Varroville is a heritage-listed former farm and now rural residence at 196 St Andrews Road, Varroville, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by Weaver and Kemp and built from 1810 to 1859. It is also known as Varro Ville and Varra Ville. The property is privately owned. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999.
History The Cowpastures When the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove in 1788, they found the soil unsuitable for farming and soon looked towards the heavy clay and loam soils of the Cumberland Plain (to the west) to sustain the colony. Early agricultural settlements were located on the rich alluvial soils of the Nepean, Hawkesbury and Georges River areas, as well as South Creek near St Marys and at the head of the Parramatta River, where the settlement of Rose Hill (later Parramatta) was established about six months after the fleet landed. A settlement at the Hawkesbury was established in 1794.
By 1804 much of the Cumberland Plain had been settled and Governor King began to look for other regions in the colony for favourable arable land. The only suitable land within the Cumberland Plain was the area known as the Cowpastures, located in the southwestern corner. This area was named after the discovery in 1795 of cows from the first fleet which had wandered off into the bush. The Cowpastures had remained unoccupied due to the official decree that reserved the land for the wild cattle (to encourage their increase).
In December 1803 Governor and Mrs King visited the Cowpastures for themselves and the Sydney Gazette reported that Mrs King was the first white lady to have crossed the Nepean River. The track to the Cowpastures led from Prospect and on 17 September 1805 James Meehan, under instructions from Governor King, commenced a survey of the track from Prospect to the Nepean Crossing and a rough road followed the marked line. This became known as Cowpasture Road, later the Hume Highway, most of which is today part of the Camden Valley Way.
Several visits to the area by the colonial gentry took place at this time, which resulted in their desire to acquire some of this rich land for themselves. They saw the area as containing very good grazing land. Captain Henry Waterhouse described the area in a letter to John Macarthur in 1804 as follows: "I am at a loss to describe the face of the country other than as a beautiful park, totally divested of underwood, interspersed with plains, with rich luxuriant grass".
Earlier Europeans had described "large ponds covered with ducks and the black swan, the margins of which were fringed with shrubs of the most delightful tints". The Europeans thought the flats were perfect for cattle and the hills would carry sheep. They admired the absence of underbush - probably achieved through Aboriginal burning off - and felt comfortable with a landscape that reminded them of an English gentleman's park.
John Macarthur received the first land grant in the Cowpastures region in 1805 for his role in the early wool industry in the colony. Lord Camden rewarded him with and Macarthur chose the highly coveted Cowpastures for his grant, though Governor King tried to prevent him taking it. Macarthur also organised an grant for his friend Walter Davidson, who allowed Macarthur to use his land freely after Davidson returned to England. In this manner Macarthur controlled of riverbank on the site where the wild cattle had first discovered the best pasture near Sydney. Later purchases and exchanges increased the Macarthur land there to over , an endowment that Governor Macquarie greatly resented.
Other early grants were in the Parishes of Minto and in adjoining Evan, Bringelly, Narellan and Cook. These all lay west of Parramatta.Godden Mackay Logan, 2012, 20-21
Governor Macquarie drew up plans in 1820 for establishment of a town in the area, to be named Campbelltown after his wife Elizabeth's maiden name. With their forced return to England in 1822 these plans never came to fruition and it was not until the arrival of Governor Darling in 1827 that plans were again reinstated and the first settlers were allowed to take possession of their town land in 1831. In the early 1850s the railway line from Sydney to Goulburn was completed, with Campbelltown station opening in 1858. When Leppington House was offered for lease in 1865, one of its selling points was that it was near a railway. Campbelltown now provided easy access to Sydney and its markets and grew as the centre of the district. Although Camden was established in 1836, with no railway line it remained a small town.
The large estates that flanked Cowpasture Road (later Camden Valley Way) and the Northern Road were run largely as sheep and cattle farms, with wheat and other grain crops being grown as well until the 1850s. The houses were often built on surrounding ridges or hills, providing sweeping views of the countryside and ensuring that any passing traveller could appreciate the owner's status by viewing their impressive country mansions from the road. This land use pattern of large farm estates and small towns, established in the nineteenth century, remained largely the pattern of development of the area up until the late 1990s. Aerial photographs of the area in 1947 show a rural landscape with some limited urban development on either side of the Camden Valley Way (then the Hume Highway).Godden Mackay Logan, 2012, 22-23
Townson of Varroville Robert Townson was born in Shropshire, developing interests in mineralogy and natural sciences young. Elected a non-resident member or Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1791, Physical class. He graduated M.D. at the University of Göttingen in 1795. Over 8–9 years he travelled extensively in Europe, from Trondheim in the north to Sicily, studying mineralogy, chemistry, botany, rural economy, technology, politics and ethics in the Universities of Göttingen, Vienna, Paris and Edinburgh. His "Travels in Hungary" was published in 1797, his 1798 "The Philosophy of Mineralogy" and a paper on the "perceptivity of Plants" was read in 1792 and included in the "Transactions" of the Linnaean Society.Havard, 2005
In July 1807 Townson (d.1827), doctor of law and gentleman scientist arrived in Sydney. He had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and visited the universities of Copenhagen, Uppsala and Göttingen. In 1792 he contributed a paper to the Linnean Society of London on the "Perceptivity of Plants". "He was often at the home of Sir Joseph Banks and had there met William Paterson of the New South Wales Corps. His brother, Captain John Townson had served as a military officer in NSW before migrating to the colony as a settler in 1806, so he had ample opportunities to learn about the new settlement. Robert approached the British government for permission to settle in NSW. He was warmly received, informed that he was the type most urgently needed in the colony, promised land and indulgences, and allowed £100 to buy books and a laboratory for the colony. Dr Townson arrived in Sydney in the Young William on 7 July 1807. Proficient in all branches of natural science and also in Latin, Greek, German, French, he was the most eminent scholar in the young colony."ADB
Townson arrived as a settler intending to establish himself as a pastoralist and trader in 1807.Everett, 2004 He arrived with the instructions of the British Secretary of State to Governor Bligh to grant him . Bligh refused to "locate the grant", but allowed him occupancy while awaiting instructions from England, which arrived in a letter of 31 December 1807. He established himself on a small estate of on the banks of the Georges River, living there for about five years, building a residence, stock yard, making and enclosing paddocks and making roads. He called this grant Towweery (Tom Uglys).
In January 1808 Townson, affronted at Bligh's delay over the granting of land, became 'an opponent of Bligh, and when rebellion took place some months later he was judged one of the principal six "who previously concerted together with Major Johnston the arrest and imprisonment of the Governor". He was present at the dinner at the officers' mess on the eve of the trial of John Macarthur which precipitated the revolt [and] he signed the requisition to Johnston to depose Bligh on 26 January 1808' He "soon fell out with the rebel administration. Johnston refused to give him the land he wanted at Emu Island, near Penrith; though he was given at Botany Bay near the present Blakehurst and twenty-eight government cattle, he claimed that only half the grant was of any use, and his long complaints against Bligh written in 1807 and 1808 were followed by another, equally querulous, in 1809 against his supplanters."
Overlooked in the grants made by Johnston in 1808, he received two grants from Foveaux in November 1808, both in the Botany Bay district, one of , the other of around the present Oatley station, Mortdale, Penshurst and Hurstville.'SHR He had six assigned convicts.
In 1809, finding this [Botany Bay] land unsuitable he applied to William Paterson (who took over the government) for some adjacent land, of . Since his land had poor pasture, he was obliged to send his flock away to other ground, and a few months before Macquarie's arrival he asked Paterson to allow him to exchange of his grant for some more open land "in a distant part of the colony". Paterson allowed him to take up for the , giving him a total of . This he chose was in the Minto district, and was the origin of Varro Ville.
James Meehan surveyed Varro Ville in August 1809, mentioning the hill of Bunbury Curran, a range, flats and hollows, hills and dales, ponds and ironbark trees, and the creek. A road was to be reserved on the south-east side. The grant was ready for delivery in November 1809'. 'Townson later confirmed that he had immediately occupied the land, "employed a great deal of labour, and expended a great deal of money" in building a horse yard, cultivating a large garden, clearing and fencing paddock and making roads.Fowler p. 68
Macquarie on his arrival annulled by public proclamation the trials which had taken place during the usurpation (of Bligh). Grants of land and of stock and leases during the same period were revoked, as well as pardons and emancipations until he could tour all the districts and reconsider the grants. Townson was required to hand in his grants, which he did in 1810. Macquarie re-granted Townson at Bunbury Curran ( at Minto ( at "Bunbury Curran" as it was called) and Botany Bay were given in May 1811, despite Townson's objections about the amount of land required to be cultivated)), which Townson named Varro Ville after the Roman writer on agriculture, Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC). The stated reason was that Varro wrote extensively on agriculture and Townson was intent on making Varroville an exemplar of agricultural pursuit, which, according to his obituaries and official biography, he achieved.
In November 1810 Governor Macquarie toured the area (after having chosen the site of a town on George's River to which he gave the name Liverpool, after the Earl of that title following the foundation of Liverpool, and writes in his journal of 8 November 1810:
Macquarie also commented in his journal that the farms of Townson and Andrew Thompson (St. Andrews farm, opposite Varroville) were "by far the finest soil and best pasturage I have yet seen in the colony; the grounds are beautiful and bounded by a large creek of brackish water called Bunbury Curran". This difference of opinion on siting reflects the different characters of Macquarie and Townson – the former masterful and dashing, would have chosen a prominent site with an extensive view, the latter a scholar, preferring seclusion and proximity to oversight his crops and orchard.