Gunnawarra Homestead is a heritage-listed homestead at Gunnawarra Road, Gunnawarra, Tablelands Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1878 to 1908. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.
History
Gunnawarra is a pastoral property first occupied by Europeans in 1865 and was an outlying part of the Valley of Lagoons run on the Upper Burdekin River, established in 1863.
Ludwig Leichhardt discovered and named the Valley of Lagoons in 1845. George Dalrymple was appointed the first Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Kennedy district in 1861. He had arrived in Australia in the late 1850s, hoping to take up land on the Darling Downs. However, this proved unsuccessful and he travelled north. He chose a well-watered block in the Valley of Lagoons and set up a partnership with brothers Arthur and Walter Scott and Robert Herbert in 1863. In 1864 Dalrymple and Arthur Scott travelled to the area and blazed a trail from what was to be the port of Cardwell to the Valley of Lagoons. The Scott brothers ran the property and soon afterwards Dalrymple relinquished his interest in the run to enter politics.
Gunnawarra was originally a run of 100 square miles and was occupied from 10 April 1865. Following the Pastoral Leases Act of 1869, the run was consolidated and included the blocks of Gunnawarra, Barcoo 1, 2 and 3, Froyle, Tempe, Tempe North, Tempe West, Forrest and Borderland. It then covered an area of 555 square miles and was leased by the partnership of Dangar, Bell, Bell and Ewan. Other outlying blocks of the Valley of Lagoons were formed as the stations of Cashmere and Greenvale. In 1878 the station appeared in the Post Office Directory as "Gunniawarra", said to mean "little house". Later the name was amended to Gunna-Warra and then Gunnawarra in 1890. The first buildings erected at Gunnawarra were of slab construction and included a saddle shed and adjoining quarters. The earliest section of the homestead building was constructed in 1878 and is located on Bell's Creek, a tributary of the Herbert River. Jack Broad, who also built Kirrama homestead, constructed it of slabs with locally cut cypress pine for the uprights and rafters; stringy bark was carted from over twenty miles away for the shingles and hand adzed slabs. The floor was of rammed antbed.
Gunnawarra was divided into two sections following the Crown Lands Act of 1884, becoming Gunnawarra and Forrest. James Ewan purchased Gunnawarra at auction in September 1887. He held it until his death over twenty years later, when it passed to his wife and trustees. On 9 March 1904, it was sold to a partnership of the three Atkinson brothers, Henry John Atkinson of Greenvale, Robert James Atkinson of Cashmere and Thomas Joseph Good Atkinson of Kangaroo Hills.
In 1862 their parents, James and Kate Atkinson, were part of a small group of prospective settlers who arrived in the area. They had previous pastoral experience in Victoria and took up land at Mount Surprise in partnership with Ezra Firth. After a few years, the partnership was dissolved and in 1870 Atkinson took up Farnham station at the site of Ingham. In 1880 he purchased Wairuna and about from the Valley of Lagoons as Abergowrie. Thomas Atkinson married in 1901 and in 1904 brought his wife, Jessie Glennie Godschall, known as Glen, and their baby daughter to live at Gunnawarra. In 1908 they added a bedroom wing of tongue and groove cedar to the house and clad the shingled roof with corrugated iron. In 1913, the buildings of the property were reported to be a house, kitchen, outbuildings, stockyard, horse and milking yards, assessed at in value.