MARBLE HILL

High in the Mount Lofty Ranges looms a romantic tragedy of a ruin. It took just hours for the dreadful Black Sunday bushfire in 1955 to cruelly gut it. Marble Hill remains as a grand skeleton of a mansion.

The Governor's new summer residence was ready to greet Lt. Gov. Sir William Jervois and his party for the New Year of 1880. "Victorian academic gothic" in style and built of local stone, it was designed by prominent architect William McMinn, who also left us the very gothic Mitchell Building in the North Terrace grounds of Adelaide University and the very decorated Austral Hotel in Rundle Street.

For seventy-five years, Marble Hill was the holiday home of South Australia's Governors, offering a cool retreat from the seared Adelaide plains. Well, most of the time. It was first threatened by bushfires exactly a century ago. Lady Tennyson wrote "our own gully garden is on fire".

In 1912, another blaze licked close enough to char the rosary and crack some windows. Only the arrival of the English cricket team (they were invited for dinner) saved the day as they beat the fire back. Lady Tennyson loved the "delightful huge verandahs" that saw great contrasts. From sizzling days to freezing temperatures. It snowed for three days in 1908. By 1939, however, the Black Friday bushfires once again threatened the hilltop house.

We don't know much about the interior. Wandering along the walkways through the ruin, we can only imagine what its twenty-six rooms looked like. There are photos of the spacious dining room and the comfortable morning room, but even the great bay window of the drawing room is gone now, demolished a few years after the 1955 destruction as unsafe. The great hall gapes skyward where there was once a beautifully carved kauri pine staircase turning up to a row of gothic arches.

The CFS now uses the tall and square restored mansion tower as a lookout, but they would have been powerless against the Black Sunday bushfire of January 2, 1955. A gale pushed a raging bushfire up the ridge, and the caretaker reported it was upon them with the speed of an express train. Fifteen people including the Governor, Sir Robert George, his wife and two children were in residence.

As they watched, the heat melted the lead lining on the tower roof and it showered down to cover the cars below. Miraculously, all the residents rushed to a high retaining wall on the laurel hedged drive and sheltered under blankets, gasping, praying for an endless hour until help came. But the Marble Hill mansion was razed.

Within months, the state government declared it would never be rebuilt. And forty six years later there is still no chance. Thanks, however, to President Ernie McKenna and the Friends of Marble Hill, it is preserved and regularly open to us all. Ernie is usually on hand during open days to explain some macabre remains - a charred loaf of bread from the kitchen oven and an assortment of weirdly twisted blobs of glass that were once soft drink bottles before the extraordinary heat of the fire.

If they are not enough to entice you up for a visit, then surely the view from the top of the tower is. It projects about six stories up from the high vantage-point chosen for Marble Hill.

On a clear day the view spans a good 150 kilometres - Mt Lofty and the ranges beyond Echunga to the south, the gnarled and heavy scrub of the ranges closeby across a deep gully to the east and the Barossa Range and the distant Hummocks beyond Pt Wakefield to the north.

The Register's nineteenth century reports were right, it is "a romantic panorama of surpassing loveliness". The tower is open whenever the property is staffed by the Friends. They will sell you a light lunch or scones to accompany the breathtaking view of the city and plains from the coachhouse round the hill from the mansion. It is restored and in increasing demand for weddings and functions.

With the Friends, we'd be stonkered!! The volunteers give us access to this romantic ruin. It is also a monument to the scourge of our hills, the bushfire. The tip is that the state government (the owner) is about to contribute a substantial grant to preserve and improve Marble Hill for visitors. Right now, however, it is an under-estimated jewel in our Adelaide Hills.

Marble Hill

Where?

Marble Hill, 20kms from GPO Via Montacute Road, Rostrevor or Via turnoff from Norton Summit - Basket Range - Lobethal Road

When?

Open every second Sunday each month eg 11/3/01, 8/4/01 etc. NB: special extra Postcards opening for March only - 18/3/01

Contact:

Friends of Marble Hill
President, Ernie McKenna
Ph: 8387-0581 or 0411-666-489
Fax 8387-6310
Bookings/Functions - phone: 8390-0414