Gold Creek Homestead is a 140-year-old stone and brick building located off Gungahlin Drive in Ngunnawal a north-western suburb of Canberra, Australia. It is adjacent to the Grove Ngunnawal retirement village currently being developed by Lend Lease.
The Gold Creek Homestead Complex referred to a group of four buildings including the 697m2 homestead, a stone and timber cottage, a buggy shed and an entertainment and function centre (formerly a machinery shed). The Gold Creek Homestead Site was a 41-hectare parcel of land, specifically Block 1 and 2, Section 23 Ngunnawal upon which the aforementioned complex was situated.
Gold Creek Homestead was at one time at the centre of 'Gold Creek' a sprawling 1,594 hectare (3,940 acre) rural property, the largest in the Ginninderra district. Portions of the former property are or will be occupied by parts of the suburbs of Ngunnawal, Nicholls, Harcourt Hill, Moncrieff, Casey, Kinlyside and Taylor as well as large parcels of land in NSW adjacent to the village of Hall. the site then became abandoned for a little while, leaving teenagers to explore it during the night. it was then put up for sale after it was declined to be heritage listed.
History
Rolfe family
In 1849 Anthony Rolfe, an English farm labourer, arrived in Australia from Oxborough, Norfolk, England with his wife and five children. The family migrated to the new colonies under one of the Bounty schemes subsidised to the British Government and was part of the wave of free settlers to follow the convict era.
After working for 10 years as a tenant farmer at Joseph Kaye's Springbank rural property, Anthony established his own property Tea Gardens, on 130-hectare (320 acre) of land in 1857. The remnants of that homestead is located in present-day Ngunnawal near Ginninderra Creek which is now part of the Gungahlin Lakes Golf Course.
Anthony's second eldest son Edmund Rolfe spent his early working life as a teamster, transporting building materials e.g. sandstone, wool, wheat and even drinking water from and to as far afield as Camden and Braidwood. He was the principal transport contractor for the tower reconstruction work on St John the Baptist Church (in present-day Reid).
Edmund Rolfe's first wife Margaret (née Logue) died during childbirth in 1867 and he later married Margaret O'Keefe. Edmund Rolfe fathered 14 children – Bryan (b. 1862), Maria (b. 1864), Mary (b. 1865), Catherine (b. 1867), Anthony (b. 1868), William (b. 1869), Alice (b. 1871), Bridget (b. 1873), Margaret (b. 1874), James (b. 1876), Patrick (b. 1878), Gertrude (b. 1880), John (b. 1882) and Edmund George(b. 1884).
Anthony Rolfe financed the initial purchase of of land which abuts the present-day Gold Creek Homestead Site and transferred the land title as part of a much larger parcel to his son Edmund in 1872. During its first few decades Gold Creek was devoted to cropping predominantly wheat and later the Rolfes diversified into merino sheep and later still beef cattle
The Rolfes were major beneficiaries of the depression of the 1890s. Rising mortgage rates left many farmers servicing bank loans at rates of seven, eight and even ten per cent. With their previous mortgages paid out, the Rolfes were better placed than most. With five fit young men carrying out a program of cropping, animal husbandry and sheep grazing activities, the property remained profitable while neighbouring farms floundered. When one of the Rolfes' long-time neighbours forfeited on their mortgage payments in 1897, they snapped up the land.
The superior quality of the Gold Creek livestock was underlined by a purchase concluded in December 1903. Mr E. Hudson, the manager of the Duntroon estate, paid £2100 for 2100 merinos and 900 lambs. They used the cash to secure mortgages on further land purchases. Over a period of several years, he snapped up at foreclosure sales various parcels of land, extending his family's land holdings. By 1907 the Rolfes presided over a rural property in size, the largest in the Ginninderra district.
Edmund Rolfe was very active in local politics in the two decades prior to the Federation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. He served for a number of years as the treasurer and later the vice-president of the Ginninderra Protection Union, the forerunner to the Protectionist party. He was also a committee member of the Ginninderra Agricultural Show, the forerunner to Canberra's Royal National Capital Agricultural Show.
The Rolfes also hosted a number of balls and dances at Gold Creek in support of St Benedicts, a Catholic Girls School in Queanbeyan. Edmund Rolfe was a fundraiser for Ginninderra St Francis Church and its replacement, Hall's St Xaviers Church.