HERITAGE NEWSLETTER OF THE BLUE MOUNTAINS ASSOCIATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE ORGANISATIONS INC. SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2010 ISSUE No. 11 Some heritage links of Mount Tomah Botanic Garden by Rob Smith, Mount Tomah Botanic Garden Director Situated on a mountain top in the Blue Mountains, Mount Tomah Botanic Garden has many links with the long history of this region. This article will discuss only some of these links. Mount Tomah has been covered in luxuriant rainforest from earliest times. George Caley, Sir Joseph Banks’s collector in Sydney crossed the Devils Wilderness1 and camped on Mount Tomah in 1804. He described the tree ferns and rainforest vegetation in his journal and called the massif, Tree Fern Hill. Tomah is the Darug word for tree fern2. The mountain is thought to have special significance to Darug On the Bells Line of Road approaching Mt Tomah circa 1920s. people and there are many signs of Photograph courtesy NSW Government Printing Office. occupation around the springs, rainforest and associated There are sites in the area recorded made an offer by a timber company sandstone cliffs. with occupation dates of about wanting the trees for timber. 9,0003 years ago. Concerned citizens decided to act. Mount Tomah was also part of the network of trails Aboriginal people In 1871, Robert Ftizgerald visited They formed a company, The used to traverse this rugged country Mount Tomah and collected a new Jungle Limited5 to buy the forest for now known as the Blue Mountains. species of orchid. Baron Ferdinand £5000 half of which would be Von Mueller and Robert Fitzgerald raised through £25 - £100 shares. named this orchid species in honour of the work of the Fairfax family in The rest would be raised by using a supporting science, and the arts. mortgage to be repaid from the They named the pencil Orchid expected revenue from a tea house Dendrobium fairfaxii.4 to be built and operated on the site. This species of orchid is growing in In 1929, 91 cars a day traversed the the Jungle today. This type unsealed Bells Line of Road. description was published in the Sydney Mail of 1871 and the The above photograph taken at the holotype is held in Melbourne now entrance to the botanic garden Botanic Garden Herbarium. shows the look of the forested and fairly rough track that Bells Line was Pictured is the pencil orchid By the 1920s the farmer who owned then. Dendrobium fairfaxii. Photograph the then 280-hectares of warm Continued page 3 courtesy Tracey Armstrong, Mt temperate rainforest, adjacent to Annan Botanic Garden. what is now the botanic garden, was HERITAGE 1 September -October 2010 From the president’s pen...... Macquarie’s convict sites featured in additions to World Heritage Listing The recent addition of 11 more The site is a powerful symbol of the farming land for free settlement Australian sites to UNESCO’s penal colony of NSW and is closely and improve transport and World Heritage Listing should be associated with efforts to reform overland communication in the seen by all conservationist and and rehabilitate convicts during the colony. Convicts worked in gangs heritage enthusiasts as a Macquarie era. It had been on the Great North Road - some in welcome and truly aspirational occupied by governors from Captain leg irons - quarrying, excavating achievement. Arthur Phillip in 1788 to Governor and building in laborious and Denison in 1856. tedious work that created a major Together the sites represent the engineering structure in the global phenomenon of *Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney rugged landscape. convictism - the forced migration Hyde Park Barracks is Australia’s of convicts to penal colonies in first government-built convict The Old Great North Road site is the 18th and 19th centuries - barracks, and the only remaining made up of a small portion of and global developments in the barracks building and complex from around seven and a half punishment of crime in modern the Macquarie era of convict kilometres of the original 250 times. administration. It marked a turning kilometre road. The site point in Australia’s management of incorporates the Devine’s Hill The Australian Convict Sites are transported convicts from Britain. It section (built 1829-32) and the the preeminent examples of our is also significant because it was Finch’s Line section (built 1828 rich convict history, with more designed by Australia’s first and subsequently abandoned). than 3,000 convict sites architect Francis Greenway, and is remaining around Australia. regarded as one of his best works. It is an impressive landscape that retains qualities of the physical This is unique in the world today. *Cockatoo Island convict site, environment in which the convict In 2007 the importance of the Sydney Harbour road builders laboured. Still visible Australian convict memory to all Cockatoo Island was created as a are the massive retaining walls of humankind was recognised penal settlement in 1839 for re- large sandstone blocks, quarried when some of Australia’s convict offending convicts. It was an ideal cliffs with triangular shaped marks records were included in location for hard labour - isolated from the hand-driven drill for UNESCO’s Memory of the World and secure, easy to provision, yet blasting holes and stretches of Register. close to the heart of the colony’s chiselled gutters and remains of major population centre. around 40 stone culverts. Convicts Of the 11 sites that make up the left their mark with graffiti, and World Heritage Australian Convicts and colonial prisoners some of this can still be seen on Convict Sites, four are in NSW quarried massive areas of sandstone blocks today. with several having links to sandstone, excavated and helped to Lachlan Macquarie, so often build a dockyard and constructed The other sites are: Kingston and called the “nation’s builder” and about 20 underground grain silos. Arthur’s Vale historic area (Norfolk whose 200th anniversary of his Some were sentenced to solitary Island), Port Arthur historic site (on swearing-in as Governor of confinement in underground cells Tasmania’s Tasman Peninsula), NSW is being celebrated this built into the sheer sandstone cliffs. Cascades Female Factory year. The sites are: After the abolition of transportation (Hobart), Darlington Probabation to NSW in 1840, Cockatoo Island Station (Maria Island –Tasmania), * Old Government House and operated as a penal settlement for Coal Mines historic site Domain, Parramatta convicts completing their sentences (Premadeyna – Tasmania), This site is made up of five and for ex-convict and other Brickendon Woolmers Estates buildings and extensive colonial prisoners. (Longford – Tasmania) and archaeological remains set in 55 Freemantle Prison (Western hectares of parkland (the * Old Great North Road, near Australia). Domain). Old Government Wiseman’s Ferry adjacent to the Source: Heritage Division, Australian House is a two-storey rendered Hawkesbury River Government Department of brick building in Georgian style, The Great North Road was built Environment, Water, Heritage and restored to represent the from Sydney to the Hunter Valley by Arts. Macquarie period. Around 100 convicts between 1826 and 1836. It John Leary, OAM convicts lived in huts and was part of an ambitious road President, Blue Mountains worked there during the convict building program to open up fertile Association of Cultural Heritage era. Organisations Inc. HERITAGE 2 September - October 2010 Botanic Gardens Trust buys Jungle Continued from page 1 On March 23, 1929 the Governor, Sir Dudley de Chair, unveiled a plaque alongside the Fairfax Walk (the late Sir James Fairfax owner of the Sydney Morning Herald had been a major backer of the project). The Fairfax Walk was a set of paths winding from the tea room to what was dubbed ‘The Temple of Nature’. With the depressed economy of that time the business closed 1934 and the land was resumed. In 1972 Alfred and Effie Brunet donated 33 hectares of land to Royal Botanic Gardens to make a cool climate botanic garden at Mount Tomah. They had managed the property as a cut flower farm Effie ad Alfred Brunet with George Townsend in front of their cottage. and nursery at Mount Tomah since This also meant the heritage 3 Kenny Suzanne, Mount Tomah 1934. building the Brunets had owned and Darug Aboriginal Connections, used for 34 years as a nursery 2002. pg 4. When they donated their property to building was returned to public 4 Mueller and Fitzgerald 1872, the Royal Botanic Gardens in 1972, ownership. Sydney Mail, The Garden, Flora of many of the original buildings were Australia, Dendrobium Fairfaxii demolished or moved. Now visitors to the botanic garden September 21 pg 360 can see this fine example of nursery 5 A New National Park. ‘The Jungle’. A large corrugated iron shed was buildings of the period. It will soon Invitation to life membership by moved to the adjacent property, the be interpreted for visitors to Mount ordinary share subscription. Jungle. Tomah Botanic Garden and can be Australian National Library ANL seen when visitors take a stroll on MIC—mcN2225 JAFp HISAT 907. In 2009 the Jungle Property was the Lady Vincent Fairfax Walk. purchased by the Botanic Gardens Trust, funded by a generous The acquisition of the Jungle, so it donation from John and Libby is now part of Mount Tomah Botanic State Governor Fairfax as well as the NSW Garden through the generosity of Environmental Trust. John and Libby Fairfax marked the opens completion of the first Botanic After much work, a part of the Bicentenary Project for Botanic Hobby’s Reach original path system was reinstated Gardens Trust at Mount Tomah. and linked to paths from the Botanic Research Centre Garden. Endnotes Her Excellency, Professor Marie 1Andrews Alan E.J., 1984.