After an incredible almost 100 years in the same family, the historic Gunbower Estate has been sold. The new owners have taken possession of the precious real estate, and long-time owner, Jenny Johnson, has left the home she has known for 87 years. The Estate has been in Jenny’s family since the 1930s when her father, Colin Reid, purchased it, but its history goes back much further than that.
The Gunbower run of 180,000 acres was originally taken up by James Rowan in 1845, G. Rowan in 1851, and George Houston in 1856. Houston began fencing the boundaries (previously marked just by plough furrows) and was granted pre-emptive right of 640 acres in 1865. Several owners followed, until Colin Reid purchased the property in the 1930s. Reid had overseen the growing of tobacco on the property since 1932.
He married Winifred Selby on the estate in 1936 and established a dairy farm on the home block of 500 acres in the 1940s. Colin and Winifred’s daughters, Jenny (born in 1936) and Gillian, were raised on the property. Jenny was to later take over ownership of the property with her husband, Phillip or ‘Toje’ as he was known, in 1966, which was also the year her father died.
They added a new wing to the homestead in 1968 and raised two sons there – Malcolm and Evan. It was never lonely on the property, with Jenny’s mother and her Uncle Dick Selby also living on the Estate until their deaths in 1984 and 1988 respectively. Malcolm and his wife Vicki also called the Estate home at the turn of the century.
Toje died in 2004, and for the first time since the Estate was established, it was home to just one person – Jenny, who spent the last 20 years living on the Estate on her own, and more recently, living part-time in Bendigo. Late last year, Jenny moved off the property entirely; the property she has known for 87 years and will hold dear to her heart.
A timber homestead is the first recorded building on the property (year unknown), joined in 1889 by a brick homestead. Fire destroyed both in 1891, but the brickwork of the homestead was retained and restored to cover the fire damage, and the weatherboard house was rebuilt in brick. This gave the new homestead two wings – the kitchen wing on the north, closest to the Gunbower Creek and the living quarters on the south, each with its own cellar and joined by a timber conservatory. These were the buildings that Jenny’s family lived in and which remain to this day.
The walls of the homestead (some three bricks thick) will carry the secrets of all the families, owners, managers and overseers who lived within the dwelling, many now just ghostly remnants. The laughter, the tears, the joy, the sorrows, the frustration, the disappointment. From men planning how to develop and farm the land, the hustle and bustle of families living within its walls and grounds, the servants hard at work, the piano played to while away the evening and entertain, the bells rung by servants to alert the family that lunch was served, or by the family to call the servants, the children playing with toys (from timber hand-made rocking horses through to plastic action figures); right through to the constant noise of modern conveniences like washing machines, radios, televisions – and the silence that came before that. Close your eyes and you can hear it all as the hands of time pass through the walls of the homestead and saw the seasons come and go.
The 50 square homestead with 14 rooms, as noted in a Heritage Review conducted by Campaspe Shire Council in 2014, is of late 19th Century Victorian Period (1851-1901) of vernacular slab outbuildings and a Victorian Period Italianate house and associated structures. One of its features is a tall brick wall that runs from the side of the home to the outside toilet block – a wall that would have separated the servants from view from the front of the house (which faces Gunbower), as well as the kitchen, cellar and kitchen yard.
When we toured the property with Jenny’s son and former co-owner, Mal Johnson, what stood out were the period features, many original and still in use, but some dysfunctional. There were rooms that were a mish-mash of the very old and slightly more modern (mid-last century) – gorgeous walls and original decorative features mixed with 1970s curtains and benches.
Late last year, Gunbower Estate left the hands of the family it had wrapped its arms around and nurtured, and who, in turn, cared for and nurtured it. It will now enter a new chapter as an educational facility under the ownership of Moama Anglican Grammar.
See next week’s edition of The [Koondrook and Barham] Bridge [Newspaper] to see what Moama Anglican Grammar has in store for Gunbower Estate.
This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 1 February 2024.
