Baronda is a heritage-listed former holiday house in the Mimosa Rocks National Park on the South Coast of New South Wales, Australia. Located on Nelson Lake Road at Nelson Lagoon near the village of Tanja, it was designed by Graeme Gunn and built from 1968 to 1969 by Kingsley Koellner (builder) and Hamish Ramsay (structural engineer). It is also known as Yencken House, Baronda Holiday House and Graeme Gunn-designed house. The property is owned by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 29 November 2013.
History Aboriginal land The far south coast of NSW was relatively densely populated by indigenous people, probably because of the abundant food sources obtainable from both land and sea. Separate cultural group stypically occupied each coastal valley, which were separated by steep forested hills with the Great Dividing Range forming a natural western boundary. The Bega Valley, where Baronda is situated, is associated with the Djiringanj people. Perhaps because of their relatively small traditional lands and the regularity of food supplies, the people of the south coast were generally less mobile than the Aboriginal people who lived in the interiorHeritage Office, 1996
The first known contact between the indigenous people of this region and Europeans came as a result of the shipwreck of the Sydney Cove in early 1797. The ship originally foundered near Preservation Island off the east coast of Tasmania. A group of 17 sailors who set out for help in a row boat headed for Sydney were soon shipwrecked again, on the mid Victorian coast. They had little choice but to try to walk to Sydney, following the coast line. Only two of the 17 sailors survived this arduous trip. An account of their travels survives in the diary of the chief mate Mr W. Clark and was published in the Historical Records of Australia.Clark, 1895 The account describes many meetings between the sailors and coastal Aboriginal people they met on their journey, mostly friendly, some hostile. It has been suggested that one of the hostile encounters took place at Baronda when the Europeans stumbled into a sacred men's site resulting in the death of one of the sailors.Moore, 2013
In 1798, an "amiable exchange of snacks" was recorded in the region, between Matthew Matthew Flinders and a middle aged indigenous man at Snug Cove in Twofold Bay near Eden. A later meeting at Snug Cove in 1803 resulted in violence, as did encounters to the north at Batemans Bay in 1808 and 1821. By the 1840s many Aboriginal men were working as agricultural labourers while Aboriginal women were being employed as domestic servants and often bearing the children of the occupiers. There were relatively good relations between white and Aboriginal workers in the whaling industry at Twofold Bay which meant that "local groups escaped the decimation which accompanied the progress of the pastoral frontier and enabled a certain continuity of traditional culture and social structure to be maintained".Pearson, 1985, p20 quoted in Heritage Office, 1996, p165
Colonial and post colonial land ownership In 1843 the former convict Fred Moon commenced farming sheep at the mouth of the Bega River near Baronda, on land that would later become known as "Riverview". Soon afterwards, in 1846, George Nelson and Jack Hayden constructed a hut at Nelson Lagoon with the aim of establishing a cattle grazing operation.NGH, 2010
With the establishment of pastoral properties in the Bega Valley, land was being partitioned and sold for grazing or for orchards and gardens. The hinterland forests were logged for railway sleepers, pulpwood or sawlogs, native wildlife was hunted and creek lines scoured for gold. Later, holiday houses replaced huts and farmhouses. Former farms are now marked by clearings or regenerating bushland, fence lines or dams, weeds or ornamental plantings. Historic houses survive in some places, though in others they persist only as ruins.DECCW 2009 cited in NGH, 2010
The passage of the Crown Lands Alienation Act 1861 resulted in closer and more intensive settlement in the area. Between 1861 and 1878, more than 50 people selected land in the Nelson area and beyond. By the 1890s, virtually all of the coastal land between the Bega River and Goalen Head had been surveyed into portions and sold. At Bithry Inlet, and on the better soils around Goalen Head, the land was cleared and converted to dairy farms.
In 1872, the discovery of half an ounce of gold in a gully at Nelson Creek triggered a frenetic, albeit localised, gold rush. The valleys of Nelson and Sandy Creeks were quickly covered in mining claims and small quantities of alluvial gold were found. In the headwaters of Nelson Creek (also known as Diggers Creek), the miners excavated a race that diverted the flow of the creek, allowing the actual bed of the creek to be dug up in the search for gold. The activity in the district was sufficient for the Tanja/Nelson Goldfield to be declared the Dromedary Gold Field Extension South in 1879.Jacques 2005 referred to in NGH, 2010
In 1886, the first oyster lease was issued for Nelson Lagoon. Mimosa Rocks National Park now protects most of the catchment of Nelson Creek, which is the principal tributary of Nelson Lagoon. Maintaining high water quality in the creek is vital to the health of the lagoon and this important oyster-growing area.
Historical records indicate that early settlers Thomas and William Russell owned the land to the south of Nelson Lagoon (also known historically as Nelson Lake and Baronda Lake). The earliest Parish Map available from 1896 shows that William Russell had the 75 acres (30 hectares) of land that was to be later owned by David Yencken and then incorporated into the park. Just to the south, William's brother Thomas Russell had adjoining land. They were sons of Thomas and Margaret Russell, originally from County Donegal, Ireland.
William Russell died in 1919 and Thomas Russell in 1952. Records from 1914 indicate a change in occupation with Henry Augustus Otton (born in 1838 in Wollongong), now owning the land formerly owned by William Russell. Otton's wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter of influential explorer, early settler and land owner in the Bega district, John Jauncey. By 1924, the Nelson Lagoon land was still shown as owned by Henry Otton although he had died in 1915 at his substantial property "Ottonville" near Bega. It is likely the land remained with the Otton family until at least 1934.
By the time David Yencken purchased the property in 1965, it was owned by a Mr Angus (first name unknown) who lived in the Mittagong area at the time. The settlement for the original 75 acres (30 hectares) of Portion 171 took place on 5 July 1965. Yencken had been looking for an "untouched" site, of "virgin bush".Tonkin, 2010, 130 Despite its long history of freehold ownership, there is no remaining evidence that the lot had been cleared or occupied before Yencken's purchase.
The Yencken purchase was part of a new pattern of occupation of this region. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a number of prominent individuals from Melbourne bought a series of properties along the Mimosa Rocks coastline for the development of holiday houses. Penders at Bithry Inlet, for example, was bought by Sir Roy Grounds and Ken Myer. The "Araganui" property at Aragunnu Bay was acquired by Mr Kenneth Begg and the "Ness" property on the northern side of the mouth of Wapengo Lake was bought by Professor Manning Clark. Several of these new landowners soon initiated a local tradition of philanthropy in which they donated their lands to the park.DECCW 2009, quoted in NGH, 2010
Pole beam timber architecture In Australia, log cabin techniques and pole frame construction have been used since European occupation commenced in 1788. Throughout the 19th century, the use of poles and logs was extensive, first in house construction, but more frequently and with increasing sophistication in agricultural buildings and bridge structures. The use of log cabin construction diminished over the years as it was found that the hardness of the Australian timbers made such construction difficult. It was within the realm of high style architect-designed buildings that poles first made a reappearance in the 1930s, in the domestic architecture of Melbourne architect Roy Grounds.JSHC 2002, referred to in NGH, 2010
The use of poles in the verandah and walkway columns of the Black Dolphin Motel, Merimbula, in 1958 was unusual at that time. Commissioned by David Yencken and designed by the acclaimed Melbourne architect Robin Boyd, the Black Dolphin also made use of unadorned brick panels and glazed infill. The use of such materials was part of a critical reaction against the polished and machine-inspired architecture of the 1950s. This was an aesthetic shift that was paralleled internationally by the rise of "New Brutalism", the move to natural and unadorned materials and honestly expressed structure.JSHC 2002 Roy Grounds' designs for the Barn and Myer House in the early 1960s nearby at Penders was another expression of this new aesthetic direction.
Baronda residence
In 1968, David Yencken commissioned Graeme Gunn, project architect on Robin Boyd's Black Dolphin Motel, to design a holiday house at Nelson Lagoon. Completed in 1969, it was called Baronda, presumably after a nearby geographical feature, Baronda Head. Peter Tonkin explains Yencken's purchase of the property and genesis of the design: 'Following [his work in developing] the Black Dolphin, David [Yencken] flew over the coast to find a remote, untouched parcel for a weekender. He negotiated for the purchase of the thirty-hectare site, nestled on an estuary near a surf beach, with virgin bush for miles around. . . The brief was for a simple two-bedroom house with the capacity to accommodate much larger groups in a sleep-out. After considerable "sweat", Graeme reached the design relatively quickly, producing sketches of a complex but resolved spiral of spaces reaching out to the landscape from a firm masonry core. While considerably larger than the brief, the design captivated the client - in David's words, "It had to be built!" and the work proceeded'.
In a letter supporting the SHR listing of Baronda on the SHR, David Yencken further described the genesis of the design for Baronda: 'When in 1967 I commissioned architect Graeme Gunn to design a house on land I had recently bought on Nelson Inlet just north of Tathra, both of us recognised that the site was of exceptional beauty, far beyond the ordinary, and thus deserved a work of real architectural significance as much as a functional dwelling. My then wife and I wanted a house that related to and was fully integrated into the bush setting of spotted gums and macrozamias that would surround it. We also wanted elevated living for views, a feeling of life among the trees and protection from sandflies. The brief was also clear about the limitations of our budget. 'The concept that Graeme brought back was for a structure that was at least double the size implied by the brief. In other circumstances I would have sent the concept drawings straight back and asked Graeme to redesign the house so that it would match our budget. But Graeme's concept was so imaginative and so compelling that we immediately decided that somehow or another the house had to be built.