Gracious Bentley moving on in history
Sharon Webb
In a Tasmanian winter when the hawthorn hedges at Chudleigh are bare of all but berries, you can see historic Bentley from Mole Creek Road.
In other seasons, hedges grown by former owner Phillip Oakden conceal the spreading white home tucked under an unnamed hill and backed by the majestic Western Tiers.
Even with an open entrance, the closely treed driveway hides the home of antiques dealer John Hawkins and noted botanical and landscape artist Robyn Mayo.
Over 20 years, John and Robyn have doubled the size of their home to 860 square metres and planted 100,000 trees. They have restored Bentley’s Van Diemen’s Land Company brick and stone barn, building stables, a carriage house and a conservatory in keeping with historical context.
And now the 395 hectare property is on the market.
Real estate agents Knight Frank and Christie’s describe Bentley as ‘arguably one of Tasmania’s finest man-made farming landscapes and magnificent period homestead’.
Appropriate, because for John Hawkins it’s all about the landscape of Chudleigh Valley, a name seldom used by locals.
‘The past 20 years has seen every great property in this valley restored,’ Hawkins said.
‘Mayfield has been restored by the Ritchie family. Scott and Deb Wilson have created an important Tasmanian attraction for garden lovers at Old Wesleydale. And Bentley.’
Hawkins’ love of history and place is the source of his knowledge of the Chudleigh landscape.
In 2006, in the Australian Garden History Society’s Tasmanian magazine Bluegum, he wrote, ‘The Tasmanian Heritage Council has permanently registered Bentley and its cultural landscape on the Tasmanian Heritage Register.
‘It is the first entry to specifically refer to a cultural landscape as a contributor to a property’s heritage significance.
‘Processes are in train for an extension of this registration to the Chudleigh Valley so as to encompass the 19th Century estates of Native Plain (now Old Wesley Dale), and part of Mountain Villa, Bentley and Mayfield.’
Hawkins described the Gog Range and the Mersey River, the home of the indigenous Pallitore, as integral features of the topographic and cultural landscape.
‘The whole valley is presided over by the Gog Range. This features a natural rock formation that in the morning light produces a perfectly formed human face, some 200 feet high. It was from this ridge that the Aborigines gathered their ochre.’
Bentley was established by John Badcock Gardiner on 840 acres granted by Governor Arthur in 1829. Hawkin’s research indicates Gardiner was born in Devon in 1800 and married at Bickleigh, 15 miles north of Chudleigh in England.
‘This close connection suggests Gardiner as the person who named Chudleigh in Tasmania,’ Hawkins surmised.
George Augustus Robinson writes in his journal (quoted in NJB Plomley’s Friendly Mission) that ‘Mr Gardiner is a lime burner … and in my journey from Launceston to this place I met numerous carts loaded with lime of the finest quality.
‘The stone is a hard blue stone. Great quantities are conveyed to Launceston on bullock carts upwards from a distance of forty miles …’
These days that limestone is made into cement at Railton.
Phillip Oakden acquired Bentley in 1838, naming it after his family home near Ashbourne in Derbyshire.
Hawkins conjectures, ‘As a member of the Launceston Horticultural Society he must have been responsible for the planting of the six miles of hawthorn hedges, which are to this day such a feature of Bentley.’
Knight Frank describes Bentley as being developed over John Hawkins’ time as a cattle grazing property with no cropping.
On a previously Aboriginal fire-farmed plain, it has a sustainable farming regime with water from five dams and waterholes and rights from the Lobster Rivulet.
John and Robyn have fenced waterways, removed every willow and radiata pine and replaced them with native trees to prevent stock from destroying water courses.
The Bentley home has a dining room, drawing room, two libraries, morning room, billiard room, conservatory, potential for six bedrooms and six bathrooms, kitchen with gas fired Aga, laundry and drying room.
John Hawkins sounds rueful about selling. But Robyn is ill and he is approaching 70; no-one can control or predict the way life turns out.
‘We thought we’d be here forever,’ he said.
