Southampton homestead
Southampton homestead is a Victorian-Georgian historical homestead located on the banks of the Blackwood River in the south west of Western Australia.
It was constructed in 1862 by Richard Jones(1795-1876) and his two sons Richard and William with mud-bricks fired on the site and took two years to construct. The heritage property sits beside the Bibbulmun Track, and located some 12 km (7.5 mi) south of Balingup in the Shire of Donnybrook-Balingup.
At the height of the settlement's prosperity, the Jones family managed some 27,500 acres (111 km2) of land. The family and workers produced wine, wheat, fruit and ran 600 head of cattle. Infrastructure included the Homestead proper, kitchen/bakery, flour mill, Dairy, workshops, brick kilns, jetty, boat shed and workers cottages.
The homestead was destroyed by a bushfire in February 2013.
Southampton Homestead was so named after the United Kingdom Port of Southampton near which settlers Richard Jones and his wife Louisa and their five children sailed on the Lotus from Portsmouth in 1829 to pursue opportunities in the new Swan River colony of Perth, Western Australia. Arriving in 1829, the Joneses originally purchased a property on the corner of St Georges Terrace and Barrack Street in the city of Perth.
Tragedy struck in 1830 when Louisa became the first European woman to die in the new colony, succumbing during childbirth at the age of 29. The baby boy, Joseph, died 3 months after his mother. They are both buried in the historic East Perth Cemetery. This left Richard Jones a widower with five children. He subsequently engaged the services of a housekeeper, a Malaysian man John Allum, who remained in the service of the family for the next 40 years. John Allum died at the age of 83 and is buried on the hill behind the homestead overlooking the Blackwood Valley.
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