16 Oxley Street, Glebe

By Lyn Collingwood, Bulletin 1/2024, March

The short length of Oxley Street was created in the 1870s and named for pioneering European explorer John Oxley. Ludwig Leichhardt and Edmund Kennedy had already been commemorated in the area. Kennedy Street has since been absorbed into Leichhardt Street. 

Part of an original Church grant, the land was owned by Alexander Brodie Spark and then Mary Chisholm (Mary Street was named for her), the wealthy widow of merchant and landholder James Bowman and a successful pastoralist and businesswoman in her own right. From 1872, her estate at Glebe was progressively sold to local builders such as William Jarrett, Ambrose Thornley and David Elphinstone. On 1 July 1875, the lot that became 16 Oxley Street, stretching to the water’s edge on Johnstons Bay, was bought by signwriter Alfred Robert Pullin. Pullin, who later patented a number of railway signalling devices before being declared bankrupt, did not keep the land for long. In 1876, he sold it to bedding manufacturer John Lawler and his wife Mary Ann. The latter died in 1882.

Eurimbla’s first owners

Louisa Ruth Preddey

In September 1884, Louisa Ruth née Hannam, the wife of gardener Lewis Edward Preddey, became the nominal purchaser of the land. On the site, the Preddeys built a house which they christened Eurimbla. It was occupied by March 1886 when their four-year-old son Claude Hannam died there. For decades, the house was known by its name, not its number.

Louisa Hannam was the granddaughter of convict Reuben Hannam who hailed from Wincanton in Somerset. Reuben made a good life for himself in Sydney as a government brickworks overseer, an honorary constable, a hotel licensee and the recipient of land grants at Campbelltown and Wolli Creek.

The fifth son of Margaret and George Preddey, Lewis, was baptised in Sydney in 1849. A migrant from Bath, George Preddey made a living by hiring drays and water carts before becoming a timber merchant. He died at the age of 72, ‘a gentleman’, at 2 Hereford Street in 1879 after falling from a buggy. His eldest son, Henry William, resided at Charles Street, Forest Lodge, at the time of his death in 1881. 

After their marriage in 1875, Louisa and Lewis lived in Westmoreland Street where newborn Ernest Claude died in 1877. The following year, three-month-old Stanley died at Derwent Street. He was buried in Rocky Point Cemetery, a graveyard in Kogarah. In 1886, Claude Hannam’s death was followed six months later by three-year-old Mary at 9 Beulah Terrace, Wigram Road. Of Lewis and Louisa’s seven children, only three survived childhood: Elsie (1880-1946), Ethel Emily Ruth (1891-1985) and Harrie Westgate (1897-1962).

Lewis Preddey was by 1889 living in Rockdale and acting and directing with the Bexley Amateur Dramatic Club. The decision to move may have been prompted by the unabating smell and water pollution generated by the Glebe Island abattoirs. Eurimbla was rented out to a series of tenants: artificial flower-maker August Ducasse; bankrupt agent Brisbane Doyle; Miss Florence Page; and ironmonger turned company director Walter Louis Victor Shaw, whose first wife died in the house in 1895. 

In 1896 Lewis and Louisa Preddey returned to Eurimbla for a short period before moving permanently into Wincanton, at 2 Leichhardt Street, which had been tenanted. In 1915, Lewis retired from his employment with the Royal Botanic Garden. He died, aged 74, on 21 June 1924 at Wincanton. His 93-year-old sister-in-law Phillis Hannam died there in 1931, and his widow on 16 June 1935. The family’s place of worship was St John’s Bishopthorpe, and their final resting place was Woronora Cemetery.

Lewis and Louisa Preddey owned Wincanton and its neighbour Kiaora. In 1943, both houses were advertised for sale. (In 1958, Mrs H K Gill of 4 Leichhardt Street won first prize in a State Lottery.)

Thomas Cowlishaw

In September 1904, Eurimbla was bought by shipping merchant Thomas Cowlishaw, a partner in Cowlishaw Brothers with interests in the Solomon Islands. He was also involved in coal mining in the Hunter region, and his land holdings included a block in the Forest Lodge Estate on the corner of Ross Street and St Johns Road. His father, Thomas snr, was an architect and a City of Sydney and Paddington alderman, and his elder brother James, who studied under Edmund Blacket, joined another brother, George, as J and G Cowlishaw architects in Brisbane. The family were active members of the Wesleyan Church. 

Thomas Cowlishaw died at Ashfield in 1907, leaving an estate of some £95,000, of which a third was in real estate. The Oxley Street property was inherited by his widow Catherine Chambers Cowlishaw and, after her death at Killara in 1918, by her son Reginald of the legal firm Robson & Cowlishaw. Reginald Cowlishaw, who owned extensive orchards at Mangrove Mountain, died in 1953 and was privately cremated. By then, 16 Oxley Street had been recently bought by Margaret Mary Carroll, ‘spinster’, of Glebe. 

The Cowlishaw family never lived at Eurimbla, but rented it out.

Eurimbla’s first tenants

Arthur and Amelia Gilder

Eurimbla’s tenants from 1889 to 1906 were Arthur Sherrington Gilder and Amelia Sarah “Minnie” née Anderson. After their marriage at St Phillip’s Church in 1886, the couple lived in Paddington before moving to Glebe. They worshipped at St John’s Bishopthorpe.

An employee of hardware firm Lassetter & Co., Arthur Gilder patented several inventions, including his ‘Australian Sanitary Garbage Bin’, impenetrable to rats and the ability to automatically sprinkle its stored rubbish with disinfectant. Another interest was fire safety; a frequent ‘letters to the editor’ writer on the subject, Gilder exhibited a model of a fire escape at the 1904 Sydney Easter Show.

In September 1906, Minnie Gilder died at Eurimbla and was buried in Camperdown Cemetery. Three months later, her widower sold the house’s contents, which included cedar and walnut furniture, and moved to Katoomba, where he married Edith Catherine Mary Potter in 1908. His second wife died in 1923, and Arthur, a ‘gentleman’, on 22 May 1932 at Chatswood. 

Daniel and Sarah Williams

By 1908, tram driver Daniel Williams and his family had moved into Eurimbla from Hampstead, two doors away at 12 Oxley Street. Daniel married Sarah Jane Powell in 1901; their daughters Margaret and Jane and son Daniel were born between 1901-5. Daniel Snr, aged 41, died at Eurimbla on 7 September 1914 and was buried in the Church of England section at Rookwood. He was a member of the United Ancient Order of Druids, Sydney Lodge no. 271.

Bertha and Winifred Perratt-Hill

Tramway employee Daniel Russell lived with his wife, Clara Agnes, at Eurimbla for a couple of years before Bertha Perratt-Hill moved in. During her tenancy, the house was known as Mayfield. Her stated profession was ‘literary’; Bertha was associated with the Society of Women Writers and occasional authors such as Ruth Geddes Crawford. In 1926, she applied for copyright on ‘Those Grey Blue Eyes’ and ‘Sun Rays of Love’ written in collaboration with Louis Grasset, but the poems appear not to have been published. 

Grasset, who lived at Tea Gardens, was involved in a bizarre court case in 1933 when he demanded the return of his Austral Lullaby, a copy of which he hoped to present to Princess Elizabeth. The designer of the sheet music covers refused to hand them back after Grasset paid him in cat skins, claiming they could be turned into an expensive fur coat for humans. To demonstrate their quality, Grasset produced an odorous white pelt from a newspaper parcel and flourished it before the magistrate.

Whether Grasset and Bertha Perratt-Hill were linked by felines as well as artistic expression is unknown. However, Bertha did breed and exhibit Siberian cats; her Siberian Queen was a prizewinner at the Royal Agricultural Society’s 1927 Championship Cat Show. 

Fellow tenant at 16 Oxley Street was Winifred Perratt-Hill, who had taught art at Ipswich Girls’ Grammar School from 1911 until at least 1918. During the First World War, she was Secretary of the Ipswich Patriotic Committee in association with the Soldiers’ Church of England Help Society. In 1921, after moving to Sydney, Winifred was appointed treasurer of the Society of Women Painters. She was also a member of the Happy Club Circle. Both Winifred and Bertha were long-time supporters of the Armenian Relief Fund. The women’s relationship has not been documented. 

Bertha Perratt-Hill was, by 1951, living at 72 Wentworth Park Road. She died, aged 80, on 7 November 1958, unmarried and intestate, and was interred at Rookwood. 

Sources: Australian Dictionary of Biography: James Cowlishaw entry; City of Sydney Aldermen website; First Families 2001 website; National Archives of Australia; NSW cemetery records; NSW electoral rolls; NSW Land Titles Office; NSW State Records; Sands Directories; Trove website.