The home of one of Elizabeth Macarthur’s daughters looks set to be relocated – to make way for coal mining.
According to this online article, The 1820s Ravensworth Homestead in the Hunter Valley, among the first agricultural properties in the area, is now in the way of a proposed expansion of the Glendell coal mine, which wants to extract an additional 140 million tonnes of coal from the site.
As a result, operator mining giant Glencore has offered to pay an estimated $20 million to fund a local plan to relocate the homestead, comprising five buildings of convict-hewn sandstone and a timber cottage, to the little village of Broke further south.
I guess the locals should be grateful they’re not dealing with Rio Tinto, who would just blow the whole thing up… Or perhaps they only do that to Indigenous sites that are 46,000 years old. Anyhoo.
There’s some more interesting photos in the article but that’s about it for historical value. For the record, Mary Macarthur (unnamed in this article) was married to Dr Bowman. Not Bowen. And he was an arse.
If you’d like to know how much of an arse, try this piece I wrote a few years ago.
The indifference of Australians to their history is staggering. We are home to the world’s oldest continuous civilization and we go helter skelter to remove all evidence. Rio’s latest atrocity. Public good guy Andrew Forrest fighting native title in the High Court. The ongoing tragedy of Burrup Penninsula. And that’s just WA. We are all Taliban.