History of convict colonial settlement from the beginnings of the First Fleet in 1788, and other significant parts of Old Sydney Town's heritage.
Bishopscourt, tucked on Greenoaks Avenue at Darling Point, didn’t begin as an archbishop’s pile. It started as Percyville — a two-storey sandstone cottage built about 1841 for ironmonger Thomas Woolley. In 1845–46 Thomas Sutcliffe Mort leased then bought the cottage and its roughly 2.8-hectare estate. With architect John Frederick Hilly he stretched it into a gentleman’s residence and renamed it Greenoaks.
The house people still argue about in heritage circles is Edmund Blacket’s work. From 1859 Blacket — Mort’s friend and the colony’s leading Gothic Revival architect — added the academic Gothic fabric: picture gallery, porte-cochère, the whole romantic silhouette. Mort was wool, shipping, Mort’s Dock, refrigeration, AMP — and a church patron who gave land for nearby St Mark’s. From 1849 Michael Guilfoyle shaped the sloping gardens with plants from his Exotic Nursery at Double Bay; by the 1860s the grounds were being called a model private garden for NSW.
After later private ownership and subdivision, the Anglican Diocese of Sydney bought the house in 1910–11 as the Archbishop’s official residence and renamed it Bishopscourt. Leslie Wilkinson remodelled parts in 1935. It’s State Heritage listed. The Diocese sold it in late 2015; since then it’s been in private hands again — Gothic harbour mansion, no longer a working episcopal HQ.