Category:1-9 Park Road, Wallacia

English: 1-9 Park Road was the home of John Blaxland on his Luddenham estate, and the site of the Luddenham homestead was the centre of activity in the area from 1813. The homestead continued to be the focus of pastoral activity through the nineteenth century when it was the home of George Wallace, the manager of the remaining part of the Luddenham estate in the 1850s and after whom Wallacia is named.

Governor Macquarie granted 6710 acres of land in the present day Wallacia and Luddenham districts to John Blaxland in 1813. Blaxland named the estate Luddenham after his family’s property in Kent, England. As well as grazing stock on the estate, Blaxland established a mill and brewery on the other side of the Nepean River. His homestead was located in the present day village of Wallacia. In 1833 Mrs Felton Matthews journeyed west and recorded in her diary that she “Reached Luddenham, Mr Blaxland’s estate. Cottage and farm buildings is rather pretty. Large tracts of cleared ground around.” She described the house further; “Luddenham as a house, is nothing, a mere settler’s habitation, of wood principally and set up with all that neglect of comfort, convenience and appearance, which is so strikingly displayed in all the earlier buildings of the colony but it is most beautifully situated, on the summit of a gentle slope which rises from the rivers banks.”

Blaxland mortgaged Luddenham in 1841. After his death in 1845, the estate was taken up by his son Edward who failed to revive the fortunes of the property. It was sold by the Australian Trust Company in October 1851 to Charles Nicholson. Nicholson established a village of Luddenham at the eastern end of the estate, on Northern Road. Tenant farmers managed much of the farmland with George Wallace managing the land at the present town of Wallacia and living in the homestead.

A plan of Luddenham estate was prepared in 1859 and shows buildings and improvements on both sides of the present day Park Road, east of Mulgoa Road. The remaining 2233 acres of the estate was sold to a syndicate of land developers in 1885 who subdivided the land into semi-rural allotments and created Park Road.

Because there is no record of the land at the rear of the shops facing Mulgoa Road being developed for other purposes, the site of Luddenham homestead has high potential to provide further information about the use of the Luddenham estate from 1813 through the nineteenth century. Sites such as this with potential to provide information about the early settlement of New South Wales, and particularly associated with a significant family such as the Blaxlands are increasingly rare.

References

• “Mrs Felton Mathews’ Journal”, in Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, volume 29, Pt 2, 1944
• Portions of this description come from the Heritage NSW physical description, which is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.