Interviewer: Frank Heimans,
            for Baulkham Hills Shire Council

Date of Interview: 29 May 2007

Transcription: Kevin Murray, June 2007

Take a Virtual Tour

The Money family owned Aberdoon House, Rouse Hill from 1947 until 9 August 2000 when it was bought by Baulkham Hills Shire Council. Dr Rex Angel Money, his wife Dorothy "Noppy” and their daughters Angela and Carole used the property as their weekend retreat. Dr Money was a Macquarie Street specialist and pioneering neurosurgeon who had served in the Australian Army during World War I and World War II. After serving as a doctor he was sent to the Atherton Tablelands before being demobilised in 1944. While there he developed an interest in nutrition.

Now, what's the connection with Aberdoon..?

Well, Dad came back from the Second World War - he actually was demobilised in '44, from memory - and he came back to practice. They needed him in Sydney to practice as a neurosurgeon for the wounded coming back, so they brought him down from the Atherton Tablelands and demobilised him. Dad was a workaholic - I now know that, I didn't know that word then. But he always had to be doing something. If he wasn't operating or seeing patients he had to be doing something with his hands and he realised that a working farm would give him that outlet. He never wanted it for social reasons or anything and I think that was one of the reasons he chose Rouse Hill, although it was closer to Sydney rather than the Southern Highlands which were very social in those days... and of course a lot more expensive too. Rouse Hill was very unknown and not expensive then.

So, how often would you visit the house?

Nearly every weekend when Dad was home. And we'd pile up the animals and the ice-boxes. And we only had a small car and we often would take a friend, so there would be five people in the car plus the back would be laden up with everything we'd need for the weekend because we had no fridge or anything like that there. And we'd set off.

Dr Rex and Noppy Money with Whippet Truck July 1968

It took about two and a half to three hours from Bellevue Hill to Rouse Hill along Parramatta Road, joining up with the Windsor Road. And I always remember when we got to the Bull & Bush Hotel at Baulkham Hills on the Windsor Road that's when we knew we were getting close and the excitement was pretty intense, because we had horses and we had a great time. We had girlfriends with us. One girlfriend used to sing all the time. She's now a singer, or has been a singer. Dad always remembered that - he'd always say "Ask Sandy so she can sing to us while we're going along".

That was quite an expedition in those days...

It was, it was a real expedition, yeh. And there was no train - we couldn't go by train. Oh there was a train, excuse me, to Riverstone, but we would have had no way of getting from Riverstone to the cottage.

So, this trip that you used to make every weekend, when you arrived, what would happen? What would your father do?

Dad would go and change straight away into his King Gee overalls and Mum and Carole and I would get out and organise the kitchen and go and visit the animals and talk to the caretakers and make sure that everything was OK. And Dad would have done that too, of course. Then, the best thing for him was to get into the unregistered old Whippet truck which he was able to drive around the property. And that was how he spent the weekend sussing out what was going on, looking at the animals... we had a piggery for a while on a neighbouring farm that Dad had bought, and he just would be busy the whole weekend. And we'd call him with a whistle from wherever he was, for a meal. And I don't honestly remember him... he was a great catnapper. He was a bit like Churchill - he could lie down for 10 minutes and he'd be up and going then for hours. I guess he was used to operating for 10 to 12 hours on his feet, so he'd just stay on his feet all day doing things.

So he must have loved the farm...

He did. He loved it. And then at night he'd be at his desk in the Sitting Room doing the books because running cattle and pigs and everything - and poultry - he had to make returns to the Rural Department and all of that. And so he'd listen to a bit of radio most of the time he did the books, because we didn't have telly of course.

Front view of Aberdoon House c1947

Can you describe what was on the farm, and how big it was and how many buildings were there?

Yes. When we took it over from Miss Fraser in '47 it was a 4 by 4 cottage - just 4 rooms - stone cottage, the original Aberdoon House built in 1887. She'd put a lean-to on at the back which was a very pokey sort of kitchen-cum-sleepout area, and that was very much a lean-to. There was nothing much around it - a few old pepper trees and that sort of thing. And privett, there was a lot of privett I remember. But there were nice semi-arable paddocks with trees and we had cattle. Dad always had a bull and some cows, and they all had names. I remember that we had a couple of terrible bulls, I was petrified of them. And then we usually had three horses of our own and also horses on adjistment from the area. So altogether, when we had the two properties we probably had about 60 or 70 acres. So it was quite vast really. There was a lot of riding land, which was lovely, and a creek at the bottom - Caddie's Creek on the eastern side. Then other buildings were the stables, the barn, where, I guess, sulkies and things were kept. Then we had the little Manager's cottage, which was a fibro cottage. I think probably Dad put that up. And we had outhouses... we had a chook house. We had a little cattle loading area, when the trucks came to take the cattle to market. A lot of that was really old, from the 1850's, from the mid-1800's, because although the house was built in 1887. There were people there from around 1840. It had a long line of succession to get to us.

Back view of Aberdoon House c1947

Yes. The cottage from 1887, yes. It was the cottage that probably had been built by Isaac Rhodes-Cooper as far as I can tell from Jilly's History (Jilly Warren - "Aberdoon House 1887"), which Council will have a copy of... Jilly Warren's History. And I imagine from what I've just read from your notes, Frank, that that house was built in 1887 by Isaac Rhodes-Cooper who then sold to John Burrell. This is the Will of John Burrell, he died at Rouse Hill in November 1897, the same year Dad was born, actually. And Jilly Warren obtained a copy of this Will, and it reads

John Charles Burrell, late of Rouse Hill, he was actually a Chemist, this is a last Will and Testament of me, John Charles Burrell, of Aberdoon House, Rouse Hill in the colony of New South Wales. Chemist. I nominate and appoint John Devlin of Rouse Hill and William Swann of Granville in the said colony, a schoolmaster, executors and trustees of this Will and direct that all my just debt, funeral and testimony expenses may be paid by my said executors as soon as possible.

Now, I'm not quite sure from reading that whether he actually sold... the house was actually sold by the executors, perhaps that's what happened, to George and Mary Whitling in 1898, after he... No we're back into 1887. So I'm not quite sure who the house was sold to at that time.

So, after Burrell got it, do you know what happened to the house, who the successive owners were?

Well, in 1898 the house was bought by George and Mary Whitling, and then in 1916 we believe it was sold to James Hogan, who then sold it to John Campbell Lamont. And certainly Lamont was a name we knew very well as kids, so the Lamonts must have stayed in the area. And then in 1938 it was sold to a woman called Caroline Pearce, and she sold it, it appears, in 1944 to Miss Fraser, whom I remember, and my family remembered very well. We bought it from her in 1947, Miss Fraser.

Right, and I believe that Miss Fraser stayed on for a little bit?

She did. She stayed on to look after things for us while we made arrangements to update the house, to restore the stone, the existing, part of the house. And she makes quite super additions to it through a firm of architects, one of whom was a friend of Mum and Dad's, John Mansfield. And he drew up lovely plans for that.

Aberdoon House - verandah and extension c1950

Right, they drew up some lovely plans... they pulled down a connecting wall between two of the bedrooms at the back of the house to make a large sitting room, and also retain a guest room there. They put in French Doors leading outside to a lovely wisteria pergola which they put on on the southern side. They put on the northern side - north west, I suppose, they added a beautiful kitchen, a bathroom a mud room and another very basic bathroom, and cupboards and that sort of thing. But the kitchen was really the high point of the house, because Mum and Dad had brought back these plans from America where they'd been, and in 1947/48 it was very avant garde to have a huge bar in the kitchen where everyone sat up and ate and talked, and Mum did all the cooking while she was able to talk to people, because normally everyone had a separate dining room and the hostess was never seen unless you had a cook or somebody, but if you were doing it yourself you were way out of the party, so it was very nice that we all chatted while you had drinks and things while Mum was doing the cooking. That also had French doors out onto the back terrace and that was very nice too. Eventually they covered that over so we had an extra very nice sitting area which was shaded from the sun, and looked down over the paddocks down to the creek, which was full of Melaleuca trees at that time.

Now if I could ask you to describe the house as if you're walking into it... Take me through all the rooms and to the back...

Yes, so you come in through a nice little portico that John Mansfield designed at the front to protect you from the weather after you'd driven up a long driveway from Mile End Road Gate, and came into the home paddock - there were a couple of gates to open, and parked the car under the trees and then walked through the portico, through the front door, and on each side there was a lovely, very large bedroom - our bedroom on one side on the right, and Mum and Dad's on the left. And the bathroom was for them an en suite as well as being available to others through a door into the kitchen, but mainly their bathroom. And then you'd go through the hallway and on the right was the guest room which was a very pretty room. And then on the left the hallway had been taken up - the wall, that was the wall that was knocked down to make a very large sitting room with the original fireplace and French windows with shutters. Now we would call it "Provincale" but in those days, no, it wasn't called that at all. More like a Georgian cottage, really.

Visitors to Aberdoon House 1954

What would you say was the style of the cottage when it was built?

Well in 1887 it was just a very, very plain cottage. I have the photos which Council would also have copies of. It was extremely plain, you couldn't put a "style" on it. It was just four rooms, stone cottage with a hallway straight down the middle. And I don't know where the original kitchen was, but Miss Fraser had added a little kitchen at the back. Whether it was an outdoor kitchen, outhouse kitchen, I don't know. It was just very basic, but it was beautiful stone.

And the grounds, beyond the house, what sort of trees grew there?

Beyond the house, lots and lots of eucalypts, and then also introduced trees like privett, which in those days wasn't considered a noxious weed, we just thought they gave nice shade. Pepper trees, Jacaranda, an orchard with lemons and oranges and, I think, mandarins as well. Mainly just native - what Mum always called just scruffy native vegetation, but I learnt later to love.And just lots of eucalypts... native grasses, presumably, now I know them as native grasses. And lots of lawn and an old tennis court, which wasn't used, next door to the orchard. And sweeping lawns where we would sit out in big deck chairs and everything when we had people and it was very pleasant.

Angela, why is the house historically important?

I think,really, being built at the time it was and obviously there were previous dwellings there, or a dwelling that we may not have known about, because as we know it was inhabited quite early - certainly as early as 1840. So, it's a part of extended Sydney, which was very important to the early times of the colony. And I think, too, people were able to have a block of land there. They might have had other professions - like one guy was a chemist in the early days, but they also liked to have their plot of dirt and they were able to have vegetable patches, and chooks and possibly a cow for milk, horses to ride, that sort of thing. I think it was important in that it was a little enclave of farmland and still quite close to Parramatta, which was one of the main centres, I presume, at that time.

Dr. Rex Money with his pigs at Aberdoon 1954

OK, and what sort of activities did you do on the farm when you came?

Well, Dad used to like to give us little chores. One, for instance, would have been - he liked us to go around the property picking up stones and putting them into little cairns so he could come with the truck then and collect the stones, because under every stone grass would grow for the cattle, so that was the reason for that. We'd help, of course, with the chooks - we'd groom the horses, and we had to look after the horses - feed them, clean them, muck out the stable, do all that sort of thing. Mum also had a horse. We used to go riding quite a lot, we loved that. I got thrown a lot, unfortunately. I think I was a bit over adventurous, sometimes. Dad always included our boyfriends and husbands, and we had a lot of very happy times there, a lot of laughs because he was a workaholic, as I said, and very task-oriented, so it wasn't every boyfriend who wanted to spend his Sunday picking up stones or that sort of thing, even though the meal was always fabulous there was quite a lot to do.

What kind of food did you eat on the farm, and how much of it was home-grown?

We always had our own veggies. Mum loved growing vegetables, usually in conjunction with the caretaker or the Manager, as we called them. Particularly with the wives, Mum always had her veggie plots near their house which was quite close to our house. We had our own fruit from the orchard. We had our own eggs. We had our own milk. And, depending on who was in the cottage at that time, in the manager's cottage, we would have cream and butter. We'd bring home the eggs every weekend and Mum had a regular group of people to whom she sold the eggs, and they were friends, and they'd come and collect them. And Dad loved his egg money, more than any other income from his surgery or anything. He really loved his egg money. He always mad sure that... "Have you got the egg money from them Nop" if he heard them coming. And from us too. We got no free eggs. It was very funny.

Patrick White milking cow at his property Dogwoods, Showground Rd Castle Hill in 1950s

We did. We had a lot of visitors, again, of different nationalities, particularly if there was a Neurosurgical Congress in Sydney, Dad used to bring the people there to show them a bit of the countryside, what early New South Wales was like. And, of course, it was very close to historic towns, which I forgot to mention, like Richmond and Windsor, so that was very interesting. We'd often  make an excursion there. And French people would come. They just loved it. They loved the open air, and the farm, and the paddocks and the riding. And then also we'd have people from the area, I mean Patrick White and his friend Manoly Lascaris, I think his last name is. They had a lovely house (called Dogwoods) I remember very well at Castle Hill with an orchard too, on the main road (Showground Road), actually. And they would come over. Mum and Dad knew them. And then we also had people down the road in the old coaching house on Windsor Road (now the Mean Fiddler), which I think later became a pub and has had various incarnations as a pub and a dance hall and that sort of thing. The Binns (?), they bred King Charles Spaniels, and they were also friends of Patrick and Manoly's, and I remember Patrick coming to dinner at our house and sitting up at the bar. And he was charming and sweet to us as kids, and we visited him as well. And he let us play outside, and they had lovely dogs themselves. I think they used to bring the dogs with them, actually. There were a lot of people - we had the Mexican Consul, who was a friend of Dad's, Carlos Sellarpa (?) and his family. She was Australian, a lovely woman, Mrs Sellarpa. And they asked us always to their Mexican National Day picnics and barbecues and we had wonderful Mariachi music and that sort of thing there, and that was close - that was at Dural. So, socially we were mixing with people around Dural, Castle Hill, Rouse Hill, Kenthurst, possibly.

And how was Rouse Hill regarded by the rest of Sydney population?

Well, no-one knew about it. Rouse Hill was a non-entity, totally. I mean, there was a little shop. There was a pretty little church which Dad supported to keep it going, financially, and we went to occasionally. And there was a beautiful old graveyard which still, thank god, is there, incorporated into the housing estate. But no-one knew Rouse Hill. It was totally unknown and unfashionable.

Was it regarded as "the country"?

Yes, it was regarded as the country. Of course when I say totally unknown, that's not quite true, because Rouse (Hill) House is opposite our house on the other side of Windsor Road, and, of course, that is a famous Georgian very large home, belonging to the Rouse family I imagine... the Terry family. It wasn't open to the public, it was still a private home belonging to the Terrys. So that was known of, but, of course, not being open, it was only a few people who would have known the family there.

Right. Sounds like you had a very interesting, stimulating time there?

Oh, we were never bored, and Mum was a huge reader. Dad only read Thrillers or Medical journals. But Mum was a huge reader, voracious reader. We had all the mags, we had Saturday Evening Post, Geographic, everything, Weekly, the lot. And we always got two newspapers every day, the Telegraph and the Herald, and we always got the Sunday papers. Didn't get the evening papers, but yeh, Mum really educated us a lot, I know that now...

Shops on north east corner of Mile End and Windsor Roads 1989

There was a butcher, but not until a good deal later. And a fabulous big fruit shop, which is still there and, funnily enough, I now work as a volunteer, he's on salary, but I now work at an Environment Centre with the son of the owners of that fruit shop, which is wonderful... every time I see Antonea Lazaro (?), I'm really thrilled, because his parents I remember extremely well - very hard working Italian people who had a fabulous shop. There was a butcher nearby but that was in later days, that was in the 70's, probably, and 80's.

So how many so-called "ethnic" people were around?

Quite a few, because I've remembered since you were here last, Frank, that we had Central European people who had come out probably as stateless people after the Second World War in that huge migration wave and they were from Estonia and Latvia, and I now know that there were a lot of those people. And they had farms where they made their living nearby. But we didn't really meet them very much, but I have since found out people whose parents did that. That I've met since.

And there were Italians that you've already mentioned?

Yes, there were Italians.

Were there any Chinese or Greeks or any of those nationalities?

Don't remember any Chinese or Greeks, no. Riverstone was totally Anglo-Saxon from memory, and that was our nearest big town. It wasn't a big town then, it was a village, but very Anglo-Saxon. There was a meat abattoir there, where the horsies used to go. We used to have to avert our eyes when we passed it because it was the knackery for the horses.

Now you were lucky in having a telephone, weren't you?

We did, but it was an exchange telephone, so we had to be a bit careful what we said. We always thought maybe it was being listened to. Yes it was a dial... we were put through by an operator. But it was pretty good to have one.

Party line was it?

Yeh. Of course we had no water. Until the day the farm was sold, we had no town water. We had wells and tanks.

View from front of Aberdoon House looking north west 1991

Now, I believe that various parts of the farm were sold off in time.

That's right.

Can you tell me about that?

Well, the first sale would have been to Hooker's Real Estate Agency in about '73. And Hookers subsequently had a very bad time, as I remember, I'm not quite sure what the outcome was but they found themselves in a sort of property crash, I suppose. And they just hung onto that, which was so lucky for us, because they'd bought quite a few acres. I think, from memory between 30 and 40 acres at least. But, because they weren't able to subdivide and do the things they wanted to do, I'm not sure if it was only because they were bad times or whether it was the property laws of the time, we still had that land that we could use, and we had horses on adjistment there and Dad paid Hookers a certain amount for the use of the land but it just kept as an extension of our property for many many years. Eventually, of course, the urban sprawl reached Rouse Hill under the Carr government, and we had no option... we were told that our land would be commandeered by Council, by the Department of Education, by the Department of Main Roads as part of the Rouse Hill development plan. At market price - it was fair, but we had no option. There was a section, my sister and I were able to sell after Mum died - to private interests, but the rest of it went to these different entities.

And of course there was a school built on the land, was there?

Yes, there was. The Department of Education. The first sale my sister and I had after Mum died was to the Department of Education, and they held onto it for many years, so we still had the view of it. Actually Mum had the view too, she was still alive, I think, at that time. But eventually, yes, a beautiful Primary School was built there, and it was very close to the house, actually, but very, very nicely done, with masses of native vegetation around it. The house itself is a Community Centre, Art Gallery and cafe, and they've done a beautiful job on preserving the house - it's different inside, but it's still very nice. The outside they've improved enormously and looked after beautifully. And then they've built a very modern Community Centre which has (actually being negotiated) early childhood, meals on wheels, all the usual things that one finds in a Community Centre. And although it's modern, it's still not too obvious. And then they've kept a beautiful park, with a sculpture park, and the original dam is a water feature.

So this is now managed by the Council?

Yes.

Are you happy with the way they...?

Oh yes, they've done a wonderful job, wonderful.

So how do you feel when you walk back into that house where you actually grew up and spent so many years...?

Mmm, it's very strange. Such a strange feeling, and of course it does look different - they've taken down all the wallpapers and they've repainted and they've kept the wooden floors, I hope. I'm pretty sure they did. The last time I went inside the house was around 2003 (actually 30th November 2003) when my sister and I went for the launch of the Community Centre, and it is very very nice. They've put on a big front veranda so we don't really recognise that very much. The cafe is excellent - they've got a commercial kitchen, so our kitchen is not what we remember at all, it's all changed both physically and what comes out of it. The Art Gallery - the bedrooms are used as a gallery. The sitting room's part of the cafe. The patio is cafe's too. There are tables and chairs in the garden which is very nice. But I have a lot of sort of quivvers about happy times there, but I don't really have any regrets. I just remember the good times.