Original Villas Of Woolloomooloo Hill, Potts Point & Elizabeth Bay - 17 Allotments - Granted By Governor Darling

If you stand on the Darlinghurst ridge and squint, you can still feel Governor Ralph Darling’s idea. In the late 1820s he picked the height then called Woolloomooloo Hill (soon Darlinghurst, associated with Eliza Darling) for a belt of gentlemen’s villas looking down on the town. Between about 1828 and 1831 he issued roughly seventeen grants of eight to ten acres, mainly to senior officials and favoured free settlers. Conditions were strict: plans needed his approval; each allotment was limited to a single substantial residence (commonly to a stated minimum of £1,000); houses were to face the town where practicable and sit in landscaped grounds.

Among the houses raised on those grants were places still remembered in street and suburb names — Craigend (Sir Thomas Mitchell), Barham (Edward Deas Thomson), Springfield, Rosebank, Orwell, Tusculum, Rockwall, Grantham, Brougham, Kellett and others. Most came down from the 1890s onward for terraces and flats. Only a handful survive: Barham inside SCEGGS Darlinghurst, Tusculum and Rockwall on the Potts Point ridge. Elizabeth Bay House sits in the same villa landscape story, though on its own closely related estate narrative.

watercolour of Potts Point

Woolloomooloo Boat Sheds - watercolour - Undated

ELIZABETH BAY HOUSE 
House








TUSCULUM 








ROCKWALL
BARHAM. 






GRANTHAM

BROUGHAM LODGE 
KELLETT HOUSE