Wilberforce Park is a heritage-listed public parkland at 47 George Road, Wilberforce, City of Hawkesbury, New South Wales, Australia. It was first established in 1810 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie and surveyed by James Meehan in 1811. It is also known as Great Square, Reserved Square and the Recreation Ground. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 18 November 2011.
History
The town of Wilberforce lies immediately above the rich alluvial flood plain of the Upper Hawkesbury River. The natural food resources, both animal and vegetable, afforded by the soil and the water, had been attractive to Aboriginal people for millennia before European settlement in 1794 and subsequent years transformed the plain into intensive farms. The area available for land grants along what became known as Wilberforce Reach was constrained in 1804 by the creation of Phillip Common by Governor King. This well-wooded upland area of 6150 acres (2600 hectares) was available as rough grazing for the farmers on the cleared agricultural land beside the river.
When Governor Macquarie arrived in the colony in 1810, he was aware of the problems created by the propensity of the Hawkesbury to rise rapidly in flood and inundate the low-lying farms. By December 1810, the Governor was ready to implement a plan to create five new towns on higher ground along the Upper Hawkesbury and Lower Nepean, where allotments would be reserved for those farming on the plain, so that they might have a secure refuge for themselves, their families, their seed-corn and animals in time of flood. In all four Hawkesbury towns, Richmond, Windsor, Pitt Town and Wilberforce, the initial site was largely or wholly resumed from King's Commons.
Wilberforce is the only one of the five towns sited on the inland side of the river. The river frontage along Wilberforce Reach, close to the future town, had been fully occupied by the end of 1794 and the area along the north-eastern part of York Reach was being farmed by 1795. In Macquarie's time the greatest density of settlement on the inland side still lay to the south-west of the town, in the boot-shaped area within the great bend of the river along the Argyle, Windsor and Wilberforce Reaches. The site chosen for the town on 6 December 1810 was convenient for access to the river and its farms. Except for King Road, closest to the plain, it lay above the level of any anticipated flood. The elevated situation, however, paid the price of a steady slope. Geographers have assigned five types of slope to the parish of Wilberforce, varying from the level flood-plain along the river, through level uplands and "rolling" country to "rough" and "steep". The level uplands lie too far from the river farms to be a possible site for the town, but the penalty of being closer to the flood-plain was that most of the town was built on a slope of the second steepest category. No other Macquarie town is built on such a pronounced hillside.
The surveyor, James Meehan started his work of laying out Wilberforce on 5 January 1811 in a perfect symmetry of three rows, each containing five sections. The Great Square occupied the whole central rectangular section. When Governor Macquarie returned to the town on 11 January 1811, "the name (Wilberforce) being painted on a board was nailed on a high post and erected in the middle of the large square in presence of a great number of the most respectable settlers in this district".
The Square was defined by the new town streets, Macquarie to the north, George to the south and, on the short sides of the rectangle, Duke to the west and Church to the east. These new roads did not supersede the older track from the flood-plain up to the road to Kurrajong, which wound across the eastern sector of the new Square. Houses were built which encroached on George Road opposite the Square and the schoolmaster's house of the 1830s came very close to encroaching on the Square itself. Church Road had no building development at all until the very end of the nineteenth century, but the two allotments in Duke Road adjacent to the Square had been developed. On the land above the Square across Macquarie Road, the second Macquarie schoolhouse/chapel, built in 1819, dominated the scene until Edmund Blacket erected St John's Anglican Church in front of the Macquarie building in 1860. Bishop William Broughton had in 1849 attempted to have the proposed new church built in the middle of the Square instead, and he had some local support, but this development was not approved.