Witches Houses of Annandale
Claremont and Kenilworth Witches Houses in a quilt panel made by the Annandale Association’s Betty Mason. Source: Inner West Libraries
The Witches Houses and The Abbey (right), around 1890.
Image source: Sydney Living Museums, Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection
The Ivory Rose is a timeslip gothic ghost story set in a fictional Witches Houses in the 1890s, written for middle readers by Belinda Murrell.
A group of spooky homes in Sydney’s inner west are an unmissable landmark.
How did these gothic mansions get here?
What school song are they in?
Why might they be Australia’s ‘first real estate display homes’?
How did they become the setting for a best-selling YA novel?
Show Notes
First Nations people please be advised this episode summary includes racially discriminating moments in history, including the distress and death of First Nations people.
Welcome
By Deborah Lennis, D’harawal woman, local Elder, and cultural advisor at Inner West Council.
What are the Witches Houses?
The Witches Houses are at 258-272 Johnston Street Annandale. While all the houses are not intact, their sandstone gates and name plaques are.
The Witches Houses in the Annandale North Primary School song [2:40]
Annandale North Primary School is down the road from the Witches Houses.
Assistant Principal Jane Fox says the the houses are such a local landmark that they were written into the school song in the school’s centenary in 2007, by Penny Biggins.
The song is sung at every school event.
The lyrics of the first verse are
Hockingdon Kenilworth Highroyd and Claremont.
Link us to the past while we're living in today.
One community strong and caring,
Annandale North on the hill, near the bay.
Assistant Principal at Annandale North Primary School, Jane Fox, talks about their school song. She then sings it, including the lyrics about the Witches Houses.
Why their name?
They’re called the Witches Houses because of their pointy spires, which look like witches hats.
Local and personal landmarks
Vanessa Berry is a writer and artist who works with history, memory and archives. One of her books is Mirror Sydney: An atlas of reflections.
Vanessa says that the Witches Houses seem “like they've been dropped in from, from the pages of a fairy tale or at least from some other world. They have a storybook quality about them. “
They are personal landmarks that she looks for whenever she goes by.
“There's a lot of places that are like that for me. Some of them are fairly mundane and other ones are more striking. I navigate places through these personal landmarks.
I think a lot of people do that. We have places that are significant to us or ones that we just find interesting aesthetically. That's one of the ways that we connect with place — by making these personal maps of landmarks that mean something to us.”
Inspiration for a Gothic ghost story
Belinda Murrell is an award-winning, internationally published author who’s written over 35 books for kids and teenagers.
When she was visiting her sister in Annandale over a decade ago, Belinda would drive by the houses.
“I was just so inspired by the architecture. It was just so incredibly gothic and just was really fascinated by the buildings. And I thought, Oh yes, this would make a great place to set a story about a haunted house.”
Belinda Murrell, author of The Ivory Rose.
The Ivory Rose by Belinda Murrell
That story became The Ivory Rose, published by Penguin in 2015. Belinda describes the Ivory Rose as the story of a modern day girl called Jemma, who’s just landed a new babysitting job.
Jemma is babysitting a little girl called Sammy, who lives in a big, old house. It's one of the Witches Houses of Annandale. The house is really old and run down and decrepit and spooky, and all the neighbourhood kids think that this house is haunted. It's supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a little girl who was murdered over a hundred years ago.
One day Jemma discovers an ivory rose charm. As she touches it she sees a terrifying flashback. Is it the moment the ghost girl was murdered? Jemma runs away but tumbles down the stairs. She wakes up in 1895, unable to get home.
The Witches Houses are on Gadigal country
Colonial records of the original landscape describe stringy bark trees, blackbutts and red gums of “enormous size”. The Eora women used the shallow bays near Annandale for fishing in their nawi, or canoes. The women fished in all weather and times of day, and sung as they paddled the water. They had extraordinary skills in fishing, canoeing, swimming and diving.
Annandale and the Frontier Wars
The suburb of Annandale was close to the 1788 Sydney Cove camp of the British colonists.
Dr Stephen Gapps uses journals of the First Fleet’s officers to piece together what was going on in the inner west at this time - a mix of communication and miscommunication, exchange, and conflict between the Sydney Aboriginal people and the colonists. Dr Gapps is a historian, and museum curator. He has a particular interest in the Frontier Wars, and is the author of The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the early colony 1788-1817.
Stephen Gapps: Going back to Lieutenant Bradley's journal, you see a pattern that builds during 1788.
And you see that the conflict is not just about convicts taking Aboriginal people's possessions, such as canoes to use for their rush cutting. The conflict becomes much more determined, I suppose.
Where the colonists and Bradley are writing that people are standing on the foreshores around here, um, further up the Harbour as well, towards, towards Ryde. And they're throwing spears at anyone who turns up. So this, this increasing conflict, occurs.
The incredibly terrible thing that happens is the smallpox epidemic in 1789. So almost just a year after the colonists are here, conflict is building up to a point, which we don't know what might've happened and then suddenly smallpox hits. And so the Aboriginal population is decimated by at least 50%, if not 80% potentially.
So imagine all around the inner west, the colonists describing dead bodies lying on the beaches in caves, around the foreshores hundreds and hundreds of people.
Imagine what would have happened here if smallpox hadn't occurred. Looking at Bradley's journal, you just see the conflict escalating to a point where I think the colonists would have been forced to either be very serious, like get serious about the military or have some kind of formal negotiations potentially, but that didn't occur as we know.
Middens as landmarks
A local landmark of pre-colonial times would have been middens on the Annandale and Rozelle foreshore. A 'midden' is an occupation site where Aboriginal people left the remains of their meals.
Along the inner west foreshores, middens often contain oyster shells and other seafood shells. Stephen Gapps says middens had other significance for Aboriginal people as well, and weren't just rubbish piles of discarded shells. Middens were often huge piles that have been described as almost artistic sculptures.
Dr Gapps says that middens would have been a ‘significant element on the landscape.’
“The Europeans often missed the landscape. They missed the artwork. They missed the incredibly detailed presence of Aboriginal people. They just saw it as bush to be conquered.”
1790s land grants
The land of the current suburbs of Annandale and Stanmore was taken from the Eora people and given to a First Fleeter, Captain George Johston, in a series of land grants between 1793 and 1799.
Compared to the rest of inner Sydney, this rocky area pretty much stayed as farmland for a hundred years.
Huge real estate deal
The development of North Annandale was actually the largest transaction of freehold property ever made in the Australian colonies to 1877. North Annandale Estate, as the area was now known, was bought by architect John Young for around 120,000 pounds - at least $15 million today.
By John Henry Harvey Image source: State Library of Victoria [H13953 p15 (detail)] (Album of views of Victoria, New South Wales, and Tasmania c1890-1910). This photo is taken from a Balmain tram.
‘The great builder Australia has ever had’
John Young emigrated to Australia in 1856, after working as a builder and architect on big projects in the UK. In 1973, he was founding president of the NSW Builders and Contractors Association of NSW (now known as the Master Builders Association). According to AURA Volume 1, John Young was ‘known for his extraordinary energy and sound work completed ahead of schedule.’
1877 North Annandale as a model township
“Robert Johnston had the concept of a model township and the finance, while John Young had the practical skills as an entrepreneur and developer, both contributing to the realisation of the North Annandale we know today.” (AURA Volume 1)
As author Belinda Murrells says, “He wanted to create this amazing estate for very wealthy people. He was envisaging it being like a Double Bay. “
John Young created Annandale Estate, with big blocks and a wide main road down the centre, Johnston Street.
AURA Journal co-author and former Witches House resident Norma Perry says that Johston Street was made wider to match with width of Parramatta road. “That's why it looks so grand.”
1890 the Witches Houses are built
With the exception of Oybin which is designed and built by Charles Blackmann, John Young builds the houses that become known as the Witches Houses. Six houses are built as pairs of ‘twins’ and Oybin at the end, next to The Abbey, also built by John Young.
Claremont and Kenilworth
Highroyd and Hockingdon
Greba and Rozelle.
Author Belinda Murrell describes the houses as “beautifully over the top” with “turrets and gargoyles and lions and towers.”
Image source: Sardaka (talk) on WikiMedia Commons
Australia’s first ‘display homes’
Norma Perry argues that the Witches Houses were Australia’s first display homes.
“John Young was deeply involved in the development of each of those houses - display home,” she says.
“That's the term that you can use for the Witches Houses because they were a real range of styles and images that were available there.” She says they were deliberately designed in various styles that catered to everybody’s tastes, and to inspire prospective buyers of vacant blocks on the estate.
1890s Depression
While the nearby factories on Annandale and Glebe foreshore didn’t help the marketing of Annandale Estate to wealthy buyers, it was the Depression of the 1890s that saw John Young’s vision of a ‘model township’ hit the dust.
He divided the large blocks into much, much smaller blocks, and he sold them off for working class cottages. Author Belinda Murrell describes the scene as a “grand swathe of huge historic mansions like hens with little chicks all around them, these tiny little workers cottages.”
Famous resident - Sir Henry Parkes
The Father of Federation himself, and former premier of New South Wales Sir Henry Parkes lived and died in the Kenilworth Witches Houses. He even named his son after the house.
Image source: Pinterest. Original unknown.
262-268 Johnston Street, Annandale. The Witches Houses of Kenilworth, Highroyd, Hockingdon, Greba. Image source: Annandale – Buildings file in Inner West Libraries, Leichhardt Local History collection via Local Notes.
Betty Mason and the Annandale Association
A citizens action group was formed by Annandale resident Betty Mason and others to protect local heritage. As Betty Mason explains in this community radio program from 1977, “the immediate reason [they formed] was the application to council to demolish two of the houses in the witch house group in Johnson street and to erect to eight story blocks of flats.”
Their lobbying prevented the demolition of one Witches House but Rozelle was demolished for flats, as well as land acquired from the property of Oybin.
The Annandale Association successfully lobbied against the demolition of other historic buildings, and stopped two expressways ploughing through Annandale.
When Betty Mason died the National Trust honoured her, saying she “continued to promote and protect the wealth of heritage listed buildings in the area until she was well into her final years.”
A symbol of Betty Mason’s love for the heritage of Annandale is a quilt that she made, with fabric illustrations including a Witches House.
Heritage of Annandale quilt hand sewn by activist Betty Mason of the Annandale Association. The Witches Houses are the top right corner panel. Source: Inner West Libraries
In 1968, Claremont was demolished and replaced with more flats.
By the early seventies, five of the Witches Houses now remained - Kenilworth, Oybin, Highroyd, Hockingdon and Greba.
Witches Houses are chopped into flats in the 1970s
Elizabeth Rankin lived in the Witches Houses in the 1970s. She said it wasn’t quite a boarding house, but the flats to rent were “all in a state of fairly significant disrepair, but it was very cheap.” Her flat was up 90 stairs and “probably the whole thing was about a size of a bedroom with a bathroom across the hall.”
The name The Witches Houses
Author Vanessa Berry points out that witch is a very powerful word.
“And so when it's spoken or when you read it, it is really powerful just in terms of its associations, the history of that word. The different interpretations of that word. There's a sense of presence with the word.
So Witches House seems like a strong and powerful place. Whether or not you want to think it's a magical power or not, it's still a really strong name.
And it all adds to the mythology of these houses. “
Detail of a gable on Highroyd Witches House. Image source: Sardaka on Wikipedia
Detail of gargoyles on Highroyd Witches Houses. Image source: Sardaka on Wikipedia
Highroyd Witches House. Image source: Adam.W.J.C on Wikipedia
Links
Annandale on the Web: Anecdotal History from Aboriginal Australia to 2022, including the series of Annandale Short Historical Walks paperbacks and eBooks by Marghanita da Cruz.
Annandale Industrial: seeks to trace the non-residential uses of existing buildings and to answer the question you might ask as you do an evening stroll: “I wonder what that old building used to be?”.
National Trust: Remembering Betty Mason and the heritage battle for Annandale
Honi Soit: the wicked witches of the Inner-West