Front Facade

The front facade of Mountain View Homestead and General Store at Wisemans Creek records a building that took fourteen years to complete and has been slowly retreating ever since. Timber walls shed their paint in long curling flakes. Broken window panes open the interior to weather. The decorative balcony timbers and handmade finials above hold their form, but the lime plaster render that once disguised the wall construction has been pulling away for years, exposing the half-log and lath beneath. David Smith Todd began construction in 1880. He harvested the timber from the property and dug mud from nearby Levy's Gully, driving bullocks around a revolving pole to mix it to the right consistency. The method was wattle and daub, one of the oldest building techniques in use. What Todd produced with it was something else: a two-storey structure with carved veranda valances, four-panelled doors, fanlights above the entries, and hipped balcony roofs fitted with handmade finials. The architectural historian Professor J.M. Freeland, who assessed the building, attributed those decorative elements to French Renaissance influences and concluded Mountain View was probably the only two-storey wattle and daub building in Australia. The NSW State Heritage Register, which listed the homestead on 10 March 2006, uses the same careful qualifier: probably the only such building in NSW, if not Australia. Todd finished the homestead in 1894, marking the date on the front door. The building passed through two more generations of the Todd family before being sold in 1973. The last occupants, Ross and Betty McKinney, lived in it without electricity until 1983. This photograph, made in 2018, shows the facade as it stood then: structurally present, ornamentally intact in its broad outline, and losing ground to exposure year by year. Conservation and stabilisation works have been under way since the heritage listing. The building recorded here is the same one Todd built by hand from the materials on his own land.