The Bondi Estate and Francis O’Brien.
The first land grant in the Bondi area was made during the term of Governor Bligh to William Roberts, on 22 December 1809.
When Governor Macquarie succeeded Bligh, he revoked all land grants that had been made but regranted the land to Roberts in 1810. The grant of 200 acres included almost the whole frontage of Bondi Beach, and back as far as Old South Head Road.
This land was purchased in 1851 for £300, by Edward Smith Hall in trust for his daughter, Georgiana, who had married Francis O'Brien. (Smith Hall was known as ‘Monitor’ Hall, after the newspaper he’d cofounded in 1826).
A year later, Smith Hall and O’Brien decided to subdivide the land, and offered it for sale in the Sydney Morning Herald. Given that the land was mostly sand hills at the time, and too far from Sydney Town, there were no takers.
Francis O’Brien then purchased the land from Smith Hall and renamed it the ‘O’Brien Estate’. The estate contained the family house known as ‘The Homestead’, with extensive flower and vegetable gardens and a busy farm that employed many local men.
The surrounding property had many freshwater lagoons. One, near the Homestead, covered two acres and was described as ‘lying like a great mirror [reflecting] the trees and banks, and in places it was covered with water lilies.’
The land was also scattered with paperbarks, swamp she-oaks and large-leafed coastal tea trees, some over 30 feet high, their dense foliage providing welcome shade from the summer sun.
It was here that Francis O’Brien raised his family. He married three times and fathered 11 children.
He also built a mausoleum on around four acres of the property, and generations of the O’Brien and Smith Hall families were buried within – including, tragically, two of his young daughters who drowned in one of the lagoons.
O’Brien sold parcels of his estate over the years, and by the time of his death in 1896, the titles were all in other hands.
The mausoleum stood until 1928, when it was demolished and the 17 or so bodies inside were reinterred at the O’Brien family vault, facing the sea in Waverley Cemetery.
