Graham Lodge is a heritage-listed former homestead, function centre and leagues club at Pleasant Way, Nowra, City of Shoalhaven, New South Wales, Australia. It was built from 1860 to 1861 by stonemason Charles Moore and carpenter Willet Burry. It was also known as Greenhills and Warragee during its homestead era, as Prague Lodge while it was a function centre, and later as the now-defunct Nowra Bomaderry Leagues Club. The property is owned by Shoalhaven City Council. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 4 June 2004.
History
Historical context for Graham Lodge
Aboriginal people are understood to have inhabited the Shoalhaven region for at least 21,000 years. Sue Wesson's atlas (2000) identified the language spoken by Aboriginal groups in the Shoalhaven as Tharawal, suggesting they would have identified with the Wodi Wodi people, who formed part of the Yuin linguistic group.
Europeans were slow to settle the Shoalhaven area because of sand and surf obstructing the opening of the river, first noted by George Bass in 1797. The first documented European visitors to the region were Lieutenant Kent and G. Evans, who anchored their boat at Jervis Bay in 1805 and walked to the Shoalhaven, some 30 kilometres to the south, where they found a small boat (presumably made by Aboriginal people) and used it to explore the river. From 1811 cedar-cutters began transporting wood from the Shoalhaven to Sydney by boat but encountered resistance from local Aboriginal people, on whom they were reported to have had "corrupting influence".
Several landholdings along the Shoalhaven were granted for agricultural and pastoral estates in the early nineteenth century. By 1822 when Alexander Berry settled as the first documented settler in the region, the cedar-cutters no longer frequented the area "as the natives either killed all the sawyers or forced them away". Berry left detailed notes about individual Aboriginal people he encountered and customs he observed, including comments on five clans associated with the lower Shoalhaven: the Shoalhaven, the Numba, the Broughton Creek, the Woregy and the Murroo. Berry estimated the population of these clans for the Census of 1834 at 150 people, however these numbers would have already been affected by disease and displacement. According to Goulding and Schell (2002, 20) Berry's estate: 'relied enormously on Aboriginal labour... Showing Berry where to locate his farm, cutting roads, (enabling Berry to bring cattle form Illawarra), conveying stores up the hill to his house, undertaking domestic chores, crewing his vessel and assisting in bringing down cattle from Sydney.'
In 1843 William Graham's early home at Greenhills was noted as the only residence in the vicinity of present-day Nowra. By 1856 Greenhills supported five stores, at least three hotels, a butcher and slaughtering business, a post office, school, church and private burial ground. The government town of Nowra was surveyed in the 1850s but only became the main settlement in the area after 1870 when a series of floods encouraged a general shift away from the riverside settlements. The construction of a bridge across the Shoalhaven in 1881 brought the main road into the district near to the house, while urbanisation and economic expansion increased after 1893 with the establishment of a railway connection to Sydney terminating at Bomaderry, just over the bridge.