Vaucluse House

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 September 1928, Page 9

Vaucluse House

ONCE HOME OF MAN WHO WANTED TO BE N.Z.’S GREATEST LANDED PROPRIETOR

HI-lOSE New Zealanders who have not visited Vaucluse House, the home of William Charles Wentworth, the great Australian statesman and patriot, at wistaria time, know not their Sydney. It is a part of Sydney, yet set apart—the old Sydney, the Sydney that we shall never again know. Such mansions are not built nowadays for many good reasons. In another week the wistaria vines will attract all good Sydney-siders, who once a year pay tribute to their greatest Australian leader. Even now they are a sight for the gods, their masses of heliotrope blossom almost concealing the front of the old homei in which the Constitution of a Commonwealth was dreamed and planned and eventually evolved. William Charles Wentworth, a man

. undoubtedly in advance of his time, ! has a peculiar interest for New Zealanders. Had not Governor Gipps refused to sanction a little deal that he had made in New Zealand, he vould have been the greatest landed proprietor on earth. In 1840 Wentworth purchased over 20,000,000 acres of Maoriland from seven Maori chiefs at a price, according to the Governor, equivalent to “one hundred acres for a farthing.” As one writer has remarked, this laii(l-liunger proposal seems preposterous, yet, as Judge Therry points out, the' purchase was on principle more “defensible than that effected at Port Phillip by Batman and his friends, who was ultimately compensated by the Government.” Wentworth’s purchase was not the only one of its kind in New Zealand, as every New Zealander well knows. Neither was he the only prospective purchaser to be disappointed. The Baron de Thierry, to the end of his days, was a disappointed man concerning the land deal that he endeavoured to confirm in the Hokianga district. On the floor of this beautiful old home, destined to be the Mecca of the

Australians of the future, one treads tiles from ancient Pompeii. Wentworth, when visiting Italy during the struggle for freedom, formed a friendship with both Garibaldi and Cavour. So grateful was the statesman for the Australian’s liberal assistance to the Italian cause, that he permitted him to purchase the Pompeian tiles that now decorate Vaucluse House.

The property came into the possession of Wentworth in the late ’2o’s. It was at one time owned by Sir Henry Brown Hayes, who named it Vaucluse. A romance has gathered around the name. While resident in Ireland, it is whispered, Sir Henry abducted a beautiful and high-spirited Quakeress named Mary Pike. Forced to flee from the wrath of the law, lie went to the Continent, to Vaucluse, or Vallis Clausa, a closed-in valley in the South of France. Yet it is considered more historic-

ally correct that Vaucluse was none other than* the family name attached to the family residence of the Hayes family in Cork. The tradition that Sir Henry encircled his new Australian home with soil from Ireland to repel unholy serpents has received partial confirmation in the alleged existence of a certain bill of lading. Wentworth lived at Vaucluse, originally a property of 500 acres, until 1883. He died in England in 1892 in his 79th year. As death approached he yearned to be buried beneath the rock upon which he was wont to sit and gaze upon the beauties' of Sydney harbour, and there, in a secluded nook of Vaucluse, he was laid to rest. Modern bungalows, however, have since intruded upon the eternal silence that once surrounded his mortal remains. The efforts of the double-tailed dragon, which guards the entrance to Wentworth’s mauso leum, credited with the power of warding off evil spirits, have been powerless against them.

What Kawau is to New Zealanders, and Aucklanders in particular, Vaucluse is to Sydney-siders and to Australians in general.

ERIC RAMSDEN.