View of Bungarribee NSW1858

Joseph Fowles arrived in Sydney from London in 1838, accompanied by his wife. He is best remembered for his publication Sydney in 1848, which depicted Sydney’s streets and buildings in that year. Fowles made a visit to the Blacktown area in 1858, where he painted a scene of a grand house on a hill, overlooking green pastures.

Those green fields, then an important horse stud for breeding horses for the East India Company, are today a 200-hectare park, named Bungarribee after the homestead, demolished in 1957. ‘Bung’ means creek and ‘garribee’ means cockatoo in the Darug language.