. The wine bar used to be the Commercial Hotel, opened in 1872 by a Dorset blacksmith, Noah Cheesman. The authorities refused to renew the licence in 1896 because the accommodation was sub-standard so a successful application was made for a wine licence. The present licensee, Matt Crowe, is the son of Jane Carroll who was refused renewal of the Commercial’s licence, then married Alfred Crowe who countered the rejection by obtaining the wine licence. Opposite the Gundaroo Pub stands a curious memorial, unusual not because it is peculiar in design but for the fact that it commemorates one man, William Ralph Clemenger, who was neither general nor emperor although, like the earlier Affleck, he was known as the ‘King of Gundaroo’. The inscription says that Clemenger ‘worked unselfishly for the benefit of the town and district for 35 years’ and exhorts, ‘Write him as one who loved his fellow men’. Clemenger died in 1918 aged 53 (the date of his death has been described as the ‘darkest day in Gundaroo’s history’) and lies in the Gundaroo cemetery. I doubt if those who erected the granite memorial some sixty years ago would be pleased with it today. Its tatty surroundings are not enhanced by the ugly posts and wire that enclose it, nor by a notice board bereft of any sign which lurches drunkenly near it. Directly opposite the Clemenger memorial is another to ‘The Gundaroo boys who volunteered to save humanity in the Great World War . . .’. For those who like pottering about old cemeteries the one at Gundaroo, where the dead lie in a great open paddock, is worth a visit. The most interesting plot contains four members of the Massy family — Charles Alphonse (died 1888), his wife Charlotte Renton (died 1908), their oldest son, Hugh William (died 1924) and George Bute Massy (died 1884). Charles’ and Charlotte’s tombstones each bear an intriguing Latin inscription—Pro Libenate Patriae (for Charles) and Reges sunt nobis non nos regibus (for Charlotte). Translated they mean ‘For the freedom of the fatherland’ and a lyrical ‘Kings are for us not 60 we for kings’ which could be interpreted as a fine espousal of democracy. The Massy plot (there could be other graves there but they are not visible) is enclosed by an iron fence now collapsing. Big trees fill the plot and heaps of fallen leaves obscure the graves. Leave Gundaroo to its ghosts and travel south to encounter some more. After crossing a bridge another cemetery can be seen on the left. It is thickly overgrown and some of the stones are broken down, which is a shame. The graveyard was the Roman Catholic cemetery and fittingly the Irish are well represented — Leahys, Lawlers and Donnellys are among those buried here, Bridget Donnelly, when she died in 1857, ‘leaving an affectionate husband and five children to bewail her loss’. Bridget had emigrated from Ireland with her husband, John, and two children in 1841. John Donnelly became a local landowner in Gundaroo and his son, Patrick Joseph Bede Donnelly, married into the Massy family, his bride being Aimee, daughter of C.A. Massy. About 5 km down the road a turning to the right takes travellers to Yass and Murrumbateman. The seal ends 2.5 km down this road and the wretched countryside about here chills the spirit should the sky be leaden and the day gloomy. Once the road begins to thread through hills, however, the landscape brightens, yellow wattle giving colour to the olive green hills in the spring. The seal returns after 13 km and some 3 km further on the Nanima property is passed on the right. John Jobbins, onetime Sydney butcher, applied for land here ini 1833 and lavished care and attention on the station, making it among the finest in the district. He built the original house in 1839 — a single-storey building with a steeply pitched roof and some attic rooms. The present owners added the upper storey im 1948. Above the front door is the inscription ‘J J MDCCCXIXXIX’ (1839). Convict labour is said to have been used in the building of the stone barn which contains a dressed stone in the wall bearing the date MDCCCXLV (1845). Just past Nanima take the Bedduluck Road to the left. It rises gently, flowing through mellow countrywide in which drooping willows give some variety to the vegetaition. The seal becomes dirt once more and the countryside flatiter, more open. Some 7 61 km from Nanima tiny Lake Springfield is glimpsed on the right, a ‘complete sanctuary’ according to a noticeboard, with a minute island in the middle. The seal returns and about 14 km from Nanima the road ends at the Barton Highway with busy traffic streaming towards Canberra or Yass. Two churches, one Methodist, the other Roman Catholic, are worth noticing as you approach the village of Hall just inside the ACT border. Both churches are lovingly kept stone structures on the hillside on the left about 1.5 km apart. The Wattle Park Methodist church is in effect a memorial to the Southwell family, pioneer settlers in the Ginninderra district. The church developed from regular services held at Thomas Southwell’s property, and which began about 1848. Isolated Ginninderra was a wild place when Southwell arrived and the people had few moral and spiritual standards. An old resident, Mrs Judy Webb, once called the locality ‘a perfect hell before Mr Southwell came to live here’. She said that ‘in those far-off days the law was practically a dead letter, for escaped convicts and ex-convicts did almost as they liked’. Mrs Webb, who often acted as a midwife, continued: T always carried a pistol. We never thought any man living could effect such a change as did Mr Southwell’. Southwell,

Wattle Park church, Hall

62 in fact, had such a profound influence for good on the inhabitants that he became known as the ‘Reformer of Ginninderra Creek’. The Wattle Park church was opened in March 1882 and enlarged in 1900. A pioneers memorial vestry, dedicated in 1955, was built from stones gathered from pioneer homes. It contains a table used by Thomas Southwell, perhaps the one at which he sat while reading by flickering candlelight the 13 lb Bible presented to him on his sixtieth birthday. Many memorials at the church commemorate Southwells, while others remember Gribbles and Browns. Small flags of Britain and Australia flank a roll of honour of parishioners who served in the two world wars. The only element which disturbs in this soilid stone building is the din of the incessant traffic speeding past on the nearby Barton Highway. This is also an irritant in the Roman Catholic church down the road where the foundation stone was laid in 1907. It was built of dark blue granite. The village of Hall is just a village and the prospect of modern Canberra, about 16 km down the highway, can be enticing after so many nineteenth century churches and graveyards.

Route 7 Canberra—old St Luke’s—Sutton— Amungula—Air Disaster Memorial—Canberra Distance (round trip) approximately 85 km. Road conditions: mostly excellent. Map reference: Sheet 8727 (Canberra)

The disused St Luke’s Church of England is of interest on this route which passes through prosperous farmlands and the village of Sutton. The Air Disaster Memorial in pine forest on Canberra’s outskirts is worth a stop. It marks where several prominent Australians died in an air crash in World War II. About 28 km out from Canberra the Federal Highway is bisected by a sealed road, the right-hand turning taking travellers to Bungendore and the left to Gundaroo. For our purposes turn left. The seal dies a short distance from the turning, but as with most country roads in the Canberra district 63 m> a O'.

Graveyard, 5 ? Lukes

64 this dirt surface is of little difficulty to watchful drivers. The road winds, twists, drops and climbs through pleasant countryside alternating between cleared farmlands and forested slopes and hills. Less than 6 km from the Federal Highway ignore Brooks Creek Road to the right and soon find that the countryside becomes a wide valley ringed by gentle hills. About 5 km further on, just over a causeway, a roofless structure with an adjoining graveyard can be seen on a rise to the left. Decades ago neatly dressed farmers’ wives equipped with parasols and bonnets mingled outside this building while earnest, red-faced men in black suits, high collars irritating their jowls, stood about, shifting restlessly in their unfamiliar garb. For this derelict shell was once St Luke’s Church of England. Church services were being held in the Gundaroo district as early as 1838, but parishioners were slow to erect their own church. An Oxford graduate, the Reverend Edward Smith, who in 1838 was appointed the first clergyman in the Queanbeyan-Canberra district, recorded that he rode a total of 60 miles to perform divine service at Gundaroo. The parishioners’ laxity did not please the Bishop of Australia, William Grant Broughton, who stopped at Gundaroo twice in 1845 to discuss the building of a church only to have the congregation fail to turn up. Bishop Broughton (‘a keen man filled with the missionary spirit, travelling to the extreme limits of settlement, and still further into the so-called “wilder­ ness” . . .’) complained twice in 1846 and 1847 about the lack of progess. Finally, what became St Luke’s was built of local sandstone in 1849. Tacked onto it were w o rooms for a school­ master, and these were later used as the vestry. A photograph of last century shows three children standing in front of the timber porch which still remains. The church looks solid, neat, snug in this picture, but over the years it became remote from the centre of population at Gundaroo and fell into disuse. Today St Luke’s stands open to the sk\y; piles of rubble litter what once were its floors and vandals hiavo scribbled over its walls. Some of the headstones are broken down while on others the lettering is fading away. Harriet Coix, born in Berkshire, England, in 1824 lies here. She died in 190)5 imd perhaps her last resting place resembles Berkshire. GrreeP fields and hills surround the church and cemetery and thie c»nly sounds are bird calls and the occasional vehicle on the distant road. 65 About 1 km from the church the dirt road ends at a T junction. Turn left here on to smooth seal and drive through rich pasture land. The road tops a rise and spread out below are flatlands and then hills rolling on to the horizon. The village of Sutton is reached soon afterwards. It is tiny, little more than a hamlet, but has a prosperous air about it. New homes are going up in the village and the surrounding countryside. The village was laid out by Surveyor E. Twynam who visited the area in July 1866. One story is that Twynam named the village ‘Sutton’ after the first man who walked up the road towards him. The person thus honoured was Joseph Sutton whose property, Woodlands, was adjacent to the reserve which later became Sutton. The yarn is an appealing one, but it seems more likely that Sutton was honoured because his property adjoined the reserve. Joseph Sutton was the son-in-law of William Guise who owned Bywong Station, a huge holding in the Gundaroo district. Guise’s father, Richard, was a sergeant in the New South Wales Corps and arrived in the colony in 1791. It is said the Guises were related to the French queen, Marie Antoinette, who ended her days on a Parisian guillotine and who is remembered chiefly for the callous remark attributed to her concerning the starving poor, ‘If they have no bread, let them eat cake!’ The road crosses the Federal Highway at a dangerous intersection 3 km from Sutton, but the countryside, witness of many a tragic collison at this point, is a scene of tranquillity. The plains, small hills, and pasture lands are dotted with farmhouses while in the background are the inevitable ranges. Standing out is the white, slate-grey-roofed Amungula property, passed on the left, 3 km from the Federal Highway. Amungula was built in 1882 by a Mr George Bingley, who hoped it would become an inn serving travellers to a proposed railhead. However, the railhead did not materialise. The Bingleys used to live in a wattle- and-daub cottage whose primitive rock foundations may be seen to this day about 150 m east of Amungula although this is private land and travellers should not go wandering over it. The spacious Amungula was built as a closed U with a courtyard in the middle. It is of stone and pise construction and its walls are about 45 cm thick. In this area drooping willows create cool images on hot days. Majestic eucalypts line the roadway and the countryside 66 becomes progressively more wooded. There are several new homes about here, some of ostentatious design, others low and flat and fitting unobtrusively into the landscape. Some 5.5 km from Amungula the road enters the ACT. On the right are the Kowen Forest plantations and soon the tall and straight pines are marching along both sides of the road. For anyone sensitive to changes in atmosphere these dark and sombre plantations can inspire a sense of dread rather than enchantment. Open farmlands return and soon the entrance to the Molonglo Gorge Reserve is passed on the left. It has picnic places and there are opportunities for walks along the river. Some 14.5 km from Amungula the Canberra turnoff is reached to the right and 2 km down this road an inconspicuous signpost points in the direction of the Air Disaster Memorial to the right. Signposting after the turn is non-existent, typical in fact of the Canberra region’s lack of attention to detail which might be of value to visitors. Drive up a rutted, dusty road, cross a grid and ignore a road darting to the right. The track continues to a point 1 km from the turnoff and veers sharply right, almost doubling back on itself. Drive 0.5 km down the hill and find the memorial in a glade on the left. The plaque is set in a huge rock marking the spot where on a cloudless day in August 1940 an RAAF Hudson came down, killing all ten on board, among them three Ministers of the Crown and the then Chief of the General Staff. An investigation revealed no suggestion of sabotage, the inquiry judge finding that the ‘most probable’ cause of the disaster was the ‘stalling of the aircraft and consequent lack of control of it by the pilot at a height at which it was beyond his power to recover control’. The Hudson had flown from Essendon in Melbourne and was on its second circuit of Canberra Airport preparatory to landing when it went into a dive or spin and smashed into the ground. Most of the plane was destroyed in the subsequent fire, a dense column of smoke billowing upwards. These days the crash site is covered in pines and the only sound is the distant roar of aircraft from Canberra Airport, now a much busier place than it was forty years ago. Canberra itself is about 12 km down the road from the memorial turnoff.

67 Route 8 Canberra—Gundaroo—Bellmount Forest— Gunning— Breadalbane—Collector—Canberra. Distance (round trip): approximately 170 km. Road conditions: good seal almost all the way; small section of dirt road is not difficult. Map references: Sheets 8727 (Canberra), 8728 (Gunning).

The historic township of Gunning on this route is worth close inspection while there are other interesting places to see as well as much beautiful scenery. Those who time their trip on the right day will see gliders and parachutists engaged in spectacular manoeuvres on one property passed en route to another historic village, Collector. Take Northbourne Avenue and the Federal Highway out of Canberra and drive for 18.5 km towards Lake George. The road from the Gunning turnoff on the Federal Highway runs through a lovely soft landscape of valleys and hills to the village of Sutton, 2 km up the road. About here the countryside is benign, corpulent in its pastoral richness. Some 16 km past Sutton the old Gundaroo Roman Catholic cemetery is passed on the right, one grey memorial standing pathetically upright among a mass of weeds and undergrowth. Shortly afterwards, across a flood plain and visible through protective trees, is the village of Gundaroo (see Route 6). The seal ends at the Fairfield Bridge, 5 km from Gundaroo, where the road climbs out of the opulent valley, flattens out, then rises gently through hill country. A collection of crude wooden buildings marks Bellmount Forest, 10 km from Fairfield Bridge, where the old Methodist Church, now the Uniting Church, built in 1902, remains in use. These days the congregation is small and nesting birds and white ants present difficulties, but years ago the worshippers were so many that seats had to be provided outside. The dirt road ends soon after Bellmount Forest and the hilly countryside presents many fine scenic views as the road continues on to Gunning, 16 km away. This township straddles the frantic Hume Highway 68 Pye Cottage linking Sydney and Melbourne and is an interesting little place, neat and clean, with some civic pride and, unlike others, proud to acknowledge its past. Opposite the Gunning Shire Office on the main drag is a quaint slab structure called Pye Cottage, now the home of the Gunning and District Historical Society. According to a notice it was originally the home of an early settler in the Dalton area, about 1860, and is typical of cottages built at that time around Gunning. The Society dismantled it and re-erected it on its present site as a memorial to pioneers of the district. At a crossroads down from Pye Cottage a bank, a courthouse and police station, and a post office, all well maintained, stand on opposite corners. A plaque on the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney premises says it was the first bank in Gunning when the branch opened on 8 September 1874. Turn left here and drive up the hill towards a building with an 69 extraordinary high-pitched roof. This is the Uniting Church, a solid brown-brick structure which is a monument to ugliness. A plaque set into a stone near the entrance says the stone was part of the foundations of the original church built in 1849. It was placed there to mark the centenary of the present church, opened in 1876. Along the road from this church is another, the beautiful Anglican church of St Edmund, built in grey/blue stone and completed in 1873 after work began on the structure in 1866. The chancel (1912) and porch (1926) came later. Enhancing its beauty is a short avenue of massive old English elms, their thousands of leaves providing cool shade to the entranceway in summer. As in other parts of the Canberra region the lassitude of the parishioners irritated Bishop William Broughton who approved a site for a church in Gunning as early 1845 although this was seven years after the first service at Gunning, conducted by the Reverend Robert Cartwright on 3 June 1838. The bishop visited the village again in January 1847 but little progress had been made. Nothing had been done by the time of his November 1847 visit either, and according to one account ‘Two pages of the Bishop’s report were devoted to his denunciation of the lukewarmness of the parishioners’. Bishop Broughton was moved to lament their indifference again in 1850, but in 1857 and 1858 the Sydney Church Society was able to report that at last a church was being erected in Gunning. By July 1859 the building was being used for worship, but, alas, later on it was blown down in a windstorm, an indication that perhaps the Gunning parishioners’ God does have an ironical sense of humour. Work on building St Edmund’s began in 1866 and unlike its predecessor this structure has survived the elements. The name of the church honours the martyr St Edmund, ‘blessed king of the East Anglians’, beheaded by the Vikings when they invaded East Anglia in AD 870. Victims of violent death in other forms are commemorated in the church. A stained glass window, appropriately enough of Sir Galahad, remembers ten parishioners killed in action in World War II. Fifteen men who died in the Great War, among them three Sheridans, are commemorated on a marble tablet in the porch. Outside the church, on the entrance gates, plaques remember other Great War victims. 70 St Edmund's, Gunning

St Edmund’s is a beautiful building, but it does have its modern-day counterpart in the Roman Catholic church on the other side of town near the Gunning burial ground. This church is a lovely circular creation of pale brick, wood and glass, an astonishing piece of architecture to see in a country town with few modern buildings. Next door is a former convent, now privately owned. Over the road from the convent the Gunning cemetery contains a monument to John Kennedy Hume ‘barbarously murdered’ by bushrangers on 20 January 1840. Hume was one of a party of four young explorers (the others were Hamilton Hume, George Barbour and W.H. Broughton) who travelled over what became the site of Gunning in 1821. Between 1821 and 1824 Broughton and John Hume took up residence on a property called Wooloowandolla, now known as Collingwood Station. In January 1840, a band of bushrangers ‘headed by the notorious Whitten’ attacked Cooper’s store. Hume heard the sound of gunfire, gathered his men and galloped to the rescue. It was his last act on this earth for a bullet smashed into his skull killing him 71 fKWm

Circular Roman Catholic church, Gunning at the age of 39. As he lay on the ground the bushrangers pumped another two or three bullets into his twitching body. Then, as if that act of savagery was not enough, they repeatedly clubbed the upper part of the corpse with musket butts, smashing many of Hume’s bones. His wife and nine young children grieved for him and his was the first burial in Gunning village. His brothers, Hamilton Hume and F.R. Hume, built the monument in the cemetery, but regrettably, as with other old graveyard inscriptions in the Canberra region, the lettering is becoming indistinct. About 3.5 km from Gunning on the Hume Highway to Goulburn is the entrance to Collingwood, the former home of John Kennedy Hume. A kilometre past here, on a bank on the left, is a concrete plinth bearing this inscription: ‘Column to record Hume Hovell expedition to Port Phillip Site of Hume grant expedition finally set out from here 17-10-1824 unveiled 17-10-1924’. (See Route 5). The expedition had actually set out from Appin, near Campbelltown, the site of Hamilton Hume’s first land grant in the colony, but the route as far as Gunning was known because in 1821-22 Hamilton Hume had founded a ‘station’ here. From this point on, the expedition moved into unknown country. The plinth is rather inconspicuous on its bank above the road and from the state of the second ‘Hume’ some yokel may have taken a pot shot at it. 72 Scenically, the countryside about the Hume Highway is a delight, but it is foolish to allow your attention to wander while you dwell on this pastoral beauty. Giant semi-trailers plying between Melbourne and Sydney continually jockey for position on the winding, narrow highway, their drivers seemingly totally indifferent to the puny vehicles they pass, engines thundering, loads swaying alarmingly. The top of the Cullerin Range is reached 15 km from Gunning and 11 km further on is Breadalbane which has a pub and an Anglican church and little else. The Chisholm Memorial Church of St Silas stands on the corner of the Collector road and turn right here. It is a small red-brick structure, opened in 1937, and replaced an old rubble church opened in 1866. The roads heads towards Collector on the Federal Highway, winding across grassy plains and through valleys and hills. The wind howls with unremitting fury, shaking the trees and making the air never still. Perhaps this is why the Federated Soaring Club uses a small airstrip in this district, 13 km from Breadalbane, from which light aircraft haul gliders towards the heavens where they drift, soar and plunge. Parachutists are taken up also and with pin-point accuracy descend like a flock of huge, brilliantly coloured birds on to their landing sites. It is exciting to stop here and watch the parachutists displaying their superb techniques to defeat the gales which strive ceaselessly to hurl them off course. The road from Breadalbane meets the Federal Highway after 17 km and close by is the village of Collector, woken from its slumber last century by the bushranger Ben Hall and his gang of desperadoes. In January 1865, according to one account, Ben Hall stationed himself near the village and ‘detained every passer by until about thirty people, three horse teams and nine bullock teams were under armed arrest’. One of the bandits, John Dunn, shot and killed Constable Samuel Nelson from behind a post and today a granite monument, and presumably the same post, stands outside the Bushranger Hotel, commemorating Nelson’s sacrifice. In those days the pub, robbed by Hall, was known as Kimberley’s Inn and is said to have been owned by Thomas Kimberley ‘who opened in business as a bootmaker at Collector and . . . was well-known for his Wellington boots’. This was probably the same Thomas Kimberley who is buried with his 73 wife Emma at one of the two Collector cemeteries. Next to the Kimberleys in this cemetery, opposite the Collector Memorial Hall, lies Constable Nelson, and appropriately enough his grave is hard up against a fence dividing the cemetery from the police residence. A plaque on this grave is another reminder that Constable Nelson was murdered by Dunn, who a year later went to the gallows for his crime. The Bushranger Hotel is cashing in on this notorious incident. Reproductions of bushrangers, their assaults on society, notables from last century, maps, guns, handcuffs and other bits and pieces from the Victorian age adorn the walls. There is a drawing of Dunn in profile. His face is weak, almost effeminate, his lips thin, his cheeks sunken. But the hotel’s attempt to recreate the atmosphere of those days is ruined by the raucous bellowing of a late twentieth century jukebox. Beyond Collector, some 60 km down the Federal Highway, is modern Canberra, unthought of in the days of Ben Hall.

R oute 9 Canberra—Uriarra Crossing—The Mullion— Mountain Creek—Uriarra homestead— Canberra. Distance (round trip): approximately 140 km. Road conditions: excellent on seal, parts of dirt road rough and dusty.

Map references: Sheets 8727 (Canberra), 8267 (Brindabella).

There are few places of much historic interest on this route but scenically it is among the loveliest in the Canberra region and worth exploring for this reason alone. Join the Cotter Road off Adelaide Avenue a kilometre or so past the Prime Minister’s Lodge and drive on to the Uriarra Crossing turnoff, 13 km from the Canberra City Post Office. 74 Take the Uriarra Road to the right here and travel through Pinus radiata plantations, the conifers thrusting densely skywards. Some 5 km from the turnoff the country opens out and the Tidbinbilla and Bullen Ranges rise bulkily on the skyline to the left, often dark blue against a streaky sky, standing out so vividly they appear painted onto their pale background. Dark shadows of cloud forever drift across their flanks. As the road winds the Bullen range sweeps around as if projected on to some giant screen. The road passes the Huntly property and plunges down towards the Murrumbidgee River. Spread out below is a splendid vista of landforms rising and falling to the horizon. The country is green, hilly, rocky. The hills are racked with ravines; some of their sides are wooded, others smooth, practically bare. To the right the Lower Molonglo Water Quality Control Centre marches as ponderously as its bureaucratic name suggests down a hillside in a series of jutting steps. Below it the Molonglo and Murrumbidgee Rivers join in a thickly wooded river valley and not far away are the cabins of the YMCA’s Camp Sturt. The road crosses the Murrumbidgee, 14 km from the Cotter Road turnoff, at Uriarra Crossing, a lovely place of flowing water, rocks, sand and deep pools. It divides at this point so take the right-hand fork, the Fairlight Road, and immediately begin climbing a dirt road which becomes progressively bumpier. Two-legged pylons carrying power cables clump across the countryside disfiguring the landscape, and great stones litter the paddocks. Turn right at Fairlight homestead and shortly afterwards the seal returns. Canberra sprawls in the distance to the right. The seal ends after about 3 km but the dirt road is of a better standard than the stretch from Uriarra Crossing to Fairlight. It runs through mountainous country before becoming a white ribbon, unwinding across a plateau over which stock wander with impunity. The weatherboard The Mullion public school, now disused, is passed on the right and a little further on a sign points in the direction of Ledgers Creek Road to the left. Do not take it — it is only suitable for four-wheel-drive vehicles. The Mullion homestead, a short distance ahead, is a pleasant sight, grey and white behind a reedy pond on which waterfowl gather. The pond is fed by underground springs and never dries 75 Disused school, The Mullion up, which is a comfort to neighbouring graziers in times of drought. The Mullion is owned by descendants of John Ledger, a Yorkshireman, who, with his Scottish wife, Marion, was the first settler in The Mullion district sometime before 1848. These pioneers lived in a bark and timber hut and in the early days started a dairy and traded butter and cheese in Yass for sugar and flour. Remains of what is said to be their hut can still be seen about 3 km up the Ledgers Creek Road at a spot on the left where tall English elms dwarf the puny dwelling. The Ledgers reared eight children in this isolated place, and all except one lived to the age of 80 or older. Past The Mullion the Sawyers Gully Road is passed on the left. Ignore this and also the Glenrock road to the right a little further on. The gaunt skeletons of ringbarked trees stand mutely on heights to the left but these monuments to man’s bushclearing efforts recede as the road runs helter-skelter down a thin ravine, forest-clad hills pressing hard on both sides. The road climbs out of the ravine and the hills drop back, being replaced by lush paddocks. Less than 5 km from the Glenrock turnoff the seal returns and the road stretches sinuously around a mountain. Once the summit is reached lovely views of hilltops receding into the distance are an indication of the scenic delights to come. The 76 road drops back to the valley floor, then twists around one flank of the surrounding hills. It is a beautiful valley, lush, green and tranquil. About 10 km out from Glenrock turnoff the road tops a rise and far in the distance the grey waters of the Murrumbidgee River can be seen. At a road junction near here take the left-hand fork pointing to Wee Jasper and find the road crossing Mountain Creek at an idyllic spot where the only sound is the ripple of water over stones as the creek drifts towards the Murrumbidgee. The road climbs steeply around the heights but the superb view of valley and mountain to the left has been largely destroyed by the gross insensitivity of the public utility planners: they have strung not one but two sets of cables across the valley, so that ugly wire ropes slash its lovely face. Curious stone outcrops snaking down a ravine can be seen to the left and at the summit the seal ends, the road passing several homesteads, among them the oddly named Salt Box property. The Corolo homestead, about 8 km from the Mountain Creek bridge, has a driveway quaintly lined with two walls of thousands of stones, walls which must have taken many hours of painstaking labour to build. Leave the Wee Jasper road about 11 km out from the Mountain Creek bridge and turn left at the Sawyers Creek road. This crosses a long plateau then drops down a narrow valley, weaving between well-rounded hills. Gentle willows and a rivulet add charm to the landscape. Some 8 km from the turnoff a battered sign announces that the 1990 acres within the boundaries of the Brooklyn property have been proclaimed a complete sanctuary and that anyone carrying guns or traps may be prosecuted. The road noses through the countryside, sometimes rising quickly and steeply, occasionally plunging dramatically. Sometimes it hugs the hillsides, at others dashes along valley floors. It crosses numerous watercourses and after rain this road could become impassable. So should you take this drive, be mindful of the recent weather. About 13 km from the turnoff, after climbing sharply, look back where cables cross the road. Behind and below hillsides stretch out, and far in the distance rise pale blue mountain ranges. This view is equalled shortly afterwards when, at Round Flat, valleys, hills and ranges wander to the horizon. On the right 77 The Mullion homestead

78 79 Tranquil scene, Sawyers Creek Road is Canberra’s ubiquitous Black Mountain telecommunications tower, its site submerged in a sea of surrounding peaks. Within 2 km of Round Flat a broken signpost with one arm pointing to Canberra is reached. Turn right here and after a few kilometres you are back at The Mullion. The road traverses familiar country on the return journey but for variety ignore the turning to the left at Fairlight and take the road to the Cotter. The grandeur of the countryside past Fairlight is compensation for the awful road which in its early stages is among the worst in 80 Collapsing farm shed near The Mullion the Canberra region. Handsome Uriarra homestead on the right marks the turnoff to the left to Canberra. The green-roofed homestead sits in a restful setting surrounded by trees and behind a large lagoon. This was man-made about fifteen years ago by the present occupier of Uriarra who bought the property after World War 11. At one time Uriarra Station covered about 4000 ha but after it was resumed by the Federal Government (which owns practically all the freehold in the ACT) large tracts were sown to pines. The present occupier runs a Poll Hereford stud. The word Uriarra is interesting, being Aboriginal for meeting place, and indeed there was once a staging post in this area with a church, post office, store and blacksmiths shop. None remain. The Huntly property, passed on the outward journey to The Mullion, was once part of Yarralumla station owned by T.A. Murray, pioneer, landowner and politician. The land was divided into soldier settler blocks after World War I and eventually, in 1931, passed into the hands of the Milson family, of Milsons Point in Sydney. It was called Huntly after one of the family properties in Queensland. The first Milson in Australia, James Milson, arrived in Sydney in 1806 on xht Albion, the same vessel which brought Robert Campbell, of Duntroon, to the colony. Huntly changed hands again in 1956 when the present owner bought it and made extensive alterations to the 81 Remains of hut said to have been John Ledger's

82 83 homestead, built in 1933, and its immediate surroundings. A sealed road runs from Uriarra homestead towards Canberra, initially through young pine forest plantations swaggering across the valleys and up and down the hills. The road swings in giant curves through these humps and after the dusty country roads it is exhilarating to speed down its smooth surface. White water rushing across the Cotter Dam to the right makes a diversion about 7 km from Uriarra homestead and soon afterwards the junction with the Cotter road is reached. Turn left for Canberra, 23 km distant.

Route 10 Canberra—The Mullion—Glenrock— Murrumbidgee River—Mountain Creek— The Mullion—Canberra Distance (round trip): approximately 30 km (from Glenrock turnoff and return). Road conditions: excellent on seal, sometimes trying on unsealed sections.

Map reference: Sheet 8627 (Brindabella).

This route is only short but is memorable for the water views presented by the Murrumbidgee River and the rich pastoral country of the Mountain Creek valley. The route is an offshoot of the longer Route 9 and the same directions to The Mullion and a short distance beyond should be followed. This time turn right at the Glenrock sign, about 3.5 km from The Mullion, and drive down a dirt road, making sure you close the gate you must open soon after the turnoff. The countryside is generally dull until Glenrock homestead is passed on the right, 3.5 km from the turnoff. The road hugs the hillside, then sweeps down a valley and up again. It curves and falls to a road junction at which you turn left. The up-and-down passage provides excellent views stretching across fold after fold of hills. Ignore a turning to the right and find that the road passes 84 through an unlocked gate. It then drops down to cross a shaded stream, follows this for a time then climbs jauntily to level out on the west bank of the majestic Murrumbidgee River. There is a steep fall down to deep water near here so be careful of children should you stop. On the opposite side are sandy beaches while downstream the river flows full and slow, cutting its ponderous way through shelves of sand. Across the river bright green fields run down to meet it; farm buildings are scattered about. The road follows this grand stretch of water for some time, presenting to travellers a succession of views of beaches, riverbank trees whose fronds caress the surface, deep pools and always the languid flow of water. Finally the river and the road part company, the Murrumbidgee vanishing around a bend marked by a huge bluff while the road veers sharply uphill to the left. Some 13 km from the Glenrock turnoff the Cavan property, owned by the newspaper tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, is passed on the right. This property, apparently named after County Cavan in Ireland, covered 10,000 acres in 1829 and was originally granted to Alexander Riley who at one time shared the rum monopoly in New South Wales. Little of interest can be seen of modern-day Cavan and soon a sealed road is reached. Turn left here and, to the right, catch another view of the Murrumbidgee, this time quite bloated. Turn left at Mountain Creek and find that the road zips along the edge of a tight valley, each bend revealing exquisite pastoral scenes until the eye and the mind are satiated. As the hills close in the road heaves itself out of the valley and the country becomes rugged and bushclad. Rocky outcrops jut out from the flanks of the hills. The seal ends after 6.5 km but there are worse dirt roads than this in the Canberra region. About 4 km away is the turnoff to Glenrock, and 3.5 km past this, The Mullion.

85 This Companion describes ten car tours within an easy drive from Canberra, taking in places of historical interest and scenic beauty. Clear directions are given for each tour, together with descriptions and anecdotes about the places to visit en route, and a useful map adds to the ease of finding the way. This book is for residents of Canberra who would like to see some of the region’s attractions and for the tourist who is tired of gazing at the modern buildings of the twentieth century and would like some time in the country.

Canberra Companions are published by the Australian National University Press as a contribution to the cultural, educational and recreational life of the immediate area served by the University. Titles available or in preparation include:

Rambles around Canberra edited by Allan J. Mortlock and Gillian O’Loghlin Tales and Legends of Canberra Pioneers by Samuel Schumack Episodes of Old Canberra by Ged Martin Canberra ’s Embassies by Graeme Barrow Fishing around the Monaro by Douglas Stewart History Tours around Canberra by Jill Waterhouse Street Trees in Canberra by Audrey H. Edwards Undiscovered Canberra by Allan J. Mortlock and Bernice Anderson The Australian National University — people and places in a landscape Native Gardens in Canberra by G.A.J. Butler The Canberra Handbook Beyond the Cotter by Allan J. Mortlock and Klaus Hueneke Indolent Kitchen Gardening by Libby Smith, illustrated by Winifred Mumford

Australian National University Press, Canberra ISBN 0 7081 1087 8