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.

The Cottage Called Windermere

29 June 2026 · 3 min read · View on map
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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 18 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

The Goldsmith family called their house Windermere. It was a plain four-roomed cottage of stone, the chimneys built proud of the outer walls and an underground dairy dug in beside the verandah to keep the milk and butter cool through the Noarlunga summers, with the privy set apart at the back. It stood on the rise of section 45, on ground that is now the suburb of Noarlunga Downs, and for the better part of a century it was a working farmhouse. Nothing of it remains.

Black-and-white photograph of a ruined single-storey stone cottage with a corrugated-iron roof and a tall stone chimney built against the outside wall, standing in long dry grass with a pile of dry-stone rubble and a timber crossarm pole in the foreground and dark gum trees behind
Windermere in ruin, about 1970, its outside chimneys and verandah line still standing. City of Onkaparinga Libraries.

The Longs and the Goldsmiths

The land had been farmed since the middle of the nineteenth century by James and Eliza Long, among the established farming people of Noarlunga; James Long worked some hundred and sixty acres in the district before his ground passed to new hands. In 1889 the property went to George and Eliza Goldsmith, who held Stoneham Farm on Old Honeypot Road.

George Goldsmith was by then a man of standing at Noarlunga. That same year he took the chair of the Noarlunga District Council, presiding over the workaday business of the hundred — forming the main road to Kangarilla, letting tenders for culverts and catch-drains, settling who might run panels across a district road. He farmed at Stoneham to the end of his life, and when he died in 1907 the notice in the Advertiser gave the address that had become the family's own.

The friends of the late George Goldsmith are respectfully informed that his funeral will leave his late residence, Stoneham Farm, Noarlunga, on Thursday, at 1 o'clock sharp, for interment in Bains Cemetery, Morphett Vale.

The Advertiser, 1 August 1907

A House on the Hill

It was George and Eliza's son Obed who made Windermere his home. He and his wife Elsie were on the hill in the early years of the new century, raising their family in the four rooms above the dairy. In July 1926 they gave a party for the eleventh birthday of their daughter, some thirty children and grown-ups gathering through the afternoon for games and tea, the table set with a three-tier cake that carried eleven candles. The families who came — the Cunneens, the Watts, the Dungeys, the Falconers — were the neighbours of a settled farming district that had not yet begun to think of itself as a suburb.

In time Obed and Elsie left the hill for Port Noarlunga, down on the river mouth, and Windermere was sold.

The Antonios and the End

The buyer was Herbert Antonio. The Antonios were Noarlunga people of long standing, holding the long limestone farm on the rise off Patapinda Road, above the cottage at the end of what is now the Southern Expressway. Herb farmed the hill country there and, with his sister Ethel, was a generous benefactor of the Catholic parish at Morphett Vale, the two of them giving their name to the Antonio School when it opened in 1975. Windermere came to him as a second holding, a stone cottage on the Noarlunga side that he never lived in.

When Herb died in 1977 the property was bought by developers, and the cottage was left to stand empty against the coming suburb. Repeatedly broken into and stripped, it was pulled down in the 1980s. The ground where it stood is now 12 Parri Link, Noarlunga Downs — a house lot among many, with no sign that a farm named for an English lake once kept its dairy cool beneath the verandah here.

Sources

  • High on the Hill: The People of St Philip & St James Church, Old Noarlunga — Kelly Dyer, City of Onkaparinga Libraries (2019). Genealogies of the Long, Goldsmith and related Noarlunga farming families.
  • City of Onkaparinga local heritage register, Former Farm Complex, 35 Patapinda Road, Onkaparinga Heights — history of the Antonio family and their hill farm.
  • South Australian Register (Adelaide, 1839–1900), 6 September 1889 — Noarlunga District Council report, George Goldsmith in the chair. Trove
  • The Advertiser (Adelaide, 1889–1931), 1 August 1907 — funeral notice for George Goldsmith of Stoneham Farm, Noarlunga. Trove
  • The Advertiser (Adelaide, 1889–1931), 17 July 1926 — birthday party at Noarlunga given by Mr and Mrs O. Goldsmith. Trove
  • City of Onkaparinga Libraries local history collection — photograph of the Windermere ruin, Noarlunga Downs, about 1970.

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