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Introduction

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It was built on a grant of land to Edward Cox made at the beginning of 1810, when Edward was only four years old.  So his father used The Cottage and Edward’s elder brothers, George and Henry, occupied it.  When George married in 1822, he lived there with his bride, Elizabeth Bell, whose brother Archibald discovered Bells Line of Road over the Mountains in the following year.  George and Elizabeth’s first two children were born at The Cottage.  Henry seems to have been there in the early years of his marriage to Frances Mackenzie, the niece of John Piper of Henrietta Villa

23. John Piper’s Henrietta VillaLycett 1825

Three Cox sons, William, Henry and Edgar, married into the Piper family.  They must all have been aware that both The Cottage at Mulgoa and Clarendon itself presented some contrasts with Henrietta Villa.  The legal owner of The Cottage, Edward, finally settled there only on his marriage to Jane Brooks in 1827 and their first four children were born there

24. The Cottage, Mulgoa, 1810-1811,Photograph 1976.

The bride’s father had just built a splendid new dining-room at the family home, Denham Court

25. Denham Court, dining-room wing 1827, two-storey Verge 1832-1833

though John Verge had not yet created the two-storey central portion of the homestead.  Contrasts were building up in the 1820s between the properties owned by the Coxes and those owned by their in-laws.

Old William Cox was unmoved.  In 1822 he bought a simple cottage in Windsor, near St Matthew’s, which he named Claremont and progressively extended it and embellished it with a dining-room like Clarendon.  After 1828 it was occupied by the local solicitor, Francis Beddek, who was the husband of Cox’s second wife’s sister and the final improvements were made in the 1830s at Cox’s expense

26. Claremont, WindsorPhotograph 1978

The final appearance of Claremont made it very compatible with William Cox’s Clarendon and The Cottage.

While old William Cox was doing various extensions to Claremont, he was also building a new house nearby in Windsor for his own use.  This time the land, on a fine elevated site near St Matthew’s Anglican church, had been granted to another son, Henry, back in 1804.  William, who was now in his 60s, chose this time to build on two storeys, as his eldest son was doing, more flamboyantly, at just the same time.  The patriarch’s brick house, called Fairfield, was no larger than Clarendon, but was more ambitious,  with five rooms downstairs (a dining-room, drawing room, master bedroom with dressing room and a study) and four bedrooms with two dressing-rooms upstairs. 11   It seems to have been completed in 1828, when Cox’s last child, his twelfth, was born there.  I have not been able to locate an image of the original Fairfield.  Its external fabric survives in some measure, but the house has been swallowed up beside a late Victorian mansion built by a subsequent owner, who also put a high water-tower on top of the Cox section

27. Fairfield, Windsor, c.1828, with 1880s mansion on leftPhotograph 1996 by Jan Barkley-Jack

It is, however, clear that if Clarendon was Cox’s Elizabeth Farm, Fairfield was not his Camden Park. William Cox senior died at Fairfield in 1837 and his eleventh child, Alfred, lived in the house for about fifteen years.  Alfred and his wife then went off round the world and settled in New Zealand.

Alfred’s elder brothers meanwhile adopted a different style, as they prospered, had large families and built new houses.  William junior, the eldest son, was naturally enough the first to have a place of his own, but he and his Piper wife lived initially in 1814 and 1815 in a rented house in Richmond, formerly owned by the Luttrell family.  Edward Luttrell was a medical man become pastoralist.  He built a modest brick house, which survives after a fashion

28. Hobartville, Luttrell house, pre-1814Photograph 2008

William junior bought the property in 1816 and all his ten children were born there.  Only after the birth of the tenth did he and his wife embark on a new Hobartville adjacent to the Luttrell house.

The new Hobartville, built in 1827, is a dramatic change in Cox style on the Hawkesbury.  It is a spacious two-storey brick villa, with two contrasting faces, much grander than his father’s Fairfield.  Its south side is austere, with an old-fashioned Doric portico.

29. Hobartville, Richmond, 1828front elevation, by Hardy Wilson

But on the north, overlooking the flood-plain paddocks down to the river, Hobartville has the most smiling face in the entire valley, with its great bay window projecting the drawing-room into the garden, comparable to Denholm Court’s dining-room built in the same year

30. Hobartville, 1828, garden frontPhotograph 1986

The north front of Hobartville was perched above the family’s rich grazing lands

31. Hobartville, Richmond, 1828, garden frontPhotograph 2010

Very pleasingly, a symbol of the Cox family togetherness survives in the garden, a brick  dunny with two high seats, one for Henry, the other for Elizabeth, with a baby one beside Mama, while on each wing there are two low seats for other children

32. Hobartville, 7-seat dunnyPhotograph 2008

The maximum simultaneous capacity was seven Coxes.

Meanwhile William junior’s younger brothers had been reshaping the Mulgoa Valley.  George, Henry and Edward, all moved on from The Cottage to build homes of their own in their own image.  Henry built Glenmore in 1824, naming it after the Scottish home of his Mackenzie bride.  It is a stone house, originally L-shaped with some attic rooms

33. Glenmore, Mulgoa, 1824 Photograph 1984

The north wing, on the right, is Henry’s.  It can be seen more clearly on an aerial photograph

34. Glenmore, Mulgoa, 1824 south (left) wing added in 1850sAerial photograph, 1984

James Broadbent calls it ‘sober, insular and introspective’. 12

 Edward, the youngest of the three Mulgoa Coxes, lived in The Cottage until he and Jane had had their full quota of eight children, but around the birth of the last child, they engaged Mortimer Lewis to design a new two-storey stone house for them on an elevated site.  Because of the Depression of the 1840s the second storey was never built, but the single-storey Fernhill is still on an ostentatious scale

35. Fernhill, Mulgoa, 1838-1845 Photograph 1979

The bow of the drawing room is more than 7 metres across.  This photograph of a tall, young James Broadbent beside the window shutters on the east front which I took thirty years ago gives an impression of the unsubtle grandeur of Fernhill

36. Fernhill, James Broadbent at east front Photograph 1979

The stonework is of high quality.  This is the east entrance, with the slightly misleading date 1842 on the lintel

37. Fernhill, Mulgoa, east entry, 1842 stonePhotograph 1979

And the cellar entry has a bravura curve of stone blocks

38. Fernhill, Mulgoa, 1842, cellar entryPhotograph 1979

far more flamboyant than the cellar entry of 1828 at Hobartville

39. Hobartville, 1828, cellar entrancePhotograph 1977

and in a different world from Evans’ 1810 cellar beside Clarendon house

40. Evans’ house, cellar entry, c.1810Photograph 2005

I jumped to Edward, leaving George Cox aside.  George’s new Mulgoa house was called Winbourne, a version of Wimborne in Dorset, where his grandfather had lived.  Originally single-storey in 1824, it was expanded upwards into a two-storey mansion around 1840, by which time George and his Elizabeth had had ten of their twelve children.

Conrad Martens made a sketch of the house just after the second storey was completed

41. Winbourne, Conrad Martens 1840

Winbourne had verandahs wrapping around three sides on the house on both levels, as can be seen more clearly on this 1920 photograph

42. WinbournePhotograph 1920

Nothing now remains of the house, but it is instructive to compare the earlier images of Winbourne with the appearance of Clarendon in Tasmania in 1966, when its grandiloquent portico had been removed

. 
There are close generic similarities, although the Mulgoa house is in stone and the Tasmanian in brick.  The National Trust guide-book to Clarendon published in 1974 said that the removal of the portico ‘has exposed the pleasing proportions of the fenestration and left the building free from pretentiousness, … establishing its importance by the greatness of its scale’. 13   Clive Lucas, who restored your portico in 1974, may not entirely concur with this judgment on Clarendon, but he might agree with it when applied to Winbourne. 

The two brothers, James and George, five years apart in age, were by the 1840s living in a style never entertained by their father.  The generational shift took different forms for the five relevant sons, but in New South Wales it transformed not only the fringe of Richmond town, but the whole Mulgoa Valley.  When Baron Charles von Hügel visited the Mulgoa area in 1834, he remarked that it was also known as Cox’s Vale and that ‘the whole valley … is taken up by [the Cox] family’. The valley, von Hügel noted, is now ‘filled with many and various buildings, most of them tasteful’ and all of them built by Coxes. 14  

‘Most of them tasteful’: I doubt if William Cox the patriarch could have wished for more.

 

11. Anon., Fairfield House, pamphlet, n.d.

12. Broadbent, The Australian Colonial House, 151.

13. National Trust Historical Committee, Clarendon: A Brief History, National Trust of Australia (Tasmania), 1974, [4].

14. Baron Charles von Hügel, New Holland Journal, November 1833-October 1834, ed, Dymphna Clark, Miegunyah Press, Carlton 1994, 264.

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Introduction