Rooty Hill, Heritage site in Rooty Hill, Blacktown, Australia
Rooty Hill is a heritage-listed parkland at Eastern Road in Rooty Hill, City of Blacktown, New South Wales, Australia. It was built from 1802 to 1828 and is also known as The Rooty Hill and Morreau Reserve. The property is owned by the Presbyterian Church (NSW) Property Trust and was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 13 June 2007.
Governor King set aside 15,672 hectares in the Prospect area as the Rooty Hill Run for government stock, and the hill was named after a similar landform on Norfolk Island. Between 1810 and 1821 Macquarie's regime built a two-storey brick house for the superintendent, four 50-acre paddocks and log barracks for 20 stockkeepers. In 1821 Major Druitt received 404 hectares out of the allotment, creating Mount Druitt, and in 1824 Captain P. P. King was granted 607 hectares.
The name Rooty Hill has several proposed origins: Governor King may have borrowed it from a Norfolk Island hill, while others link it to flood debris or the Hindustani word "ruti", bread. Oral testimony records that Aboriginal people used the hill as a hidden camping and gathering place between Sydney, Parramatta and the rest of the state.
The site sits on Eastern Road at Rooty Hill in the City of Blacktown, about 42 kilometres west of Sydney, on the Great Western Road line. The two-storey brick residence, paddocks and former stockyard area lie within what is now Morreau Reserve parkland. The property is owned by the Presbyterian Church (NSW) Property Trust and was added to the State Heritage Register on 13 June 2007.
The two-storey brick house built for the government stock superintendent still stands, now with a galvanised iron roof instead of the original shingles. Governor Macquarie reserved one room there for his own use when visiting the stock station.
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