| Historical notes: | STATEMENT OF COUNTRY
Gosford Courthouse and Police Station (former) is situated on Kuring-gai Country (Horton/AIATSIS, 1996) and within the boundaries of the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council. Aboriginal people have maintained strong links with the area for millennia and continue to do so despite concerted attempts to displace them, including by violence. As a site for the policing, judging and incarceration of offenders through the colonial period and during much of the 20th century, the site has a deeply troubled past. Its present use by students of music, including from Aboriginal communities, adds to the site's rich and layered history, dating from pre-colonial times to now.
FIRST CONTACT
The impacts of the new colony of New South Wales were felt by the Traditional Owners of the area even before the arrival of explorers or settlers to its shores. In 1788, Governor Arthur Phillip's first soil-hunting expedition encountered Aboriginal people whose mobility was evident in the European-made objects they carried and had presumably obtained from Sydney to the south. Again, in 1789 when Phillip and his party returned to Brisbane Water, they found smallpox had travelled ahead of them, having broken out in Sydney just months earlier. The 'lively and numerous' Aboriginal population that received them in 1788 had been decimated (Karskens, 2020).
At first, interest in seeking the interior limited interest in the upper reaches of Brisbane Water, where Gosford was later founded. Settlement occurred from 1823 with the first land grants issued that year. These landholders lived mostly in Sydney and relied on convict labour to clear the abundant forests from their newly acquired land.
JUDICIAL AND POLICE FUNCTIONS
Unruly behaviour was common in what was then a colonial backwater well beyond the watchful eye of the Sydney authorities. Several constables were assigned and the office of police magistrate established. Local magistrates exercised summary justice on lawbreakers in cases of disturbances, petty theft, arson, larceny, contraband, poaching, cattle stealing and other illicit activities but referred more serious cases to the higher courts in Sydney (Tabuteau, 1990).
The first police magistrate, Willoughby Bean, was appointed in 1826. The absence of a courthouse at this time required Bean to administer justice from his home on the banks of Erina Creek (Tabuteau, 1990). Bean did not delay in having a watch-house built, on Donnison Street, to house prisoners. The three-roomed, shingle-roofed slab-timber structure quickly became inadequate for its purpose (RKH, 2020). Around 1833, a slab-built courthouse was erected.
Aboriginal resistance in the Gosford and Brisbane Water area increased during this period of growing settlement and increased judicial and police activity. As Aboriginal groups from outside the area came in search of native and introduced food sources, and to harangue their invaders, colonial authorities and settlers employed various means to assert control over the area. In response to agitation from European landowners (Sydney Herald, 1834), the government pursued the relocation of Aboriginal population and an aggressive policy for the arrest, conviction and punishment of offenders, fetching in more serious cases death sentences commuted to life to Van Diemen's Land. Overt resistance had largely abated by the final third of the 19th century and the Aboriginal population further reduced, yet police repression continued (Freeman's Journal, 1879; Truth, 1900).
The slab-built courthouse had fallen into a ruinous state by the mid-1840s, with one prisoner managing to escape by prizing off sections of the timber (Gosford Times, 1952). A process of modernising the local judicial system and built infrastructure began. A larger population allowed for the position of police magistrate, a figure of summary justice, to be replaced with local Justices of the Peace, who deliberated in groups of two or three. Plans for a new courthouse and lock-up began in 1847. Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis took carriage of the project, its first stage consisting of a courthouse, two cells, a yard (for executions and exercise) and rooms for a magistrate, clerk and constable. Construction was overseen by master stonemason George Paton (1800-1860), best known for his contemporaneous work on the Australian Museum (1846-1849). Lewis' building and subsequent additions served as a courthouse and lock-up for almost 140 years and a police station for half of that time.
AN EVOLVING FLOOR PLAN
The first stage of construction was progressively modified and expanded upon. Construction of an additional room to the northeast and significant repairs to the flooring and woodwork due to white ant activity took place between 1857 and 1861. A major addition by Colonial Architect James Barnet provided a spacious courtroom in 1887. Further upgrades were made through the 20th century. A grille was added over the yard in the mid-1920s. A brick expansion to the southwest in 1928 saw the rehousing of the police station on the site, having been relocated in 1863. In the mid-20th century, the building's plumbing was connected to the sewer and witness accommodation and a verandah added to the north and west respectively.
FROM BACKWATER TO BRIDGE
Increasing connections between Gosford and the rest of the colony continued to transform the region and bring about demographic changes. By the late 1870s, a telegraph ran between Wallsend and Gosford and twice-weekly steamers had shortened the trip from Circular Quay to the mouth of the Hawkesbury River to three hours (SMH, 1878). But it was the prospect of a rail connection that prompted the greatest influx of investment and settlement. The Newcastle-to-Gosford passage opened in 1887. Two years later, a rail bridge across the Hawkesbury connected Gosford with Sydney and, in doing so, joined the railway systems of the eastern colonies (Beer, 2023). Rail continued to be the principal form of transport linking Gosford for much of the 20th century, thanks in part to the electrification of the Sydney-Gosford line in 1960. Road access from north Sydney became possible in 1946 after more than a decade's work and was upgraded in the 1960s with the first section of the Sydney-Newcastle motorway, completed in the 1990s.
DEVELOPMENT PRESSURES
With metropolitan interest growing in Gosford through the second half of the 19th century, pressures to rebuild mounted. One commentator derided the humble quality of the existing courthouse yet his wishes for its replacement with 'buildings of a better description' did not eventuate (Sydney Mail, 1886). Instead, Colonial Architect James Barnet was enlisted to expand the building with a courtroom and watch tower in 1887, albeit significantly more stately than previous elements.
In the context of growing pressures on Gosford's built heritage, in 1958, the Brisbane Water Historical Society attached a plaque on the Mann Street frontage of the Barnet courthouse. The plaque commemorates Captain Gother Kerr Mann (1808-1899), after whom Mann Street is named. The historical figure does not, however, have any special connection to the site, having practised briefly as a magistrate in Gosford before the Courthouse's construction (Dargan, 1997). The plaque was stolen for unconfirmed reasons in the 1990s and was subsequently replaced.
Plans to demolish the site surfaced again in the 1970s amid a rush to construct, which saw the Imperial Centre shopping complex built on Mann Street. Amid increasing awareness of the need to control development, sections of the community sought to defend Gosford's heritage through the 1970s and 1980s. Measures included seeking protection for the courthouse and police station. Locals Robert Knox and Tudor Davies held a public meeting in 1981 to explore the possibility of establishing a music centre in Gosford, citing a desperate need in the community. They secured the use of a vacated TAFE plumbing workshop in the old Gosford primary school building a short distance east of the Courthouse and Police Station. Enrolments grew from 68 in the first year of teaching to 200 students and 15 teachers by 1983 (Knox, 2007).
A MUSICAL REPRIEVE
When the courthouse fell vacant in 1987, Knox and others occupied the building for the purposes of establishing a school of music, known as the Central Coast Music Centre. One of its earliest students was a 10-year-old Erin Helyard, whose musical education had up to this point been limited to the radio and magazine subscriptions (ABC Classic, 2021; Music in the Regions, n.d.). Community pressure succeeded in formalising the Music Centre's status when, some months after the occupation had begun, NSW Premier Barry Unsworth announced the building would become the permanent home of a conservatorium. In 1988, the site was listed on the Gosford Local Environmental Plan and, in 1991, The University of Newcastle assumed its management for a short period.
In 1993, the school was renamed the Central Coast Conservatorium of Music, the title under which it operates today. Major refurbishment was carried out in 2021 to improve the building's facilities for music education while minimising harm to its historical fabric. |