Castle Hill property

The Bidjigal and Pemulwuy

Bidjigal people lived on the land that became Castle Hill, and Bidjigal Reserve today commemorates them.

The Bidjigal are believed to have been a clan of the Darug, who occupied the country immediately west of Sydney.

Bidjigal Reserve straddles Castle Hill together with North Rocks, West Pennant Hills and Baulkham Hills.

Pemulwuy was a Bidjigal leader, and the best known Aboriginal person of his time.

He led the resistance against settlers in the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars, including sacking farms at Castle Hill.

He was eventually captured and killed by the bounty hunter Henry Hacking.

The government farm and the name Castle Hill

Governor Phillip led the first Europeans to visit the district in April 1791, travelling from Parramatta with a group of companions. They reached the 'hills' by following Aboriginal trails, the routes now overlaid by Windsor and Old Northern Roads. Phillip needed fresh land to settle and ground to grow crops, so that a struggling young colony could be fed.

Governor King began the Third Government Farm on 8 July 1801 and used the name "Castle Hill" for it on 1 March 1802. Irish Catholics made up most of the convict workforce there, many of them transported for sedition in 1798. Branded "politicals", they were exiled for life, never to return.

A Frenchman, Baron Verincourt de Clambe, received a grant of 200 acres in 1802 in unusual circumstances. He was Castle Hill's first free settler. De Clambe's house was known as "The Hermitage". One suggestion is that people then often called it "The Castle", a name that came from the Baron's noble status.

Rebellion, orchards and the railway

On the night of Sunday 4 March 1804, convicts at Castle Hill rose up as one. People came to call it the Castle Hill convict rebellion, or the Second Battle of Vinegar Hill. Later the district became filled with market gardens and orchards that supplied Sydney, and a post office opened in Castle Hill on 1 January 1869.

The Rogans Hill railway line carried the district's produce to Parramatta and on to the city, but it closed in 1932 under competition from buses, trucks and cars. The orchards disappeared as Sydney expanded, giving way to suburban dwellings, shops, commercial buildings and light industry. The Hills Shire Council holds an Orange Blossom Festival each year to mark the shire's orange-growing past.

Landmarks, heritage and a writer's years

Castle Hill House on Old Northern Road dates from about 1844 and is heritage-listed by the local government. The public school on Old Northern Road dates from 1879 and is heritage-listed too. The former parsonage on Parsonage Road dates from 1866. Two further sites are heritage-listed: the Third Government Farm on Gilbert Road, and the former St Paul's Anglican Church at 221 Old Northern Road.

From the post-war years until 1968, a Nobel laureate and his partner lived on Showground Road, in a house called "Dogwoods". Over much of that time, the two of them farmed several hectares at the site. The Nobel laureate wrote several of his best known novels while living in Castle Hill, and the suburb gave the setting for The Tree of Man, The Solid Mandala and Riders in the Chariot. Several characters in his fiction drew on the people he knew in Castle Hill in those years.