Gwambygine Homestead is one of the earliest colonial buildings still remaining in Western Australia. Until the death in 1998 of the last occupant, Merton Clifton, the house had the reputation of being the oldest continually occupied house in the state.
Early history
Indigenous people were known to have frequented Gwambygine and the pool for many thousands of years before European settlement. The fertile York district was explored by Ensign Robert Dale in August 1830. Dale found the cave with Aboriginal markings which gave its name to Cave Hill, part of the original Gwambygine land grant. A large corroboree was recorded there in 1841. Today there are no registered Aboriginal sites within the Gwambygine farm property, but the Avon River and the Pool do have mythological significance. In 1861, an epidemic of measles in the Swan River Colony reduced the Aboriginal population, some of whom had worked at Gwambygine Farm.
Gwambygine Estate is one of the earliest rural Land Grants of the Colony in Western Australia. The Reverend John Burdett Wittenoom (1788–1855), was the Colonial Chaplain to the new British Colony, founded by Lieutenant Governor James Stirling in 1829. The British feared that the French would claim the western part of Australia, prompting them to establish this colony.
Reverend Wittenoom saw the Swan River Colony as an opportunity for his sons to become owners of land and for him to carve out a new career. Wittenoom's first wife, Mary Teasdale whom he married in 1815, had died in England in 1824 following the death of their 5-year-old son Edward. Their deaths prompted John Burdett Wittenoom's decision to move to Swan River. At the age of 42, accompanied by his sister Eliza and four sons John, Henry, Frederick and Charles, Wittenoom left England on 14 August 1829 on the Wanstead, a barque bound for the Swan River and Tasmania.
In 1830 Wittenoom took up Location Z, on the bank of the Avon River south of the York townsite. In 1835 the 5,000 acres were surveyed. The name Gwambygine, bestowed by the Wittenooms, comes from the indigenous Noongar (Ballardong) name of the deep permanent pool in the Avon River. This pool influenced the location of the Homestead, and it survives today behind the Homestead on the eastern side. The local Aborigines named the area around the pool Gwarbanginning. This is believed to mean 'a good place to stay' and so it has proved for the three main families who have lived here, the Wittenooms, Hicks and Cliftons. In colonial times the pool was slightly brackish, fine for stock. Most drinking water was obtained from springs or rainwater.
In 1836 the teenage sons of Reverend John Burdett Wittenoom, together with Thomas Carter an early settler from Norfolk, started building the first sections of the house. They constructed the mud house on the same principles Carter had seen used in England. Initially, Carter worked on the property undertaking improvement duties for the Reverend Wittenoom, and farmed wheat and sheep. The boys' Aunt Eliza, who had emigrated with her brother, kept house for the boys through the late 1830s and early 1840s and was joined by her 68-year-old mother Elizabeth in 1839. Elizabeth died on the property in 1845 at the age of 74 and was buried in the old York cemetery.
The Reverend John Burdett Wittenoom's second marriage in 1839 to Mary Helms produced two daughters, Mary Eliza and Augusta Henrietta, and a son, John Burdett who died at the age of two years. Reverend Wittenoom died on 23 January 1855 at the age of 66 years, a distinguished and much renowned clergyman and prominent member of the Swan River Colonial community. Apart from being the first Colonial Chaplain to the civil establishment of the colony, and ministering to scattered congregations around the Colony, Reverend Wittenoom was also responsible for the establishment of St. George's Church, the new Church in Perth, completed in 1845.