Vaucluse House: preserving a grand harbourside estate

Located on the traditional Country of Gadigal and Birrabirragal people, Vaucluse House is a rare surviving 19th-century harbourside estate that retains much of its original setting, including its grounds and harbour frontage. It is a complex layered site that was built in several phases over a period of many decades, with the landscape and buildings preserving elements of First Nations occupation and that of successive owners of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Interestingly, the initial preservation of the site resulted not from its association with prominent past owner William Charles Wentworth or a recognition of its significant heritage values, but from a campaign to bring foreshore land (Vaucluse Bay) into public ownership. Opening in stages from 1911, Vaucluse House is Australia’s first publicly owned house museum.

First Nations connections

Although most of the earlier, much larger Vaucluse estate is now covered with houses, the site has retained significant aspects of its pre-contact landscape such as creeks, bays, rocky shores, creek valleys, springs and sandstone outcrops in Nielsen Park, Vaucluse Park and Parsley Bay Reserve and within some larger house blocks in Vaucluse. Many Aboriginal heritage sites have been preserved in this broader area and include living places within rock shelters and in the open (such as middens), charcoal drawings and stencils in rock shelters, rock engravings on exposed sandstone platforms and grooves for the sharpening of stone implements such as axes.¹

Colonial occupation

Henry Browne Hayes

In August 1803, 105 acres (42 hectares) on this site was bought by Henry Browne Hayes (1762–1832), a transported Irish knight who had been convicted of kidnapping an heiress. By April 1805 a stone cottage orné (‘decorated cottage’) was being constructed in a woodland valley on the east side of the creek. Heavily modified, it survives today as the drawing, little tea and dining rooms within the main house.

Wentworth family

20th century

Nielsen-Vaucluse Park Trust

The Nielsen-Vaucluse Park Trust was formed to care for the property, opening first the gardens in 1911, and then the house in 1915 as a ‘Museum of Australian Historical Objects’. At this time the gardens developed a municipal character, with bitumen and, later, concrete paths laid and decorative plantings added. The entry gate piers were relocated to their current location to form the main entrance. Most significantly, a general ‘tidying up’ began. This involved demolishing structures, including the outlying workers’ cottages and picturesque convict barracks; ‘completing’ the rooftop crenellations and creating a flat roof open to visitors; lining the creek with stone; and installing stone-edged garden beds across the grounds.

Museums of History NSW

In 1980, Vaucluse House became one of the first properties to be managed by the newly established Historic Houses Trust of NSW (HHT), now part of Museums of History NSW. The HHT set about a vigorous program of reinterpretation and conservation of the site – including the grounds, buildings and interiors – and its collection to reflect Wentworth family occupancy in the years 1827–53 and 1861–62.

Today, MHNSW recognises the 19th- and 20th-century histories of the site while continuing to develop its interpretation to include all periods of occupation, including First Nations histories, and acknowledging that Vaucluse House has now been a museum for longer than it served as a private residence.