Berrima

A new town on the Great South Road

Berrima followed the earlier settlement at Bong Bong. In 1829 Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell selected a site beside the Wingecarribee while planning a new road from Sydney. In 1830 he instructed Robert Hoddle to lay out a town around a market place and the river; the plan was approved in 1831, the first lots were sold in 1833 and mail-coach traffic was drawn through the new settlement. Berrima was intended as the commercial and administrative centre of the County of Camden.^[12][16]

That plan remains unusually visible. Berrima is recognised as the district’s second settlement and the last largely intact Georgian-period town on mainland Australia. Berrima House dates from 1835, while the courthouse, gaol, churches, inns and Market Place still give the nineteenth-century plan a remarkable physical presence.^[13][14]

The road depended on a river crossing. David Lennox’s dressed-stone bridge opened in 1836, but floods swept away its upper section in 1857; a temporary timber replacement was itself lost in another flood in 1860. A timber truss bridge followed downstream; dressed sandstone blocks in the commemorative park are associated with the earlier bridge.^[30]

An 1841 plan catches the road’s early land speculation: it shows 28 numbered portions at Little Forest, a locality sketch and the road towards Sydney. The sheet records an intended offering along the newly formed Great South Road, even though its auctioneer and sale-date fields were left blank.^[41]

Land was still being laid out beyond the old town later in the century. A State Library catalogue records an 1890 plan of Berrima suburban and country portions, bounded in part by Nathan Street and the Great Southern Road.^[25]

Justice, inns and a colonial village

Berrima’s courthouse opened in 1838 after a difficult building process. Designed under Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis, it served the courts and later community purposes; the gaol, built in the 1830s, also passed through changing roles. Together they made Berrima a centre of colonial justice as well as a distinctive stone-built town.^[20][23]

George Paton helped bring the courthouse to completion as contractor and later superintendent. His initials survive on the building’s eastern side, linking Berrima’s troubled construction to the Sydney tradesman who later built the Hero of Waterloo hotel.^[31]

James and Mary Harper were among the early innkeepers. Their Surveyor General Inn and the family’s Harper’s Mansion became familiar parts of the young town; published accounts differ over whether the house dates from 1834 or the late 1830s, but both place it firmly within Berrima’s first decades.^[21][22]

Michael and Jane Doyle opened the Royal Mail Coach Hotel in 1839, later known as the White Horse Inn. It welcomed coaching travellers, became a private residence and regained the White Horse name in the 1970s. Nearby, Berrima District Council held its first meeting in the courthouse in September 1843; its plans for roads and services were limited by revenue, and the council ended in 1858.^[24][27]

Faith added another layer to the town. On the former stockade site south of the river, a hut donated by Charles Throsby became a chapel where Bishop John Bede Polding celebrated Mass in 1840, with a second hut used as a school. A church designed through Polding’s connection with Augustus Pugin was built in sandstone by William Munro, opened as St Scholastica in 1851 and was renamed St Francis Xavier in 1891.^[33]

Internment on the river

During the First World War, the former gaol became an internment camp for more than 300 German mariners between 1915 and 1919. They were separated from their families and ordinary lives, confined at night and allowed only limited movement by day, yet made gardens, huts and small boats along the Wingecarribee River.^[17][18]

The courthouse became part of the camp too. Its courtroom served as a reading room and place for church services, other rooms held lessons and club activities, and a small group of internees lived in rear rooms. Edmond Samuels, an officer of the guard, recorded roll calls, daytime parole and riverbank life in his diary, offering one contemporary view of the camp.^[26][28]

The camp’s history now survives in photographs, diaries, theatrical images, family memories and objects. A zither given by internee Karl Pfingst to local musician Evelyn Welch carries one personal connection beyond the camp; the museum’s Stortebeker canoe, found after flooding in 1978 and displayed from 1980, preserves another river story.^[32][36][39]

Roadside trade, gardens and later Berrima

The old road adapted to motor traffic. Fred Simons opened the Star Service Station as a roadside kiosk in the 1920s, with hand-operated petrol pumps and refreshments. By 1940 he had built a general store and service station between the post office and Surveyor General Inn, adding a new road-age chapter to the village economy.^[38]

The Crowe family’s Berrima Bridge Nurseries shaped gardens across the Highlands from 1943. Claude and Isobel Crowe supplied plants and advice from Jellore Street; hand propagation and a river-fed irrigation system supported later expansion across the river, and their son Noel took the work on to Robertson. Accounts differ on whether the business closed in 2000 or 2003, but its plans and garden designs survive as part of the district’s landscape history.^[34][36]

A sandstone marker on Berrima’s northern approach simply reads ‘A Man Killed Here 1837’. Its story has never been securely established, but the stone itself became a local cause: Deborah Winchcombe drew attention to its weathering in 1961, Claude Lee recut the lettering and road widening moved it in 1963.^[29]

Steam and collecting brought Berrima’s past into public view. The 2010 Megaethon 150 road run recalled an early steam-powered Sydney-Goulburn journey and a 1911 Fowler traction engine used for the re-enactment, not the original early Sydney-Goulburn vehicle. The Society museum at 1a Market Place opened to visitors on 4 December 1976; its fiftieth-anniversary exhibition in 2026 makes the museum itself part of the town’s later history.^[15][37]

Berrima’s records continue beyond its buildings. The Kevin Herring Collection, received by the Society in 2012, gathers papers on land acquisitions and the people involved, adding another layer to the story of a town that has long been read through roads, river crossings, homes and the traces its residents left behind. Contact the archives to confirm the collection’s present scope and access.^[35]