Gold Creek Homestead

Gold Creek Homestead
Gold Creek Homestead, 2006.

Gold Creek Homestead (1) is a 140-year-old stone and brick building located off Gungahlin Drive in Ngunnawal a north-western suburb of Canberra, Australia. It is adjacent to the Grove Ngunnawal retirement village currently being developed by Lend Lease.

The Gold Creek Homestead Complex (2) referred to a group of four buildings including the 697m² homestead, a stone and timber cottage, a buggy shed and an entertainment and function centre (formerly a machinery shed). The Gold Creek Homestead Site (3) was a 41-hectare parcel of land, specifically Block 1 and 2, Section 23 Ngunnawal upon which the aforementioned complex was situated.

Gold Creek Homestead was at one time at the centre of 'Gold Creek' a sprawling 1,594 hectare (3,940 acre) rural property, the largest in the Ginninderra district. Portions of the former property are or will be occupied by parts of the suburbs of Ngunnawal, Nicholls, Harcourt Hill, Moncrieff, Casey, Kinlyside and Taylor as well as large parcels of land in NSW adjacent to the village of Hall.

In 1849 Anthony Rolfe, an English farm labourer, arrived in Australia from Oxborough, Norfolk, England with his wife and five children. The family migrated to the new colonies under one of the Bounty schemes subsidised to the British Government and was part of the wave of free settlers to follow the convict era.

After working for 10 years as a tenant farmer at Joseph Kaye's Springbank rural property, Anthony established his own property Tea Gardens, on 130-hectare (320 acre) of land in 1857. The remnants of that homestead is located in present-day Ngunnawal near Ginninderra Creek which is now part of the Gungahlin Lakes Golf Course.