North Bundaleer In The Mid-North of South Australia - A grand homestead revived to welcome guests
Basking in the afternoon sun, North Bundaleer homestead is well and truly back on the map. About ten kilometres south of Jamestown in the mid north of South Australia, it is a classic of the Australian Victoriana style and it's now welcoming guests to stay in style.
At the turn of the 20th century it was a handsome statement of family wealth. Amazingly, 70 years later, it was a ruin. It was rotted. It was a write off. Come the turn of this new century, however, and it is miraculously, magnificently restored. So today we chart the rise and fall and rise again of North Bundaleer.
It's a romantic tale, with a happy ending written by a management consultant couple from Sydney who fell in love with the ornate building and its surrounds... and bought it.Owner Malcolm Booth joined me for a stroll around the garden and I asked him to recall what it looked like when they first bought the property.
"It was a nice green paddock but no other vegetation other than that. It was totally devoid of everything because for decades the stock, cows and sheep had been wandering around and eating everything and trampling everything down".
That was the scene in 1999, but five years and 600 David Austin roses later, it's looking much more like the brief glory days. With the aid of photographs from 1910 of the original house and gardens, and with a huge helping of elbow grease, the sweeping walled garden is back. Malcolm gives us an indication of the work involved.
"It was remarkable because we started digging trenches and about 2 to 3 inches below the surface we found terracotta tiling that had been delineating the garden and the path". "Who did the trenching?" "I did!"
This sounds like our own mid-north translation of the seven labours of Hercules, especially when you see how sad and sorry the house looked when Malcolm and Marianne Booth first bought it. They paid for the land price alone because the insurers had written the house off completely - after all no one had lived here for 30 years, except the sheep sheltering and lambing inside.
With National Trust advice, and the Booths acting as labouring offsiders to the tradespeople, a three-year transformation brought North Bundaleer back to its best.
The story behind this opulent detail, inside and out, goes back to the great Bundaleer Run, established in 1841. The sheep flocks stretched over fifty kilometres through the mid-north until the 1880's owner, Robert Maslin, divided it between his two children. Son George took North Bundaleer and built this last of the great homesteads in 1900. Just eleven years later, the government bought the sheep station and subdivided it into smaller farms. The grandeur first envisioned by George Maslin couldnŐt be sustained and so the slow decline began.
Marianne Booth took up the challenge to return the magnificent ruin to its interior glory. And now we can join Malcolm and Marianne, surrounded by 1900's spaciousness and opulence, in their grand country house with its four guest suites.
"This is the red room or sitting room", said Marion, as we entered from the long central ballroom, around the house was designed. "We call it the Chinese sitting room, so it's actually a larger suite. You get the red room- the main bedroom- and this sitting room, plus the bathroom"
Here the sensational restoration is matched by the Booths' beautiful furniture, artwork and personal pieces gathered over an interesting life in places far flung. Each object of art holds memories for Marianne.
"That clock was my grandmother's and there's a little tea-set there that I used to play with when I was a little girl. And I picked up this small artwork here in a junk shop in Sydney and it cost me twenty bucks".
The striking red colour in the bedroom is close to the original, and a Ballarat craftsman lovingly created the Georgian four poster bed. But the piece de resistance in this suite is the very contemporary bathroom with broad views to the hills that rise behind.It is in the original conservatory, renovated according to the blueprint provided by those invaluable 1910 photographs.
"When we bought the house there was just a bit of a wall left so we built it exactly as we saw it in the photograph and then we needed an ensuite bathroom for the red room so we used the space for the bathroom".
Fancy a relaxed read? You're welcome to use the library. But there are plenty of distractions, like the English oak fireplace, the century old wood grain painting on the door and an intriguing array of lovingly collected ornaments.
There's plenty of room round the sixteen place Georgian dining room table, and the Booths happily admit, with decor like this, they feel obliged to serve delicious traditional dinners to match!
You can always walk off the fine fare by taking the air with Oscar the pet kangaroo, whose cousins hop through the paddocks up the hill. And then there's the ubiquitous Archie, the homestead Jack Russell, who'll fetch a stick all day.And we mean all day.
Over the valley waits the beautiful Bundaleer Forest Reserve with walking trails through the 1870's experimental plantings that led to the choice of North American Pinus Radiata as our state forest tree. All the land along the pretty backdrop range was once part of the Bundaleer Run.
When Marianne and Malcolm take you upto the top of the high hill behind the house you get a sense of where else you can get to from here. Down the ranges to the south is the Clare Valley, across the hills there's Burra and up past the silos at Jamestown you're headed for the Flinders Ranges and, right here of course, you've got your own beautiful patch of mid-north hills country, with its ancient and craggy blue gums.
Take a look in the visitors' book at the people from Sweden and the States and Toronto and Tokyo and a lot of them never got past the front gate during their stay and that's because of the remarkable restoration and hospitality, that you too are most welcome to share, at North Bundaleer.
You can continue your tour and read the rave reviews on their excellent new website or contact Marianne and Malcolm for booking details.
North Bundaleer
Jamestown
South Australia, 5491Visitors by appointment only.
Ph: (08)8665 4024
