Bronte House
Bronte House is a heritage-listed historic house and visitor attraction located at 470 Bronte Road, Bronte, New South Wales, a beachside suburb of Sydney, Australia. Built in the Australian Gothic Revival style, the house was designed by Georgiana & Robert Lowe and Mortimer Lewis and built from 1843 to 1845. It is also known as Bronte estate. The property is owned by Waverley Municipal Council and was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999 and is listed on the Register of the National Estate.
Described as a "magnificent, mid-Victorian mansion", the house is a sandstone, one-storey bungalow with verandahs on the west and east sides; and features a service wing that extends to the south, plus two octagonal rooms with cone-shaped roofs.
Bronte House was designed by the Colonial Architect, Mortimer Lewis, who set it on the edge of what is now known as Bronte Gully. He obtained the first land grant of which was right to the shoreline of Bronte Beach, at the time known as Nelson Bay. Lewis decided to consolidate his holdings including the whole area which formed Bronte Park and sited the house on the estate. Construction began, but Lewis sold the house in 1843, under financial duress, for A£420 when it was still incomplete, to Robert Lowe. Lowe completed the construction of the house in 1845. Lowe's wife, Georgina, was a skilled watercolour artist, botanist and gardener. Her sketches and watercolours provide the earliest images of Bronte House and the surrounding area. She also sketched images of the New South Wales countryside. Her sketchbook is held at the State Library of New South Wales. Georgina Lowe took an interest in the estate and established the first Bronte House gardens which have become well celebrated. The Lowes lived in the residence for four years. Robert Lowe, an Oxford graduate and member of the English Bar, was appointed to the Legislative Council of New South Wales and was admitted to the New South Wales Bar. In 1849 the Lowe family sold Bronte House and returned to England, where Lowe was elected to the House of Commons and later appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1880 he became Viscount Sherbrooke.
The garden was neglected over the years, until well-known Sydney restaurant critic, Leo Schofield, became the tenant. Schofield has been credited with restoring the garden. The house is now owned by Waverley Municipal Council and is leased to private tenants, who are expected to maintain the house and gardens and open it to the public a few times a year. Since 2001 the garden layout has been directed by Myles Baldwin, a landscape designer.
History
Bronte, the suburb
Bronte the suburb takes its name from an early settler's home, that settler being Robert Lowe who named his estate "Bronte" in honour of Horatio Nelson. The name is a direct link to Royal Navy Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson. The King of Naples made Lord Nelson the Duke of Bronte in 1799. Bronte is a town in Sicily, west of Mt. Etna. According to a Sydney Mail article in October 1860, the Englishmen of Waverley paid tribute to the famed sea warrior by naming several roads after Nelson, including Nelson Bay, Nelson Road and Trafalgar Road. Over time, Nelson Road became Bronte Road and Trafalgar Road became Trafalgar Street. The name Nelson Bay however survives on all official maps.Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis bought, most of the beach frontage at Bronte, including the current house's site, at Nelson Bay in 1836. By 1838 he had bought in total, including the valley to the beach's west, the creek, a waterfall, part of the headland to the north and all of the headland to the south of the beach, and all of the beach. Lewis chose the house site, cut roads, fenced the land and lay the foundations of the house. He established a slab hut and a home farm on the property. In 1841 Lewis refused an offer of A£4,000 for the property. He faced financial crisis in 1842 and work on the house halted. In 1843 Lewis sold the site and unfinished house for A£420 to the barrister Robert Lowe. His design was probably altered by Robert and Georgiana Lowe. Completed in 1845, Bronte House is among the oldest buildings in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.
The name Bronte is a late 19th. century conceit and suggests a much grander residence than is really the case. Early records refer to the house simply and more appropriately as 'Mr. Lowe's Cottage at Cugee'. Even the appellation Bronte is a relatively recent one. In 1799, Ferdinand IV, King of the Two Sicilies, created Lord Nelson, Duke of Bronte.
In ancient Greek, the word "Bronte" means "Cyclops" or "Thunder" and in 1520, the name was officially applied to a small village on the slopes of the volcano, Mount Etna in Sicily. It was this Duchy that was awarded to Nelson, so Bronte must have seemed an apt choice of name for both the eponymous house, the beach and the suburb as they are all at what was, and indeed still is, known as Nelson Bay, a name that survives in all official maps and is much older than that of "Bronte Beach".
The Lowe family (1845–1849)
Robert Lowe, an Oxford graduate and a member of the English Bar, arrived in Sydney from England on the ship Aden in 1842 with his wife Georgiana. He had introductions to Governor Gipps who was a distant relative of his wife. Lowe, who had a promising career in England, had come to Australia for his health. The choice of a seaside residence was a curious one, as he was an albino. His skin and hair were both white and he wore a pair of curious- looking goggles to protect his eyes against glare. This is possibly why the bay window in the dining room at Bronte House is fitted with unique sets of adjustable upper and lower shutters to control direct light.Mrs. Lowe was much taken with her seaside cottage where she and her husband entertained the intellectual elite of the colony. In one of her letters home she wrote "We have a little estate of 42 acres, four miles from Sydney on the sea; it is lovely beyond conception. We have given only A£420 for it." Georgiana Lowe was an accomplished artist and horsewoman but she took particular interest in the garden at Bronte House which is mentioned in several of her letters home. She established a thriving vegetable garden on land above the house and was often to be seen taking her produce to Sydney for sale. The garden had a fine lawn and the rest was laid out in terraces, each laid out into flower beds intersected with gravel walks. Plants and flowers of the most choice and rare description. It was described as "one of the finest botanical collections in the colony". Dame Mary Gilmore recalled that waratahs were planted there and that her grandfather had laid out a "maze" for Georgiana Lowe. This is the first record of the successful cultivation of waratahs in a Sydney garden.
In almost all of her letters to relatives in England, Georgiana described the pleasure she had in making her garden. Writing to her mother-in-law in October 1847, she notes "I am in the garden all day and quite delight in cultivating our place. My brother John has sent me a large collection of the new annuals and vegetables. I shall have great pleasure in planting them. I have just been planting seeds that were collected on Dr. Leichhardt's expedition. A gentleman who accompanied him gave me a few seeds of each new flower and tree discovered. I intend to make drawings of our new place."
The State Library of New South Wales has Georgiana Lowe's sketchbook containing some twenty six highly accomplished watercolour drawings including many of the house and its surroundings. One of these provides clear proof that the specimen of giant bamboo in front of the house dates from her time and may well have been planted by her. Equally impressive are the two magnificent pines on the northern side of the property, a Cook's pine and Norfolk Island pine were also probably planted in the garden's earliest days. Bananas were sketched by Mrs Lowe and remain growing in the garden today. However, there is no evidence that any other of the current planting dates from Mrs. Lowe's time here, although it is tempting to speculate that the brush box on the edge of the gully to the north of the house and the brown pine near the Port Jackson fig may have begun life as some of those seeds gathered on Leichhardt's expedition. It is also possible that Mrs Lowe planted the Port Jackson fig tree.
In 1849, the Lowes returned to England. Robert Lowe, his health much improved, subsequently became Chancellor of the Exchequer and was later elevated to the peerage as Viscount Sherbrooke. Neither he nor his wife ever returned to Australia, although both spoke warmly of their years at Nelson Bay.
After the Lowe family (1849-1948)
The Lowes sold Bronte House to G. A. Lloyd, an auctioneer, merchant and Colonial Treasurer for A£1,300. Lloyd owned the house for only a few months before it was sold for A£2,000 to one J. Lublin, then sold again to the superintendent of the Bank of Australasia, J. J. Falconer, who in 1861 once again put the property up for auction. The buyer was J. B. Holdsworth, a hardware and ironmonger magnate, who paid A£4,750 for the house. Before he died, Holdsworth added the second storey to the wing on Bronte Road. Holdsworth's son sold the house and to Stanley Ebsworth in 1882 and a period of rapid change of ownership ended. A subdivision created a through road south of the house to the beach on part of the former carriage drive. This entailed demolition of one of the corner turrets to the house and construction of the two-storey wing to the south.Members of the Ebsworth family, many of whom were wool brokers, owned and lived in the building for over six decades until 1948. James E. Ebsworth was second commissioner of the Australian Agricultural Company, which had land grants in Port Stephens, the Hunter Valley and Peel River districts of NSW. His descendant E. M. Ebsworth, based in Bronte House, was the manager of the Mitchell Estate in the northern part of Rose Bay, where Ebsworth Road was subdivided off for sale in 1909. In 1935 the Ebsworths tried to interest the NSW Premier Sir Bertram Stevens in the NSW Government buying the house.