Macquarie Field House is a heritage-listed former farm, private school and homestead and now residence at Quarter Sessions Road, Macquarie Fields, City of Campbelltown, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by James Meehan (first house, barn), James Hume (attrib: second and current house) and built from 1810 to 1843 by James Meehan (first house); Mr Burns (woodwork in second, current house). It is also known as Macquarie Field House and the Meehan remains; Macquariefield, Macquarie Fields and Macquarie Field. The property is privately owned. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999.
History
An initial 1809 grant of to James Meehan had expanded to ( of which were cleared) by 1820, in 1826, in 1877, approximately were in NSW Government ownership by 1944, the remaining area of open space today is not stated nor analysed. The current SHR curtilage area, plus land proposed in the application to be community open space, totals approximately .
Meehan (1774-1826) was a middle-class Catholic Irishman whose flirtation with the Society of United Irishmen in 1796-8 led to his conviction as a member of a proscribed organisation, although he did not take part in the actual uprising (the 'Irish Rebellion') of 1798. As a result, the 25-year-old school teacher and surveyor arrived in Sydney in February 1800 on the convict ship "Friendship" to serve a life sentence. Because of his valuable experience as a surveyor in Ireland, Meehan was soon assigned to the Surveyor-General of the colony, at first Augustus Alt, but after 1801, Charles Grimes. Meehan was the only one of four assistant surveyors with qualifications, so from the start his competence and diligence earned him uncommon freedoms and by 1803 he had done survey work not only on Sydney's Cumberland Plain but as far afield as the Hunter, Port Phillip and Van Diemen's Land. In 1805 he received a conditional pardon and was acting as chief surveyor of NSW in Grimes' absence. Meehan had, while still a convict, received a land grant of 100 acres in the Field of Mars in 1803.
By 1802 he had been on two major expeditions and, by 1806, had been conditionally pardoned. He continued to work on departmental duties, and, from difficult beginnings, had a remarkable rise to be an important colonial surveyor, explorer and settler, surveying and mapping large areas of the country. The early towns of Sydney, Parramatta, Bathurst, Port Macquarie and Hobart were all explored, laid out and measured by Meehan. A statue of him was commissioned by the Land & Property Management Authority to commemorate Meehan's close collaboration with NSW Public Works Heritage Services and the Government Architect's Office. This new statue of Meehan was placed on the south-east corner of the former Lands Department Building in November 2010 to commemorate Meehan's achievements.
In 1806 Meehan began living with English convict, Ruth Goodaire, in a leased town house. Their son Thomas was born in 1808 and daughter Mary in 1810. While senior surveyor, Meehan received in Bankstown in 1808 and in June and August 1809 two grants in Minto totalling straddling Bunbury Curran Creek. He gave up his Field of Mars grant, but when Governor Macquarie arrived in 1810 and regularised most of the grants made in the difficult preceding years, Meehan's Minto holdings were increased by the addition of several adjacent farms, surrendered by their previous grantees, making an integrated estate of in 1810. It was a provision of Macquarie's grant and regrant of 1810 that Meehan must cultivate at Minto by 1815 and, although there are few details, there is no doubt that Meehan developed the estate while continuing as a busy government surveyor until 1822. He acquired more adjacent land and in October 1816 Macquarie issued a further consolidating grant for a "Macquariefield" which now embraced .
It is not known how soon (after 1809) Meehan began to erect substantial buildings. Huts would, however, have been required for stockmen from the beginning and certainly by 1814 when he was supplying the government with of meat, the same as his neighbours Charles Throsby and William Redfern. In the first years much of the acreage remained uncleared and uncultivated. There was certainly some kind of accommodation on the estate by 1811, when the Governor directed people with promises of land in Airds to 'attend at Mr Meehan's Farm on the Bunbury Curran Creek' to meet the surveyor. The brick barn is plausibly dated to between 1814 and 1816. The question is open whether the main house was built before or after the barn and whether the house was built in stages. At all events, it was complete when Rev. Thomas Reddell converted it into a school in 1821.