[1] A close examination of the documentation of Governor Phillip's first exploration of Parramatta's western hinterland in April 1788 reveals that the orthodox view that he went only as far as Prospect Hill or a little beyond is deeply flawed.

From c. 1815 Macquarie began to grant parcels of land from the Rooty Hill Farm to settlers, which marked the beginning of organised European agricultural activity in the area.

John Campbell, a major in the British Army and for whom Bungarribee Homestead was built, arrived in Sydney on 30 November 1821 with his wife, Annabella, and their nine children aboard a sailing ship called the Lusitania.

Campbell, accompanied by his wife and nine children and bearing a letter of introduction from the Earl of Bathurst (then Secretary of State[10]) to Governor Macquarie, was intent on making his fortune by taking up land and farming.

[12] Despite being described by Broadbent (1997) as an "unappealing man" and an "unconscionable self-interested sponger", Campbell appears to have had considerable knowledge of farming and was relatively highly regarded by the colonial government at the time.

He positioned his new house on the top of the highest hill on the property, with the main living section facing to the west, providing views to the Blue Mountains in the distance.

An auction notice for the estate in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser from August 1828 until its sale in September 1828 described the property as including "a garden consisting of 8 acres with a great number and variety of young fruit trees well watered".

A letter in the Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser of 23 March 1846 reported that 63 people lived at Bungarribee (during the occupancy of the East India Company).

A second sale notice from 1882 also mentions the existence of a kitchen and flower garden, vineyard and orchard, but gives no further description of plantings or size[19][1] The problems encountered by Campbell during the construction of the estate were considerable.

Christopher Lawler, a convict employed at Rooty Hill, was the culprit, and was charged with 'having a quart tin in his possession stolen from the Huts on Mr Campbell's farm.'

Of these, it is most clearly shown in T. Rider's painting of the site c.1850 which (looking to the homestead group across the estate), shows the garden enclosed by a timber railing fence, separated from the house by a large paddock.

[26][1] It then passed through a number of tenants, one being Captains Dallas and Apperley, who used the property as an assembly depot and "rest station" for horses purchased in NSW as remounts for the British army in India.

[18][1] An 1846 record (Lt. Col. Godfrey C Mundy), notes Bungarabee (sic) as the H.E.I (East India) Company stud establishment (just on the eve of abolition)...and consisting of an excellent dwelling house and offices, stables permanent and temporary for several hundred horses, with some fine open paddocks around them...'.

[28][1] Bungarribee House itself eventually passed into the hands of a Thomas Cleaver and during WWII the American Air force built a sealed runway on the property which was used as an emergency training ground.

As described in the historic records, the homestead featured "a two-storied, circular conical roofed tower with two single storey verandah wings radiating from it" – an L-shaped house with a drum at the junction of the two arms.

[47] The conical-roofed tower, a defining feature of the house in subsequent decades, was not completed at the time of the auction and was most likely finished during the ownership of the Icely family from October 1828 until May 1832.

The house was built in the Picturesque style, which had been made popular in England by the architect John Nash in the early 19th century and had begun to appear in colonial design from the 1820s.

Due to the curvature of the walls, interior doors in the drawing room were also curved and in this way reminiscent of the foyer in the now-also demolished The Vineyard House at Rydalmere.

[52] Recognised from some distance away by its tower, as well as being romanticised for its "simple and stately style of humble execution, of broad wall surfaces and long colonnaded verandahs", the house was in fact "a strange hybrid piece of geometry, a semi cylinder married to a triangular prism" that had been designed to some extent around the need for a staircase to its upper level.

As described in the historic records, the homestead featured "a two-storeyed, circular conical roofed tower with two single storey verandah wings radiating from it" – an L-shaped house with a drum at the junction of the two arms.

[56] During the early years of the twentieth century, the-then owner Major J. J. Walters broke the estate into smaller parcels of land but remained in residence at the homestead until the 1920s.

In a description of the house from 1926, for instance, a journalist lamented that "neglect and changed conditions conspire with time to wreck this fine old home ... [and that] a more utilitarian age will soon demand its removal".

Within only seven years of the celebrated Hopkins restoration, another journalist described the house as being "with its burden of a century's life, standing like a battered old man, calmly awaiting the call that will write 'finis' in its history".

[5] The condition of the homestead only worsened during the Second World War, during which time the Commonwealth had resumed the property for military purposes, and by the 1950s Bungarribee had become "an isolated wreck" on the Doonside Road.

for storage until demolished in 1977[5] The Bungarribee Homestead complex represents a rare, intact footprint of a very early farmstead including a main house, outbuildings and plantings.

[1] As a cultural resource, this complex is highly significant for the potential to yield information regarding the evolving pastoral and economic activities of an early homestead in the western region of Sydney.

Many locals today have childhood recollections of stories told to them by family and friends regarding the Bungarribee homestead with its grand verandah, and the large barn that once stood to the east of the home.

[65] In making reference to "the famous old legend of The Bungarribee Ghost", the article provides one of the only credible indications that the house had been afforded its sinister reputation quite some time prior to this date.

The most widely reported of these deaths, that of Major Frederick Hovenden in 1845, has more than likely given rise to a story about the ghost of a military officer who took his own life in the iconic Bungarribee tower room.

Hovenden, who was indebted to creditors and had disappeared from Sydney as much as two years earlier, was found dead in a remote corner of the estate with the words "Died of Hunger" engraved on the peak of his travelling cap.