TACKLING the restoration of an historic homestead is done for the love of it not the money, and that’s proven the case for Deanna and Tony Sanders.
The couple bought historic Bomera Station, located at the foot of the Warrumbungle range north of Coolah and east of Coonabarabran in the Premer district, in 2000 and spent most of the next decade slowing working on what was to become their home.
The property has special significance for Deanna, whose father Donald Deaton bought it in the early 1960s as his escape from Sydney.
At one time the Deaton family owned the Hotel Manly and the former Prince of Wales Hotel in George Street near Central Station, however, Donald always had a strong interest in farming.
Deanna described her father as “an early Pitt Street farmer” who spent much of his life hankering to own a property.
In his early years Donald had planned on a career in agriculture, even studying the subject at the former Hawkesbury Agricultural College at Richmond during the 1930s, however, when his father William became sick he had to put aside his agricultural dreams to take over the family business.
Despite how the cards were delt, Donald never lost the dream of country property ownership and in the early 1960s he bought Bomera Station.
Deanna and Tony have many happy memories of school holiday visits they and their young family made to the property during the 1980s.
When Donald bought “Bomera” it came with a rundown homestead.
“The homestead was pretty dilapidated, but my father decided to keep it,” Deanna said.
“It was left pretty much empty most of the time and we only ever used it for family visits.”
Like her father, Deanna’s husband Tony, a former Qantas pilot, spent much of his life harbouring an interest in agriculture sparked during his teenage years mixing with country boys as a day student at Brisbane Boys College.
So, when Deanna and Tony’s sons, Brett and Scott, also announced they was keen on a career in agriculture, it was an easy decision to make to buy “Bomera” following Donald’s death and begin rebuilding the homestead and property.
“Bomera” today consists of 1336 hectares (3300 acres), but when it was first opened up in the early 1830s the property was closer to 32,400ha (80,000ac) and spread as far as Cassillis to the south east.
The homestead is built of sandstone and timber (ironbark slabs and cypress pine frame), with both building materials cut from the property using convict labour – the convict cuts in the sandstone blocks on the exterior walls are still clearly evident today.
Deanna and Tony believe the original homestead buildings – comprising the former kitchen (now a dining room) and bedrooms – were built in the late 1840s at the direction of the property’s first owner James Hale.
As well as restoring the homestead, the Sanders have also pieced together some details of the property’s first owner.
Tony described Hale as an enterprising ticket-of-leave convict who rose to wealthy prominence and whose family held “Bomera” for more than 50 years.
A former “farmer’s boy”, Hale was about 20 when he was convicted in London of stealing and sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia, arriving on the Mariner in 1816.
At the completition of his sentence Hale was employed as an overseer and later became the licensee of a hotel at Windsor in the Hawkesbury Valley, north-west of Sydney.
He was also buying land west of the ranges, and by 1833 chose not to renew his inn-keepers’ license, instead deciding to concentrate on his growing pastoral interests which included “Bomera”.
Hale used a team of assigned convicts as well as builders brought in specifically to work on “Bomera” homestead.
Like many early inland homesteads, “Bomera” was purpose-built rather than architecturally designed, with successive owners making adjustments, “tacking bits on” and changing the building to suit their needs through the decades which followed, Tony said.
By the early 1960s when the Deaton family bought “Bomera” the homestead had a multi-peaked, leaky roofline consisting of seven different gutters which needed simplifying, and much of the wooden exterior had been painted a distinctive rusty red colour.
Tony and Deanna’s plan was to salvage as much as possible of the original building while converting it into a comfortable and practical home in which they could eventually live.