Wunkoo

Nightingale, an early manager of the Government Savings Bank who arrived in Brisbane in 1860, acquired the title for over 11 acres on the slopes of Toorak Hill in 1863.  He purchased an additional two acres bordered to the south by Langside Road in 1866. It is on this lower portion of land that Wunkoo was built.

During the 1860s, Hamilton was an elite rural enclave with views from Toorak Hill over the Brisbane River. Several substantial homes were built at this time at Hamilton by Brisbane’s wealthy and influential families including Lochiel in the 1860s, for auctioneer, John Buckland, Toorak House (c 1865) for James Dickson, also an auctioneer and later, Premier of Queensland, and Eldernell (1869) for William Hemmant, a draper and politician.

Nightingale mortgaged his Hamilton property for £500 to James Cowlishaw in 1866. Several other mortgages to various institutions followed. Nightingale continued to mortgage the land heavily during the early 1890s. He rented ‘Wunkoo’ to various tenants including E.I.C. Brown, MLC for Queensland and a proprietor of the Courier and Mrs Bridget Brownlow Cole, a widow. It seems he suffered financial difficulties during the depression of the 1890s as the land (now 11 ½ acres) was repossessed by the Australian Mutual Provident Society in 1905.

In 1919, Nightingale’s former tenant, Bridget Brownlow Cole, purchased ‘Wunkoo’ and just over an acre of land surrounding the house between the new road of Eblin Drive and Langside Road. According to F.E. Lord’s 17 December 1931 article in the Queenslander, the house at this time had a room at each end of the verandah and another verandah at the rear of the house (facing Eblin Drive). The original brick kitchen with its own verandah was also located behind the house. Stables, a coachhouse, fowl house and other outbuildings were situated behind the house on the western boundary. These were demolished prior to 1931. A maid’s room opened off the inner end of the brick kitchen. The kitchen was demolished at some point prior to 1946.

Mrs Brownlow Cole made substantial alterations to the house, adding an upper timber storey with two large rooms and a balcony, kitchenette and bathroom above the rear verandah. A porch was built onto the verandah below and a laundry added to the old brick kitchen. She also reportedly moved the staircase from the hall to the north eastern end of the verandah allowing access to the upper storey.  Much of the southern end of the front verandah was converted to a room and one of the original “end verandah rooms” used as a bathroom. In 1931, F.E. Lord provided a lengthy description of the house and grounds for the Queenslander, including a description of the lower floor:

The lower floor of the main house comprises the long divided room so often mentioned, which takes up the right hand side as one enters from the front and a door from each part opens into the hall which extends through the house. Across the hall are two rooms, the principal bedroom in front and the dining room behind it. Each contains a fireplace with a white marble mantelpiece in the former room and a wooden one in the latter.

In 1935, Mrs Brownlow Cole sold some 51 perches fronting Langside Road and began to use Eblin Drive as main entrance to the house. After her death at Wunkoo in 1940, the property was transferred to her unmarried daughter, Cecily Brownlow Cole. Miss Brownlow Cole sold the house and remaining three quarters of an acre to Edmund Cuppaidge in 1943.

Cuppaidge, a solicitor, and his family took up residence at Wunkoo, and the house remained in the Cuppaidge family until 1994. Since 1944, the house has been on a smaller parcel of land of around half an acre (2378m²) with no frontage to Langside Road.  In 1949, Cuppaidge received approval for repairs and alterations and to relocate the garage to a new position. He was granted approval for further additions in 1980. According to photographic evidence, it appears that at this time, the interwar flat on the upper storey and the upper sections of the stone walls on either side were removed and a new timber upper storey constructed, converting the building back to a single residence. 

Despite these changes, in 1993, a Sunday Mail article described many original features in the house, including pressed metal ceilings with plaster cornices, the marble fireplace, panelled internal doors and three sets of French doors onto the verandah. 

Further changes occurred in 1999 when a large extension was added to the rear (southern end) of the house, the upper storey altered internally, stone tiles removed from the hallway, the old garage demolished and a tennis court, fountain, pool and new garage added.

Many of these changes to ‘Wunkoo’ reflect its transition from a mid-19th century home on a large estate with numerous outbuildings which overlooked the Brisbane River to a suburban home in Eblin Drive. The stone 1860s core of the house provides evidence of the period when Hamilton was a fashionable rural retreat for the city’s wealthy professionals.

1. Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Queensland Certificates of Title

2. Brisbane City Council aerial photographs, 1946, 2001, 2009

3. Brisbane City Council, Properties on the Web, Building Cards

4. Brisbane City Council Heritage Unit, ‘Heritage Trail: Hamilton’ (Series No. 9, 2nd edition)

5. BCCl. Surveyor’s notebook. BCA C126 – 13

6. Brisbane City Council Town of Hamilton Detail Plan 252, 1923

7. McKellar's Map of Brisbane and Suburbs. Brisbane: Surveyor-General’s Office, 1895

8. Queenslander, Dec 1931. Oct 1883

9. Courier Mail. Dec 1940. Brisbane Courier, 1898- 1950. NLA Trove digital newspaper website.  http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper?q Viewed April 2013

10. Sunday Mail. Mar 1993

11. John Oxley Library, ‘Notable Brisbane Houses of the Nineteenth Century’ (1975)

12. Queensland Post Office Directories