Building blocks adjoining historic NSW Southern Highlands shale village at Joadja up for sale
Four rural allotments located in the heart of the Joadja wine country in the Southern Highlands of NSW have been listed for November 25 auction under the instruction of receivers and managers PKF Chartered Accountants.
The vacant lots, some 28 kilometres from Bowral and within 1.5 hours’ drive of Sydney, range from 3.6 to 7.9 hectares.
Each lot has a building envelope of 2,500 square metres.
The sites are zoned E3 Environmental Management under the Wingecarribee Local Environmental Plan 2010.
They are listed through Simon Kersten and Amanda Buikstra at Colliers International in conjunction with Phillip Bassingthwaighte at PRD Mossvale.
The subject site is within the historic mining township of Joadja.
It has been 100 years since Joadja Creek village in the Southern Highlands was first sold. The mining town was abandoned in 1904 after shale-oil deposits dwindled, alongside growing competition from imports of cheap kerosene from the US.
The property was sold in 1911 by Raine & Horne of Sydney, for £4,400, as grazing land.
The village had been home to up to 1,300 miners, mostly Scottish, and their families. It was almost self-sufficient: there was a post office; a community hall that was used by Presbyterians and Catholics; a school for up to 140 students; a pharmacist; a school of arts; a cemetery and a hotel. A railway built by the Australian Kerosene, Oil and Mineral Company transported products to Mittagong for shipment to John Fell's refinery near Sandown, on the Parramatta River.
The ghost town sold earlier this year to the Jimenez family under the mortgagees' instructions by receivers Trent Devine and John Lord of PKF.
The main 290-hectare village holding offered with expectations of $1.5 million plus by Colliers International agents Simon Kersten and John McCann fetched $1.71 million.
The village consists mostly of industrial ruins (chimney stacks and retort ovens) and workers' cottages. There is also a manager's homestead dating from the 1870s, which has been restored.
The current blocks on offer are expected to sell for $230,000 plus apiece.
The total holding last sold for $1.4 million in 2002 to a syndicate that built a whiskey distillery there. Before that the property was bought by a South Coast consortium for $1.45 million in 1993, after which most of the 1,000-hectare property was subdivided and sold as hobby farms.
The consortium had bought the estate off an Arkansas farmer, Patricia Lee, who owned the property for three decades after paying grazier Sam Stirling $44,040 in 1966 after a visit to Sydney on a world cruise stopover.
Wingecarribee Shire Council has approved plans for tourism development for the historic village.
Joadja Creek is the southernmost link in a chain of oil-shale mines that stretched along the western margin of the Sydney Basin.
Shale, the precursor of the modern petroleum industry, was pioneered in West Lothian, Scotland, near Edinburgh, in the 1860s, although nothing of the industry remains there today.
Joadja shale was exceptionally rich in oil, yielding about 590 litres per tonne.
"The refining and processing of the oil into kerosene and secondary products such as waxes and candles, and the subsequent distribution for export or local use, means that the Joadja plant is an important example of 19th-century industrial management keying Australia into the world system," NSW Heritage says.
"The isolation and beauty of Joadja Valley, the comprehensiveness of its physical testimony to a great Australian industry, a vigorous Scottish community and a vanished technology make Joadja an extremely important element in the heritage not just of Wingecarribee Shire but of Australia and the world."
