Southampton Homestead, Heritage homestead in Shire of Donnybrook-Balingup, Australia.
Southampton Homestead is a 19th-century estate on the banks of the Blackwood River, built from handmade bricks with Victorian Georgian architectural elements. The main house and outbuildings display typical construction methods and spatial layout of a prosperous farming property from that period.
Richard Jones, born 1795, sold his Perth town lot for £8,000 in 1855 and bought 10 acres south of Balingup, where he and sons Richard and William built a wattle-and-daub homestead. The Blackwood River flooded it in 1860; its site was found in 2007. The mud-brick homestead was built in 1862, and the family later held 27,500 acres.
The property shows early Western Australian settler life through original structures including a separate kitchen, bakery, and farm buildings. These outbuildings let visitors understand how daily work and household tasks were organized on a rural estate.
The site lies beside the Bibbulmun Track and is reachable south of Balingup, making it conveniently accessible for hikers on their route. Visitors should know this is an outdoor setting where weather and ground conditions can vary.
The first homestead, built after Richard Jones sold his Perth land in 1855, was flooded by the Blackwood River in 1860; its site was only found during excavations in June 2007. The later homestead was razed by a bushfire in February 2013. John Allum, the family's Malaysian housekeeper for 40 years, is buried on the hill behind the homestead overlooking the Blackwood Valley.
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