A field of flowers and steam at a festival of living history

Visitors were encouraged to discover Goulburn’s Living History as part of the  ‘Our Living History’  festival in Goulburn NSW. Held between 9 March and 12 March 2018 the Celebrate Goulburn Group co-ordinated the event. Organisers were encouraging residents and visitors to celebrate and enjoy the city’s heritage. The event was sponsored by the New South Wales Government through the Heritage Near Me Project.

 

This blogger joined the visitors and was out and about at two participants in the festival and took in a Georgian house museum and garden and an a museum highlighting the steam technology at a local pumping station.

 

Riversdale Homestead Museum and Garden

Visitors were encouraged to embrace the theme of ‘Unearthing Riversdale’ at the homestead at 2 Twynam Drive Goulburn.

 

The homestead is owned by the National Trust of NSW  and the website states:

Built in the late 1830s as a coaching inn, Riversdale later became home to the district surveyor, Edward Twynam and his family. Edward was appointed Chief Surveyor of NSW during the 1890s and his family occupied Riversdale for almost 100 years prior to its purchase by the National Trust.

The building is a Georgian style and now interpreted as a farm homestead.

 

 

Riversdale was variously known from 1840 as the Victoria Hotel, the Victoria Inn and the Prince Albert Inn. The building was located on the main road of the ‘Goulburn Plains’ and the site had been occupied by Matthew Healy with built a slab hut public house in the 1820s. Healy also built the kitchen and stable. Healy sold out to Anne and John Richards who ran an Inn.

 

The site of the town was moved to its current location and the Inn became unviable and the building became a boarding school and then a small farm. The building was called Riversdale in the 1860s by John Fulljames.

 

The Twynam family took up residence  in 1872, and the family occupied the residence until the National Trust purchased the property in 1967.

 

The Garden

The National Trust rejuvenated the house garden in 1967 in the Gertrude Jekyll style with plantings of herbaceous borders and silver and grey foliage plants. Many 19^th century plantings were added and included bearded iris, bulbs, peonies, aquilegia, delphiniums, lilies, lavender and old style roses.

 

Much of the garden was established by the Twynam family in 1872.  There are historic trees in the garden with plantings from 1820s and of particular interest is the avenue of English elms at the rear of the courtyard from the 1840s. The elms were planted by the inn owner Anne Richards, who also planted the medlar on the eastern lawn.

 

Goulburn Waterworks Steam Engine and Pumphouse

An interesting piece of steam driven technology is  the waterworks pumphouse on the Wollondilly River.

 

The waterworks pumphouse was built between 1883 and 1885 by Harbours and Rivers Board of the NSW Public Works Department on the Wollondilly River at Rocky Point. The supervising engineer and designer of the works for the pumphouse and  Marsden Weir was EO Moriarty.

 

 

Before the pumphouse was constructed Goulburn residents collected water in tanks or wells, or purchased water from a water carter.

 

The board installed a 1893 120 HP Appleby Bros steam engine to drive the water pumps.  The Appleby beam engine is a typical compound condensing steam engine based on an Arthur Woolf design and 1804 patent. The pumphouse and steam engine was operational in 1886. The engine was driven by two Lancashire/Gallaway boilers in the boiler house.

 

 

The pumphouse was designed the New South Wales colonial architects and built in a Victorian Georgian style. It is built of brick laid in  a Flemish bond pattern. The Waterworks states

It is known as a beam engine because of the large overhead rocking beam that transmits motion from the pistons to the cranks.

 

Waterworks beam steam engines, according to Bruce Macdonald (manager, 1974), were not common in Australia with the Goulburn engine only one of ten in Australia, all in New South Wales. The others were located in Sydney, Newcastle, Wagga Wagga, Albury and Bathurst.  The Goulburn steam engine, according to the Australian Institution of Engineers, is the only intact example in Australia.

 

A northern annex to the pumphouse building was built in 1897 to house a secondary steam pump, with additions in the late 1920s. The southern annex was built in 1918 to house the first electric pumps which operated in tandem with the steam pumps until 1932.

 

The complex was managed by Goulburn City Council from 1887 to 1922. The facility supplied water to the town until 1977 when the waterworks closed.

 

The waterworks is a rare example in Australia of a complete steam powered municipal water supply left in its original location. The facility is of national scientific and technical significance.