Nahoun

The land on which the house is situated was included in 61 acres (portions 280 and 281) purchased by Robert Davidson by deed of grant in 1859. This land, bounded by Enoggera Creek and Enoggera Road was gradually subdivided and sold from the 1860s onwards. Davidson Street and Edith Street (now Thurlow Street) were named for Robert Davidson and his wife, Edith. 

Newmarket, situated on the route north to Kilcoy and Gympie, had developed with the establishment of the stock salesyard in Newmarket Road in the late 1870s. Residential development at Newmarket was further stimulated by the opening of the railway to Enoggera in 1899 and the extension of the Kelvin Grove tramline along Enoggera Road in 1903. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the area was largely a middle-class residential district which had retained a rural atmosphere.  

The Cowlishaw's home was constructed at a time when half a dozen houses already existed in Davidson Street. In 1883, a wooden church hall had been erected by the Bible Christian section of the Methodist Church on the corner of Davidson Street and Enoggera Road. The first house was built in Davidson Street around 1900. 

Eric Burgoyne Owen Cowlishaw was born in 1883 and lived at Montpelier House, the  family home, which was purchased by his father in 1870. He studied dentistry at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1905. In 1915, he married May Thurlow, who had previously lived in the Thurlow family home, Saxmundham, in nearby Edith Street (now Thurlow Street). 

The site of the house, allotment 22, was purchased by May Cowlishaw from her mother, Phoebe Ann Thurlow in 1915 along with the adjacent allotment 20. Phoebe Anne Thurlow, and her husband, businessman and politician Robert Woods Thurlow, had resided at Saxmundham since the early 1880s and owned several allotments between Davidson Street and Edith Street. The Cowlishaw family acquired two more allotments adjoining their property in 1923. After Eric and May Cowlishaw were married, they moved into their newly built home at 20 Davidson Street, which they named Nahoun. 

The Cowlishaw family believe that the house was designed by Eric's brother, James Percy Owen Cowlishaw.  James Percy Owen was born in Brisbane in 1867. After attending the Brisbane Grammar School, he was articled to architect J.J. Clark. In 1885, Cowlishaw joined the Queensland Public Works Department as a cadet. He returned to work with J.J. Clark in 1887. Cowlishaw practised privately in Brisbane from 1896 to the 1920s. He was the architect to the Commercial Banking Co., designing many of its buildings in Queensland. Other buildings designed by Cowlishaw included the Brisbane Gas Co. offices at Petrie Bight and the Lady O'Connell Wing of the Brisbane Children's Hospital, both since demolished. James Percy Owen Cowlishaw died in 1925.

Eric Cowlishaw continued to live at 20 Davidson Street until his death in 1954.  On the death of May Cowlishaw on 24 August 1984, the allotment on which the house is situated passed to her descendants as tenants-in-common. The house has remained in the Cowlishaw family to the present day. It has had three small additions at the rear and sides. The interior of the house remains highly intact. The front garden contains a large hoop pine planted by Eric and May Cowlishaw.

Nahoun is significant for its association with the Cowlishaw family and as evidence of the consolidation of Newmarket as a residential suburb early this century.

1. Methodist Times, 5 October 1933

2. Queensland Certificates of Title

3. Queensland Post Office Directories

4. Watson, Donald and Judith McKay. Queensland Architects of the 19th Century: A Biographical Dictionary. Brisbane: Queensland Museum, 1994

5. Information kindly provided by the Cowlishaw family, site visit 4 March 1997 and 24 January 2002