From Fields to Barrels

Local history of Adelaide's Southern Vales. The forgotten farms, vineyards, hotels, lost townships, and the families who built them. Stories written into the landscape, if you slow down to read them.

Broadmead Farm, Hackham

1 July 2026 · 5 min read · View on map
Share
Part of a series Pioneer Families of the Southern Vales

Biographies of the founding families who took up land in Adelaide's Southern Vales — the men and women who broke first ground, built the first farms, and left their names on the district.

  1. John Reynell of Reynella
  2. Samuel Reynell
  3. Alexander Anderson of the Lodge
  4. Robert Bain and Melville Farm
Show all 20 posts
  1. The O'Sullivan Family of Morphett Vale
  2. The Higgins Family of Morphett Vale
  3. The Sauerbier Family
  4. Glenheath Farm
  5. Thomas Tapley of Tapley's Hill
  6. David Beyer and Karlsruhe Farm
  7. Stewarton Farm, Whites Valley
  8. The Braes, Reynella
  9. William Sherriff of Dunglass
  10. The Sturdy Pioneer: Daniel Le Poidevin
  11. The Wheat at the Jetty: James Galloway of Glen Bank
  12. The Cottage at the End of the Expressway
  13. The Cottage Called Windermere
  14. A Portuguese at Morphett Vale: The Antonios of Hackham
  15. Thomas Hardy and the Making of McLaren Vale
  16. Broadmead Farm, Hackham

In February 1866 a hundred and five acres of Hackham farming country came onto the market, and the man selling it did so from the front step. The advertisement in the South Australian Weekly Chronicle set out the whole of Broadmead Farm in a single breath:

FOR SALE, BROADMEAD FARM, Hackham, near Noarlunga, 105 Acres, subdivided into three well-fenced Paddocks, with a good Stone House of six rooms, Vineyard, Garden, and well of good water.

South Australian Weekly Chronicle, 3 February 1866

Interested buyers could apply to S. J. Way in King William Street or, more directly, to the owner on the premises — Edmund Humphris.

The Humphris Years

Edmund was a son of Richard Humphris, the Gloucestershire farmer who had come out on the Woodbridge in 1850 and who, in that same year of 1866, was busy raising the ambitious two-storey stone house on the hill above that the district would nickname Folly Hall. Broadmead was the plainer, older working farm — three paddocks, a six-roomed house, a well and a vineyard already established. The family were putting down roots across Hackham in these years, and Broadmead was one property being let go while the grander place was going up.

Whoever bought it in 1866, the farm was on offer again a dozen years later, this time to rent rather than buy. An Evening Journal notice of April 1878 advertised Broadmeads Farm to let — a hundred and five acres of good agricultural land with a five-roomed dwelling, a cellar and plenty of water, and by then known as M. Sheehan's, applications to Nathaniel Oldham at Imperial Chambers in Adelaide. The acreage had not changed, though the house was now counted at five rooms rather than six, and the vineyard that would come to define the place went unmentioned. The Sheehan whose name the farm had taken was almost certainly Michael Sheehan, granted the licence of the Golden Pheasant Inn at Hackham by the licensing bench in March 1865 and holding it until 1867 — the Holly family's old whalers' inn, by then well past its heyday. That put him at the centre of the little farming settlement in exactly those years, and a dozen years on his name still clung to Broadmead.

The Hollys at Broadmead

By the 1880s Broadmead had passed to a branch of the Holly family, whose people had farmed at Hackham since William Holly senior built the Golden Pheasant Inn in the district's first years. William Holly and his wife Caroline lived at Broadmead with their children through the closing decades of the century. He was the eldest son of Charles Holly of Olive Farm, one of the Hackham Hollys whose name ran through the district's Sunday schools and rate rolls for generations.

The year 1900 emptied the house. Caroline died at Broadmead on 17 July, after what the notice called a long and painful illness, aged only thirty-three and leaving her husband and six children. William — recorded in her notice as William Holly junior — outlived her by barely four months:

HOLLY.—On the 9th November, at his residence, Broadmead Farm, Hackham, William, husband of the late Caroline Holly, eldest son of Elizabeth Holly and the late Charles Holly, of Olive Farm, Hackham, in his 42nd year, leaving six children to mourn their loss.

Evening Journal, 15 November 1900

Six children were left orphaned on the farm inside a single year. They carried it on. It was their son Alfred James Holly who took up Broadmead and worked it for the better part of the next sixty years, keeping the vines and the paddocks in the family's hands well past the point at which most of the old Hackham farms had gone under the plough of the surveyor.

Black-and-white photograph of a low single-storey rubble-stone farmhouse with a corrugated-iron roof and a tall brick chimney, a timber-posted verandah shading the near wall, a white picket gate and post-and-rail fence at left, rows of vines and open country beyond, and gum trees behind
Broadmead, the home of William and Caroline Holly at Hackham — the original stone homestead, later demolished, with the vineyard running away to the left. City of Onkaparinga Libraries.

The Vines and the Surveyor

The vineyards Alfred James Holly tended occupied the country bounded by Penneys Hill Road and States Road, on the northern edge of Hackham where the district ran up toward Morphett Vale. The original Broadmead homestead — the stone house of the sale notices, which had stood near where Hackham East Primary School is today — gave way in his time to a newer house he built around the 1920s facing Penneys Hill Road, and the old homestead was eventually demolished. The vines outlasted both. A photograph from 1957 catches the vintage in full swing, the pickers gathered before a trailer heaped with grapes and a line of almond trees marking States Road in the distance.

Black-and-white photograph of grape pickers posed before a vineyard beside a heaped load of harvested grapes. Two men in broad-brimmed hats sit on top of the load; below them a row of nine people — men in work clothes, women in aprons and sun hats, and a small boy in shorts — stand along a wire fence, with vine rows and scattered trees running to the horizon and a trailer at right
Grape pickers at Alfred James Holly's Broadmead, Hackham, 1957 — Bob Noble at left and Arn Holly at right on top of the load, the almond trees along States Road on the skyline behind. City of Onkaparinga Libraries.

Broadmead Farm was sold in 1967, but the vines survived on the ground until the first housing subdivision reached them in 1969 — the same wave of surveyor's pegs that was, in these years, converting paddock after paddock across the southern corridor from Reynella down to Hackham into suburban streets. The newer house and the seven acres around it were sold last of all, in 1975. The vineyard country between the two roads is now the streets of Collins Parade, Arnold Drive and Parkview Rise, and the almond line along States Road is gone; the name Broadmead survives in the memory of the district, a hundred and five acres of vineyard and paddock reduced to the ground beneath a suburb.

Sources

  • Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 18 March 1865 — Bench of Magistrates licensing meeting; Michael Sheehan granted the licence of the Golden Pheasant, Hackham, the name of the house having been supplied Trove
  • South Australian Weekly Chronicle (Adelaide), 3 February 1866 — Broadmead Farm offered for sale by Edmund Humphris; 105 acres, three paddocks, stone house of six rooms, vineyard, garden, well; agent S. J. Way, King William Street Trove
  • Evening Journal (Adelaide), 6 April 1878 — Broadmeads Farm, Hackham, to let; 105 acres, five-roomed dwelling, cellar, water; then occupied by M. Sheehan; applications to Nathaniel Oldham, Imperial Chambers Trove
  • The Advertiser (Adelaide), 25 July 1900 — death of Caroline Holly at Broadmead Farm, Hackham, on 17 July 1900, aged 33; wife of William Holly junior; leaving a husband and six children Trove
  • Evening Journal (Adelaide), 15 November 1900 — death of William Holly at Broadmead Farm, Hackham, aged 41; husband of the late Caroline Holly, eldest son of Charles Holly of Olive Farm; six children Trove
  • G. H. Cowell, Hackham (1972) — licensee register of the Golden Pheasant Inn, showing M. Sheehan holding the licence 1865–67
  • City of Onkaparinga Libraries — 'Broadmead', home of William and Caroline Holly, Hackham (catalogue no. 1149062); grape pickers at A. J. Holly's Broadmead, 1957 (catalogue no. 1387493); Letty and Ruby Holly, 1910; house at 103 Penneys Hill Road, built c.1920s for Alfred James Holly on the site of the original Broadmead; notes on the Holly family and the Penneys Hill Road subdivision

Related

Comments & Memories

A descendant, a witness, a correction, a question — all welcome. Comments are powered by GitHub Discussions and require a free GitHub account to post.