Woodlands

Roads and rural properties

At the meeting of Wombeyan Caves Road and Spring Hill Road, Woodlands opens a way west from Mittagong towards High Range and the old shale-mining community of Joadja. Its farms, families and roads carry stories of a district connected by journeys through the hills.^[4]

An 1893 auction plan offers another view of a place called Woodlands. It shows numbered lots and a homestead, roads towards Mittagong and Bowral, and a tramway towards Joadja. The plan records how the estate was offered for sale; later plans and titles are needed to establish how its boundaries relate to today’s Woodlands locality or what happened to each block.^[7]

The council’s 2023 heritage evidence sheet describes Leicester Park, a stone house in a rural setting, and associates it with Charles Robert Loseby and his family. Local historian Linda Emery’s research notes, reproduced in the study, identify Charles as a son of Thomas Loseby, who arrived in Australia with the army in 1832; the family came from Leicestershire. The notes suggest, but do not establish, that Thomas may have obtained the Woodlands land. The Society’s archive holds further Loseby material for researchers.^[3]

The evidence sheet discusses a separate slab building, but the subsequent 2024 peer review cautions against identifying the reconstructed building as a heritage item in its own right. Its date and history need further investigation. Leicester Park is a private property; its inclusion here is for historical research and does not imply public access.^[3][4]

The Morris family’s Woodlands property appears in a newspaper account of a tragic 1891 accident. Philip Morton’s Society article identifies John and Elizabeth Morris’s property on the Berrima Road south of Mittagong, near the Wombeyan Caves turnoff, and recounts the death of their son Michael after a tree fell on him. It is a family-history lead for the district; the precise boundaries of the historical property and modern locality should be checked separately.^[5]

Community records and further history

A local source for community and emergency-service history is History and Memories of the Woodlands Volunteer Rural Fire Brigade 1952-2022. Carolyn Dougherty’s list of 2022 additions records it in the Society library at shelf reference 13/293; the book itself should be consulted for the brigade’s history.^[6]

Parish maps, property records, newspaper notices and family papers offer ways to follow the people who lived and worked among these farms and to see how the district changed around them.