Greenmount Homestead, Heritage homestead in Walkerston, Queensland, Australia.
Greenmount Homestead is a single-storey timber house with a corrugated iron gambrel roof and projecting gables, encircled by verandahs linking a kitchen house to the southwest and an office to the southeast. The symmetrical north front has a gabled entry porch with twin side stairs, shingle cladding and curved timber brackets. French doors with fanlights open onto the verandahs, and the main door's etched glass reads GREENMOUNT.
Greenmount Homestead was built in July–December 1915 for Albert and Vida Cook by Walkerston contractors Arthur Carter & Co. to designs by Mackay architect William Sykes, who reworked Albert Cook's rough plans modelled on the second Balnagowan homestead. The fireplace and mantelpiece from that Balnagowan house were moved into Greenmount. The Cooks acquired the Greenmount lease in 1914; the station had been taken up in 1861 by John Mackay, the district's first European settler, and forfeited by him in 1864.
The property exemplifies Queensland's pastoral heritage through its role in sugar farming and cattle breeding, notably establishing one of the state's first Aberdeen-Angus cattle studs in 1917 and demonstrating the lifestyle of early 20th-century rural communities.
The homestead sits on an easterly slope above canefields, with the formal garden to the north and a dam to the east. The main house, kitchen house and office are linked by verandahs, and the 1915 outbuildings stand nearby. The Mackay Historical Society runs the property as a museum; the old Walkerston railway station and two Marian mill barracks were moved onto the grounds.
John Mackay, the district's first European settler, took up Greenmount Station in 1861 but forfeited the lease in 1864. A fig tree in the grounds, now the Tom and Dorothy Cook Memorial Park, is believed to have been planted by Mackay in 1862, three years before the homestead's construction.
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