Middenbury House

Description

Middenbury House is a single-storey brick house with a slate roof, overlooking the Brisbane River. The house is oriented to take advantage of the views and has timber verandahs on three sides. The interior includes fine cedarwood joinery, including folding doors enabling the large main room to be divided into two. Two fig trees from the original gardens remain on Coronation Drive.

History

The house was built for Eliza Mary Rogers and completed by December 1866. At the time, wealthy people were starting to build "villas" along the riverside and in other rural areas near the city where they could have larger houses. Rogers' house may have been named after Midanbury, a suburb of Southampton, England, which in turn was named for a house called Middenbury. After Rogers' death in 1875, it was first owned by her children and rented to a series of well-to-do tenants; in 1885 her son Frank subdivided the original 6 acres (2.4 ha) and retained the house and a little over 2.5 acres (1.0 ha). In 1891 it was bought by Tim O’Shea, a Brisbane merchant. His family owned the house until 1949; in 1920 they hosted the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII. They made various additions to the house, including an extension containing a bathroom and a study or additional bedroom, and a garage building with a room for a chauffeur, laid out a circular driveway, and created a tennis court in the garden.

After the deaths of the last members of the O'Shea family, the house and land were auctioned off and bought by the Webster family, who owned the Shingle Inn and Webster's Cake and Biscuit Company. In 1955 Accommodation Australia bought it and it became a boarding house. In 1957 the Commonwealth of Australia bought it and the Sidney House next door for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, now the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who demolished the Sidney House to build a television studio. They used the house and 1.5 hectares (3.7 acres) of land until 2006–07, when they vacated it after a high incidence of breast cancer was found among female employees; the site was declared free of radioactivity in 2010. To celebrate the ABC's first TV broadcast in Queensland on 2 November 1959, a reception for 500 guests was held at the house, but it was primarily used for offices and a canteen. The ABC built several buildings on the site and the original wooden service wing at the rear, the extension, and the outbuildings including the garage were demolished and almost all the gardens destroyed; the house was almost surrounded by a steep retaining wall.

Recognition

The building was listed by the National Trust of Queensland in 1968 as one of its first listings, and was later placed on the Brisbane City Council Heritage Register. It was included in the Queensland Historic Register after the Queensland Heritage Act came into force, but was removed in 2004 on legal advice since it was owned by the Australian Government and used for public purposes. When the ABC sold the Toowong site to Sunland Group in 2013, a condition of the sale was that an application be made to place the house on the Queensland Historic Register, and it was listed on the register on 18 July 2014. Sunland plans a high-rise residential development called Grace on Coronation; the house is to be preserved in a park setting and possibly used as a gallery or cafe.