If you've had a cold one on the deck of the Clovelly Hotel, you've been drinking on the site of one of the eastern suburbs' great lost houses. Mundarrah Towers was a castellated sandstone mansion with battlemented towers and Gothic colonnades. It looked straight down Little Coogee Bay, which we now call Clovelly. It began in the 1850s as a doctor's farmhouse called Rockbrook. Newspaper proprietor Samuel Bennett, of the Evening News and the Australian Town and Country Journal, then turned it into a seaside castle in the 1870s. It housed the Bennett family for years, was carved up in the land boom that came with the trams, and was pulled down in the 1920s for the pub. Today the only reminders are a couple of street names and a lot of old paperwork.
Here's the whole story, as far as the sources take it. They don't go as far as I'd like. No architect's name has come down to us, and the house appears in only a handful of photographs and one 1878 woodcut. Where the sources disagree, I've said so.
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Before the Towers: Yarana and Little Coogee
This was Eora country long before any Europeans arrived. The Bennett family historians at Bennetts of the Evening News say the Aboriginal name for the bay has been recorded as "Yarana". They also say the diarists of the First Fleet didn't record which clan owned the land between the harbour and Botany Bay. It could have been the Bidjigal, the Gameygal or the Cadigal, or it may have been shared country. Some accounts put Governor Phillip's meeting with a crowd of 200 to 300 Aboriginal people on 10 July 1788 at this bay. The same writers point out that more recent research, based on Surgeon John White's journal, places that meeting at Little Bay instead.
The Europeans named the place Little Coogee, after the bigger crescent of beach to the south, past Gordons Bay. Randwick Council says hunting and fishing were what first drew settlers out here.
Greville's 20 Acres, 1834
The block that became Mundarrah Towers was first sold in 1834. According to the Bennett family research, a man called William Morricy applied that February to buy the 20 acres around the bay, with an upset price of ten shillings an acre. When it went to Crown auction on 13 June 1834, Morricy lost out to William Charles Greville, a clerk in the Colonial Secretary's office. That gave Greville the whole beachfront. Greville Street is named after him.
Greville didn't bother naming the place, and he didn't build a proper house on it. According to the Bennett site, the land was farmed, and before 1853 there were only two dwellings in the whole area. One was a hut on "Mr Greville's farm" and the other was on James Holmes's five acres next door.
Dr Dickson's Rockbrook
The first real house went up under Dr John Dickson, a medical man with a practice in Elizabeth Street. The Bennett researchers say he paid £1,000 for the 20 acres in September 1853. He called the estate Rockbrook, after the creek running down through it into the head of the bay, and built on a ridge south of that creek with a long view out to sea.
From their description, it was a good solid house. It was two storeys of stone in the Gothic Revival style, with a central porch facing west onto a driveway. Downstairs a central hall led to the parlour, drawing room, library and kitchen. Upstairs were four attic bedrooms, and the main one had a dressing room. A verandah at the back looked over the bay and the ocean. Out the back were a big stable with a hayloft, a coach-house and a dairy, and the doctor spent a lot of money fencing and landscaping the grounds.
A racing daughter and a stack of debt
This is where it gets colourful. The Bennett site says Dickson's daughter Mary was a racehorse owner and trainer, and they suggest the levelled oval in front of the house may have been her training track. She was always short of money, and according to the same writers she turned to scams to get by, including selling horses she didn't own. One press report has her hiding a racehorse inside the house so it couldn't be repossessed.
By 1858 Dickson himself was in financial trouble. He tried transferring the property to his wife, and he tried subdividing and selling it. In the end his mortgagee used its power of sale in 1866, and the estate went to John Campbell of Campbell's Commercial Wharf for £926 17s 6d. Randwick Council's history also notes that Dickson (spelt "Dixon" there) was the first returning officer for the Randwick municipal elections in 1859.
Aberburnie: Campbell and Renwick
Campbell renamed the place Aberburnie, which the Bennett researchers translate from the Scots as "the mouth of the brook". He doesn't seem to have changed the house much. He did make a deal with Randwick Council to split the cost of rebuilding the "Government Road" from Arden Street to his front gate, and that road became Burnie Street. He lived there with his family until 1871. Then money troubles hit him too, and in October 1872 the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney sold the property to George Renwick of Redfern, a builder.
Renwick put it up for auction on 11 October 1873 and it seems not to have sold. In August 1874 he sold it privately to Samuel Bennett.
Samuel Bennett Builds His Castle
Samuel Bennett was 59 and easing towards retirement. He owned the Evening News and the Australian Town and Country Journal, which Randwick Council calls "one of the most influential newspapers of the day". He and his wife Eliza were living in the city at Ashmore House in Kent Street, close to the paper, while their son Alfred was being groomed to take over. The Little Coogee farm, six miles out of town and quiet, was meant to be their retirement home.
Bennett didn't knock Rockbrook down. He wrapped it in something much grander. The Bennett researchers compared an 1888 Public Works plan with the 1866 subdivision plan and worked out what he added between 1874 and 1876. At the front and on the north side came terraces edged with stone balustrades. Then came the castellated towers, joined to the entrance porch by walkways with Gothic colonnades. Randwick Council calls the result the locally famous "castellated Mundarrah Towers", built around Dickson's original house. Later press reports apparently said Bennett spent as much on the outside of the house and the gardens as Dickson had spent building it.
The earliest known photograph, taken in 1879, shows the old gables and pitched roofs of Dickson's house and outbuildings still poking up behind the new castle front. The Illustrated Sydney News ran a woodcut of the nearly finished house, seen from the bay, on 17 September 1878. It's attributed to Arthur Collingridge, and the same issue carried an article and a poem called "Mundarrah".
Buying up the neighbours
Twenty acres wasn't enough for him. Between 1875 and 1877 he bought Lot 8 for £150, Lot 9 for £212 3s and Lot 6 for £400, which added more than 16 acres along both sides of the road out to Arden Street. The building work took so long that he and Eliza didn't move in until 1877, and the 1877 Sands Directory lists them at both Kent Street and Little Coogee.
Why "Mundarrah"?
Nobody really knows, and the best story might be a joke. The name appears from the mid-1870s, after the Bennetts arrived. The Bennett site quotes an article from the Town and Country Journal of September 1878, which was Bennett's own paper. It tells of "a lady" who wanted an Aboriginal name for her house and bribed an Aboriginal man with tea and sugar to tell her what the place was called. She heard either "Munyarra" or "Mundarrah" and chose the second. The writer of the article had "no doubt" the man had said "munyarra", meaning "I do not know"! The family researchers say they couldn't confirm the word in the Sydney language. They point out that by then the man could have come from almost anywhere in New South Wales. They also suggest that for a story like that to run in the family's own paper, the Bennetts must have been happy to laugh at themselves.
A Tragedy in the Garden
Samuel Bennett barely got to enjoy the place. In June 1878 he hurt his left forefinger helping the stonemasons with their work, and he died of tetanus. He was 63 and otherwise in robust health, and he'd lived in his castle for just over a year.
Eliza, Mistress of Mundarrah Towers
Eliza inherited the estate and stayed on until she died. Her daughter Rose and Rose's husband John Henniker Heaton lived there with her until they left for England in 1883. One of the few photographs of the Towers shows a family group at the christening of two of Samuel and Eliza's grandchildren. Going by the size of the Norfolk Island pines, the family historians date it to about 1880.
Mrs Bennett's picnic, Good Friday 1884
The other great photograph comes from a staff party. On Good Friday, 11 April 1884, Eliza hosted the employees of the Evening News and the Town and Country Journal at the Towers. The Town and Country Journal reported on it on 19 April. In the group photo Eliza sits in the middle with Alfred and his wife Emily. Down the front, sitting on the grass, is a man you can't mistake: Sir Henry Parkes. He had founded the Empire, the paper Samuel Bennett had started out on, and he stayed close to the family. Alfred's son Len later recalled being told that Sir Henry had bounced him on his knee as a baby.
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In 1885 Eliza transferred a building block on the south-west corner to Dr George Heape Stanley, the first minister of Sydney's Unitarian Church and an old family friend. Nobody knows whether he paid for it. The Bennett researchers think it was most likely a gift, since Eliza's estate was later valued at over £94,000.
Eliza died at Mundarrah Towers on 3 December 1886. Rose had come back from England to be with her. The house and land were valued for probate at £9,500, and the valuation flagged the problem that would dog the estate for decades. Much of it was "rendered unsaleable and inaccessible by an immense water course traversing it in two directions, being sand, the wash away is considerable after storms."
The Heatons, the Trust and a Baronet "of Mundarrah Towers"
Eliza's will left the estate in trust for Rose for as long as she lived in the homestead. After Rose, it was to go to her eldest son John for his lifetime. Neither of them ever came back to live there, so the executors sold up and kept the money in trust as the "Mundarrah Towers Fund". The trust wasn't finally wound up until 1963, when that son, by then Sir John Henniker-Heaton, Baronet, died.
Rose's husband was quite a figure himself. Wikipedia describes John Henniker Heaton (1848–1914) as a Conservative MP and postal reformer who had been a journalist in Australia. The Bennett site says he won the seat of Canterbury in the House of Commons. When he was made a baronet, the title took its territorial name from a Clovelly creek bank: there's a 1912 coat of arms on Wikimedia Commons for the "Henniker-Heaton baronets of Mundarrah Towers".
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Alfred Bennett, Drains and the 1890s Crash
When the property was auctioned on 23 March 1888, Eliza's son Alfred bought the original 20 acres plus Lots 6, 8 and 9 for £15,100, all on mortgage. In August he paid his brother Christopher £4,500 for Lots 4 and 7. On 4 September 1889 he brought the whole 46 acres under Torrens title. He spent hundreds of pounds trying to fix the drainage so the land could be subdivided. He even thought about demolishing the Towers, and in March 1892 he tried, without success, to sell allotments. Then the 1890s depression caught him overextended, and by 1895 he had to hand his interest over to his siblings Frank, Christopher and Rose.
Trams, Subdivision and a North Sydney Butcher
The family waited for the economy to recover before selling. Between 1908 and 1910 the land went on the market as the Little Coogee Beach Estate and the Mundarrah Estate. Rose was the last Bennett to hold land there, and she sold her final interest in 1909. Randwick Council says Clovelly's subdivision "began in earnest in 1909". It adds that the progress association lobbied for a tram, arguing that 717 houses had been built within metres of the proposed route.
The 63 lots of the Little Coogee Beach Estate, Section 1, were auctioned on 19 March 1910. The papers reported every lot sold, for a total of £5,808 17s, but the Bennett researchers found that only 18 of those sales were ever completed. The lot with the Towers on it went to Walter Lumley, a North Sydney butcher, who also bought the lot next door.
The tram changed everything. In 1913 the government resumed most of the northern parts of the lots along the creek for the Clovelly tram loop along Donnellan Circuit. Lumley ended up with just under 1¼ acres, and the Towers sat alone on an "island" cut off by the resumptions. The only other building there was a small four-bedroom cottage he put up below it in 1914.
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Little Coogee Becomes Clovelly
With the tram coming, the locals wanted a name that wouldn't be confused with Coogee. Randwick Council says the Little Coogee Progress Association ran a competition in 1914. The winner was "Clovelly", after the fishing village in Devon, suggested by the association's president, Mr F. H. Howe. It beat "Eastbourne", which lives on as Eastbourne Avenue. Wikipedia, citing The Book of Sydney Suburbs, dates the change to 1913. It also says Howe took the name from a local estate called Clovelly owned by Sir John Robertson, which had itself been named after the Devon village.
Demolition and the Clovelly Hotel
According to the Bennett researchers, the Lumleys lived at the Towers until 1923, when it was demolished to make way for a hotel. Randwick Council and Wikipedia both give the demolition as 1926 (see below). Walter Lumley got a publican's licence in June 1925 for "a premises proposed to be erected in Burnie-street, Clovelly", and tenders went out a month later. The hotel was finished by March 1926. William Westphal took the lease and the licence in June 1926 but ran into money trouble and was gone by 1930. In 1955 Lumley handed the property to his five sons in equal shares, and in 1967 they sold it to Imelda Small, who was then the licensee. The family site notes that the leasehold last changed hands in 2018, sold by the Solotel Group.
What's There Today
Nothing of the house survives that I could find. The Clovelly Hotel, "the Cloey", stands on the site in Burnie Street, which began life as Dickson's and Campbell's driveway road. Randwick Council says the estate covered the land around Burnie Street overlooking the western end of Clovelly Bay, and that Mundarrah Street "honours this once grand part of Clovelly's heritage". Greville Street remembers the first buyer. With the house long gone, I couldn't find a heritage listing for it either. Council describes it, along with Cliffbrook at Gordons Bay, as part of the "hidden heritage" of the northern coastal suburbs.
The Bay Around It
A few other bits of Clovelly history are worth knowing, because the Towers looked out on all of them. Randwick Council says Shark Point, at the mouth of the bay, was a defence battery from 1879, part of the coastal forts built against fears of a Russian attack. During the Depression of 1929–33, relief works built the concrete platforms along the bay. The plan was to link them with a causeway across the mouth of the bay that cars could use, but a big storm in 1938 wrecked it and the project was abandoned. Its remains still show at low tide. The surf club dates from the first years of the twentieth century. On 5 December 1927 more than 30 lifesavers went out in the "Rescue off Schnapper Rocks" and saved four of five boys caught by the tide. The fifth, 19-year-old Thomas Wooldridge, drowned. Council also says that for a while the area was known as "Poverty Point", which is hard to believe given today's house prices.
Timeline
- Before 1788: Eora country. The bay is recorded as "Yarana".
- 13 June 1834: William Charles Greville buys the 20 acres around Little Coogee Bay at Crown auction.
- September 1853: Dr John Dickson buys the land for £1,000 and builds Rockbrook, a two-storey Gothic Revival stone house.
- 1859: Dickson is returning officer at Randwick's first municipal election.
- 1866: The mortgagee sells to John Campbell, who renames the house Aberburnie (Council gives 1860).
- October 1872: The bank sells to George Renwick, builder, of Redfern.
- August 1874: Samuel Bennett buys the estate.
- 1874–76: Towers, terraces and Gothic colonnades are added. The name Mundarrah appears.
- 1875–77: Bennett buys Lots 8, 9 and 6.
- 1877: Samuel and Eliza move in.
- 17 September 1878: The Illustrated Sydney News publishes the Collingridge woodcut.
- June 1878: Samuel dies of tetanus after hurting his finger on the stonework.
- 1879: The earliest known photograph is taken. Council dates the Shark Point defences from this year.
- 11 April 1884: Eliza's Good Friday staff picnic, with Sir Henry Parkes among the guests.
- 3 December 1886: Eliza dies at the Towers. The estate goes into trust for Rose Heaton.
- 23 March 1888: Alfred Bennett buys the estate at auction, and consolidates 46 acres by 1889.
- 1895: Depression. Alfred hands his interest to Frank, Christopher and Rose.
- 1908–10: The estate is subdivided and sold.
- 19 March 1910: The Little Coogee Beach Estate auction. Walter Lumley buys the Towers lot.
- 1913: The tram reaches Clovelly, and the resumptions leave the Towers on an "island".
- 1913 or 1914: Little Coogee is renamed Clovelly.
- 1923 or 1926: Mundarrah Towers is demolished.
- 1925–26: The Clovelly Hotel is licensed and built on the site.
- 1963: Sir John Henniker-Heaton dies and the Mundarrah Towers trust is finally distributed.
- 1967: The Lumley sons sell the hotel to licensee Imelda Small.
Where the Sources Disagree
- The doctor's name. Randwick Council's suburb page, Wikipedia and the Bennett family site say "Dickson". Council's Our Story Clovelly page says "Dr John Dixon".
- What Greville paid. Council and Wikipedia say £40. The Bennett site gives £44, or £2 4s an acre.
- Who built it and when. Council and Wikipedia say Mundarrah Towers "was built for Dr Dickson in the 1860s". The Bennett site has Dickson buying in 1853 and building Rockbrook in the 1850s, and has the towers added by Samuel Bennett in 1874–76. My own A–Z of homes list gives 1863.
- The ownership chain. Council's Our Story page has Dickson selling to Campbell in 1860 and Campbell selling to Renwick two years later. The Bennett site, working from the land titles, has a mortgagee sale to Campbell in 1866, a bank sale to Renwick in October 1872, and the sale to Bennett in August 1874.
- Demolition. Randwick Council (both pages) and the Clovelly News say 1926. The Bennett site says 1923, and so does my A–Z of homes list. The hotel was built in 1925–26, so the 1926 date may really be the hotel's opening year.
- The renaming of Clovelly. Council says the competition was held in 1914. Wikipedia says the name changed in 1913, and it adds that Howe took the name from Sir John Robertson's Clovelly estate.
- The surf club. Council dates it to 1907, Wikipedia to 1906.
- Governor Phillip's 1788 meeting. Some accounts place it at Little Coogee, but more recent research cited on the Bennett site puts it at Little Bay.
My Earlier Posts
- The A – Z Of Homes In Sydney – As I Find Them. Mundarrah Towers is listed under M.
- Clovelly – Watsons Bay – New South Wales
- Sydney Trams – From Horse Trams to Light Rail
Sources
- Bennetts of the Evening News, "Mundarrah Towers, Little Coogee (Clovelly)" and its timeline pages: overview, The Original Occupants, Crown Land Grant, Dr Dickson builds Rockbrook, John Campbell / Aberburnie, George Renwick, Samuel Bennett purchases, The towers are added, Expanding the estate, Samuel and Eliza move in, Why Mundarrah Towers?, Samuel dies, Eliza, Mistress of Mundarrah Towers, Eliza's death, The Mundarrah Towers Trust, Alfred Bennett, Alfred forced to sell, Disposal of the estate, 1910 sale, Walter Lumley, Demolition, The Clovelly Hotel.
- Randwick City Council, Our Story, "Clovelly 2031".
- Wikipedia, "Clovelly, New South Wales", citing Frances Pollon (comp.), The Book of Sydney Suburbs, Angus & Robertson, 1990, p. 64.
- Wikipedia, "John Henniker Heaton".
- Wikimedia Commons, for the images credited under each picture.