Landcross Farm

The farm takes its name from a village in Devon, carried eleven thousand kilometres and set down on a hillside above McLaren Vale. John Gribble was born in Devon around 1805 and arrived in South Australia in January 1839, the colony's third year. When he came to farm a run of sections in the Hundred of Willunga in the early 1850s, the name came with him.

He was not the first on the land. One section had been granted in 1847 to John Ridley — the South Australian flour miller whose grain stripper transformed colonial wheat harvests — though Ridley was already in England by the time Gribble arrived and remained an absentee owner. The sections adjoining belonged to Thomas Whinnerah, a Cumberland-born grain merchant with holdings spread across the district from Port Willunga to Aldinga. In March 1853 Whinnerah leased two of them to Gribble at thirty pounds a year, with the right to purchase for £200; a third, which already carried a house, came to him separately. The four sections were worked as one farm long before the paperwork caught up with that fact: it was not until May 1869 that the Certificate of Title confirmed him as owner.

Those two decades of working the land left a farm of considerable substance. When Gribble advertised the property for sale or let in 1872, the Adelaide Observer carried the notice:

FOR SALE or TO be LET, LAND-CROSS FARM, about Three Miles from NOARLUNGA, the Property of Mr. John Gribble, containing about 300 Acres of good Land, all enclosed, Dwelling-House of Seven Rooms, two Stone Cottages, Barn, nine-stall Stable, Chaffhouse, Dairy, Cellars, Orchard, Vineyard, Well of good Water, and every convenience.

Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 2 March 1872.

Somewhere in that sequence of construction arose the pug cottage — sun-dried earth walls, likely thatched — that may be the oldest surviving building on the site, and the two stone cottages that followed it.

Gribble named it Landcross Farm, after the village near his birthplace in north Devon. The name appeared in the South Australian Almanac & Directories by 1864. His first wife, Elizabeth, had died during the voyage out to Australia; he remarried in Adelaide in 1843 to Mary Sanders, who died near Noarlunga in March 1866; and he married a third time in June 1868 — to Ann Fair, at his residence at McLaren Vale, the ceremony most likely taking place at the farm itself. He is buried at the McLaren Vale Uniting Church Cemetery with his second and third wives.

His public life in the district was active. He sat on the Noarlunga District Council intermittently between 1858 and 1877 and held a slaughtering licence from March 1859. He attended a public meeting at the Horseshoe Inn in July 1866 to oppose a proposed deviation of the Main South Road near Noarlunga, seconding the resolution against the proposal and serving on the committee that drew up a memorial to the Central Road Board. A local historian later recorded that he was reported as having been "very kind" to Aboriginal people who walked north through his property from Tatachilla Road, along the gully that would eventually be called Wheaton's Gully. In June 1878 the Adelaide Observer published the Noarlunga council proceedings with a terse notation: "J. Gribble (in the chair)."

By 1872 he had moved to the Noarlunga village to work as a storekeeper, and in March 1873 he leased Landcross Farm to Eli King for seven years.

King had come from Yardley Hastings in Northamptonshire and arrived in South Australia in November 1851 with his wife Drucilla and two young children. He had worked as a labourer, gone twice to the Victorian goldfields, and then settled for fourteen years on two sections at Encounter Bay — a beach there was named King's Beach in his time — before taking the Landcross lease. He held a slaughtering licence of his own, served on the Noarlunga Council, and maintained or extended the vineyard that Gribble had established. The large stone barn in the south-western corner of the farm complex — the most substantial structure on the site, with corrugated iron over the original masonry — is thought to date from his tenancy. He and Drucilla had fifteen children in total, none born at Landcross. Drucilla died in February 1905; Eli himself retired to McLaren Vale when the lease expired in 1880, and died there on 11 October 1912. He had said in his later years that he had "started at the lowest rung of the ladder" and, as a result of hard work and self-denial, could scorn the idea of accepting an old age pension.

In January 1880, John Gribble, by then in his mid-seventies, instructed auctioneers Pavy & Hack to sell Landcross Farm at the Jolly Miller Inn at Noarlunga on 13 February. The Adelaide Observer described the property:

All those Four SECTIONS of LAND, Nos. 102, 111, 112, 121, DISTRICT of NOARLUNGA, containing 308 Acres of good Agricultural Land, well fenced, and divided into convenient paddocks. Good Dwelling-House, Stables, Barn, and Outbuildings, Well of good Water (unlimited supply).

Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 7 February 1880.

Possession was to pass on 25 March. The farm was purchased by Joseph John Wheaton. Gribble died in September 1887, at Norwood.

Wheaton had been born at Ridgeway Farm, Plympton, in November 1853, the son of Philip and Ann Painter Wheaton, who had come from Devon and arrived at Port Adelaide in August 1848. He married Sarah Ann Moore in December 1880, and their only child, Edwin Moore Wheaton, was born at Landcross Farm in September 1883.

Joseph settled into the district's life on every front. He played cricket for the Southern Fifteen in the same year he bought the farm — the papers called him one of the two best bowlers — and in his later years was goal umpire and timekeeper for McLaren Vale football, serving as vice-president of the Southern Football Association in 1910 and 1911. He was elected chairman of the Noarlunga District Council in July 1888, and in July 1893 was one of five judges at a trial of harvesting and binding machines in a paddock belonging to Mrs Dungey at Noarlunga; the Hornsby machine scored highest. He chaired a church gathering in December 1902 to farewell a departing minister, and throughout bred and exhibited Rouen ducks and Buff Orpington fowl at the McLaren Vale Poultry Show. He was also a member of the Aurora Australia Tent of the Independent Order of Rechabites at Willunga — a temperance fraternal society whose membership, in the heart of wine country, required a certain conviction.

His son Edwin married in November 1911. His wife's name was Edith King — Edie — and her paternal grandfather was Eli King, who had tenanted Landcross Farm from 1873 to 1880 before Joseph Wheaton bought it. When Edwin Wheaton married Edie King, the granddaughter of the old tenant became the daughter-in-law of the man who had purchased the farm from her grandfather's landlord. The two families that had worked the same hillside a generation apart were, in that way, joined.

The new house was built in 1911 by local builder George Hunt — painted stone beneath a corrugated iron roof, a bullnosed verandah sheltering two sides, the whole front symmetrical and neat. Edwin's parents remained in the older house until Joseph's death, Sarah Wheaton staying on until she died at the farm in April 1931. Their son Jack was born at Landcross Farm in August 1915.

Joseph died from cancer on 22 September 1914, aged sixty. His funeral left from Landcross Farm.

Edwin was a sportsman, brass band member, and committee man like his father. The farm under his management diversified steadily. Milk and butter remained, but there were also sheep, pigs, poultry, and an orchard producing peaches, apricots, nectarines, plums, and almonds. Peas were grown from the 1940s into the early 1960s; during the picking season Italian immigrants would come out for the harvest and live in the old stone cottages that John Gribble had first raised in the 1850s, the pug walls and corrugated iron roofs still serviceable nearly a hundred years on. Edwin grew gladioli and sold the bulbs. In May 1914, J. Wheaton and Son registered a Model T Ford to take eggs and butter more quickly to Adelaide.

Edie died suddenly at Landcross Farm in June 1945. Edwin remarried in 1947 and died peacefully at the farm on 1 October 1958. His son Jack then took on the property, farming it with his wife Doreen through the 1960s — Poll Dorset sheep stud, barley, field peas, garden peas — with neighbours from the adjoining Ostrich Farm helping with shearing and harvesting. In July 1961 Jack purchased a portion of the neighbouring Nene Farm, adding another hundred acres to the holding.

In March 1972 the state government acquired part of Section 102 for the straightening and widening of the Victor Harbor Road. The road cut through the holding; the affected land was subdivided into ten-acre lots and sold. Encroaching suburbia, rising rates, and the owners nearing retirement brought the gradual subdivision of the rest. In 1997, Jack and Doreen sold the last twenty acres — the 1911 farmhouse, the old house, the stone barn, the outbuildings, the early cottages — ending 117 years of Wheaton tenure. The road that runs along the boundary bears the family's name: Wheaton Road. Jack died that same August at Victor Harbor.

The buildings at 68 Wheaton Road are now part of the Paxton Wines estate, and several were restored for offices and a wine tasting venue after purchase in 2000. The farm complex is a local heritage place. In the sequence of structures — the pug cottage from Gribble's era, the stone cottages that followed, the barn that may have risen during the King tenancy, and the 1911 farmhouse where Eli King's granddaughter brought up her children — the history of three families across nearly 150 years remains legible in stone and corrugated iron on a McLaren Vale hillside.

Sources

• City of Onkaparinga heritage database, Heritage ID 5382 — heritage description and history of Landcross Farm
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries local history collection — photographic records including c.1876 and c.1890s photographs of Landcross Farm
• Willunga National Trust, "Landcross Farm, McLaren Vale (Parts 1 & 2)", 2022–2025 — family history by Bronte Gould; farm records, ledgers and photographs courtesy of Dorothy Sigston (Landcross Farm Collection, Willunga National Trust)
• Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 2 March 1872 — Landcross Farm for sale or let; John Gribble's notice describing the property. Trove
• Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 7 February 1880 — Landcross Farm auction notice; Pavy & Hack, Jolly Miller Inn, 13 February; sections 102, 111, 112, 121, 308 acres. Trove
• South Australian Weekly Chronicle (Adelaide), 2 April 1859 — Noarlunga District Council proceedings, March 1859; slaughtering licence granted to John Gribble. Trove
• Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 8 June 1878 — Noarlunga District Council proceedings, June 1878; J. Gribble in the chair. Trove
• South Australian Weekly Chronicle (Adelaide), 6 October 1888 — Noarlunga District Council proceedings, October 1888; J. J. Wheaton as chairman. Trove
• Express and Telegraph (Adelaide), 3 November 1893 — harvesting machine trial at Noarlunga; J. J. Wheaton one of five judges
• Chronicle (Adelaide), 25 February 1905 — Death of Mrs. Eli King, McLaren Vale; Eli King family arrived South Australia 1851. Trove
• The Register (Adelaide), 16 October 1912 — Death notice for Eli King, aged 86, at his residence at McLaren Vale, 11 October 1912. Trove
• Chronicle (Adelaide), 26 September 1914 — Death notice for Joseph John Wheaton, beloved husband of Sarah Ann Wheaton, aged 60, at McLaren Vale, 22 September 1914. Trove
• Noarlunga-Morphett Vale council records (NRL-LG-005, Noarlunga Library) — councillor and chairman list confirming John Gribble and Joseph J. Wheaton's civic service