The Cottage at the End of the Expressway

At the southern end of the Southern Expressway, where the road runs out against the hills above Hackham, a small stone cottage stands abandoned in a paddock. The render has peeled from its walls, the verandah gapes open along the front, and bare trees crowd in close. For more than a century it was a farmhouse; for most of living memory it has been a ruin. The man who built his life around it was a Suffolk farmer named Daniel Radford, who took up the land in the 1870s and died in the cottage in 1919.

Two Suffolk Brothers

Daniel's father George and his uncle Samuel were woodmen's sons from Great Bradley, a village on the Suffolk border. George married Eliza Grigg in 1848, and when their only child Daniel was a year old the family was still in Great Bradley, George working timber as his own father had. They left soon after, reaching Adelaide on the Olivia in 1853, and made for the Noarlunga district. Samuel and his wife Susan followed about two years later; he kept a store and butcher's shop at Noarlunga and lived there until his death in 1911. George took up farming, sat on the Noarlunga District Council in 1868, and spent some years at Encounter Bay before returning to end his days at Noarlunga, where he died after a long illness in 1886. Eliza Grigg outlived him by twenty-six years.

The Cottage on the Road

Daniel followed his father onto the land. He married Eliza Crossman — by coincidence, another Eliza — at Inman Valley in 1873; their infant son Samuel George died of measles the following year, and Eliza Crossman herself died in 1877, at twenty-four, of a burst blood vessel in the brain. Their surviving son, Alfred Ernest, would later marry Gwendoline Maud Holly of Hackham, tying the Radfords to one of the district's oldest families. Daniel married again in 1887, to Emma Peck of Morphett Vale.

It was around this time that he settled on the small piece of section 38 where the cottage stands, taking up the adjoining ground from his father's estate. The cottage sat on the Main South Road, hard against the foot of the hills, and here Daniel farmed for the rest of his life. He died in March 1919 of a tumour on the brain, aged sixty-nine, and was buried among his family in the churchyard of St Philip and St James on the hill at Old Noarlunga.

His son Alfred sold the cottage and its land that same year to Charles William Holly, a farmer of the very family into which Alfred had married. In time it passed to Herbert Antonio, whose people already held the larger farm on the hill above, and the two properties came under one name.

The Farm on the Hill

The long limestone house that stands ruined on the rise behind the cottage is older, and its story runs back to the steam mill at Noarlunga. The land belonged to James Clark of Green Loop Farm, the miller who took over the Noarlunga steam mill in 1849. Clark leased the farm and its two-roomed stone cottage to Daniel Le Poidevin, the Guernsey carpenter who became the largest landholder in the Morphett Vale district.

In 1863 the farm was bought by Joao Antonio — John, as he was known — who let Le Poidevin stay on as tenant for a while before he moved closer to Hackham and eventually north to Glen Bank at Morphett Vale. The Antonios kept their own home at Warnock Farm, near Gates Road, and worked the hill country above. John raised the long house of limestone rubble, with brick quoins and chimneys at either end, and added to it over the years until it ran in a single line across the slope.

The Antonios

The Antonios became one of Noarlunga's settled families. John's son Thomas, born at Hackham in 1864, spent his whole life in the district and was widely liked. When he died in 1932 the Chronicle remembered a fixture of southern sport and country shows:

The death of Mr. Thomas Antonio, of Noarlunga, has deprived the district of one of its most popular residents. Born at Hackham 68 years ago, Mr. Antonio has resided in the Noarlunga district all his life. His genial manner won him a large circle of friends, and his upright character was respected by all.

The Chronicle, 14 July 1932

Farming the dry hills was never easy. One of John's sons gave up the land for railway work in the early 1890s, ruined by red rust in his crops and sickness in the family, and walked away with nothing. But the family held the farm on the hill for well over a century. It was John's grandchildren Herbert and his sister Ethel who lived there last. Generous benefactors of the Catholic parish at Morphett Vale, they gave their name to the Antonio School on Bains Road when it opened in 1975, and on its opening day Herbert sealed a time capsule into the base of the statue of Our Lady. The pair lived at the farm until they died, within months of each other, in 1977. The cottage at the foot of the hill, which had come to them with the rest, was by then long past use.

Onkaparinga Heights

Both buildings have stood empty since. The farmhouse on the rise is ringed with wire and boarded up, graffiti spread across its limestone and a warning sign nailed to the verandah; the cottage below has lost most of its roof to the weather. The ground that Daniel Radford and John Antonio farmed from the 1860s and 1870s passed in time to the State's urban renewal authority, and the district has been renamed Onkaparinga Heights and zoned for housing. When the streets come through, the two ruins at the end of the expressway — the small cottage on the road and the long farm on the hill — will be the last sign of the farms that were there first.

Sources

• High on the Hill: The People of St Philip & St James Church, Old Noarlunga — Kelly Dyer, City of Onkaparinga Libraries (2019). Genealogies and biographies of the Radford, Le Poidevin, Holly and related Noarlunga families.
• City of Onkaparinga local heritage register, Former Farm Complex, 35 Patapinda Road, Onkaparinga Heights — description and history of the Antonio farmhouse, with rate-assessment detail for Joao (John) Antonio.
• Chronicle (Adelaide, 1895–1954), 14 July 1932 — obituary of Thomas Antonio of Noarlunga. Trove
• The Express and Telegraph (Adelaide, 1867–1922), 28 February 1893 — Insolvency Court report on the affairs of John Antonio of Hackham, railway labourer. Trove
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries local history collection — photographs of the former Radford cottage and of Stony Hill Farm, Patapinda Road, Hackham, 2012.