Long before Canberra became the National Capital, the land was home to native Aboriginal people. With the influx of European settlers, Yarralumla evolved from open land into farm land and eventually into today's National Capital. The following is a brief description of this process.
Aboriginal people lived for thousands of years in the Canberra region, moving across the plains and into the mountain valleys in small groups to hunt and camp. They lived on kangaroos and small marsupials, caught fish, eels, yabbies and water birds, ate tubers of the yam daisy and other plants and travelled in summer to the mountains west of the Murrumbidgee River to feast on the Bogong Moth. In winter, they wore cloaks made from possum skins for warmth and sought shelter in warm and sunny places along the banks of rivers and among rock formations.
In the Gudgenby Valley and at Yankee Hat and Rendezvous Creek, Aborigines painted the animals they hunted on the sheltered sides of granite boulders. In the bed of the Ginninderra and Tuggeranong Creeks and at the top of Gibraltar Falls they left evidence of their existence in axe grinding grooves; in Gungahlin they dug for red ochre; at Lanyon they cut canoes out of the bark of trees that can still be seen, while along the banks of the Murrumbidgee and Molonglo Rivers and their tributaries there are hundreds of stone tool scatters, the remains of Aboriginal sites from time immemorial.
Yet within 80 years of European settlement, the Aborigines had been dispersed; killed by exotic diseases to which they had no immunity and the despoliation of their ancient hunting grounds by the arrival of the settlers' sheep and cattle.
(right) Elmsall Inn, which was the Canberra district's first licensed premises in 1838. It is now a private home.
The first Europeans to visit the area arrived in 1820. They came in search of the Murrumbidgee River which they failed to find but several returned in autumn of 1820 with an Aboriginal guide who led them to the river near Pine island at Tuggeranong.
The news was well received in Sydney where Governor Lachlan Macquarie was anxious to extend the limits of European settlement, provided permanent water could be found to sustain the settlers. Two further expeditions traversed the area and were quickly followed by overseers and assigned convicts who came south with sheep and cattle to establish stock stations on the newly discovered Limestone Plains.
Joshua Moore's servants arrived in late 1824 from Baw Baw north of Goulburn, walking via the Yass Plains across Gungahlin and following Sullivan's Creek to its junction with the Molonglo River below Black Mountain. There, on high ground, they cleared a site for the first Europeans habitation in the district.
In 1825, James Ainslie became their neighbour after he arrived with 700 sheep from Bathurst to establish Duntroon station for the Sydney merchant, Robert Campbell. others followed: George Thomas Palmer had 14 men at Ginninderra in 1826 and at Yarralumla, James Taylor was pasturing sheep without authority. The census of 1828 reveals that there were 60 men employed on the Canberry, Duntroon, Ginninderra, Jerrabomberra, Tuggeranong and Queanbeyan stock stations. Most were assigned convicts.
The Lanyon station was established by John Lanyon and his partner James Wright in 1834 when they constructed huts near the Murrumbidgee below the site of the present homestead, planted wheat, an orchard and vegetables and began to stock the property with sheep. A four year drought caused financial problems for Wright who was forced to sell Lanyon to Andrew Cunningham in 1849. His descendants retained the property until 1926.
James Wright moved across the river to Cuppacumbalong station but subsequently sold it to Leopold de Salis in 1856. De Sails, of Swiss origin, planted the Lombardy poplars that can still be seen by the river at Tharwa. De Salis was elected to the NSW Parliament and was quite wealthy until almost ruined by the depression of the 1890's when he was forced to sell Cuppacumbalong. He moved to Lambrigg to live with his daughter, Nina, and her husband, William Farrer, who successfully developed rust resistant strains of wheat on experimental plots beside the Murrumbidgee River. His success was of great benefit to the Australian wheat industry. Farrer died in 1906 and is buried with his wife in a grave, on a hill behind the homestead, which has been declared a national monument.
(below) Overseer's cottage, Yarralumla, 1910, two years before the sheep station was resumed by the Commonwealth. Left to right, Roy and Elsie Vest, Mrs and Mr Richard Vest, Darcy, Doug and Harry Vest (foreground) holding the horse.
When the Commonwealth acquired the Yarralumla property in 1912 for construction of the Federal Capital it covered 40,00 acres (18,000ha). The Commonwealth paid nearly 150,000 pounds - a huge sum of money - to purchase it. It even paid compensation for the number of trees that had been ringbarked, because in those days killing trees to provide more pasture for stock was seen to be an 'improvement' to a property.
A brickworks was established on part of the Yarralumla station for construction of the city and a railway line was built to transport the bricks to the Hotel Canberra and the provisional Parliament House sites.
The large Yarralumla woolshed, built in 1904, still stands. It remained in use for the next 50 years because much of the property was leased out to farmers and graziers until required for urban development, which began in the Woden Valley in 1963.
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