Fernhill Estate heritage

Fernhill Estate is located on Mul-goa and Boorooberongal Country, close to Gandangara Country, at the edge of the Cumberland Plain below the Blue Mountains.

Aboriginal people cared for Mulgoa Valley for tens of thousands of years prior to the arrival of the British in the late 18th century. Before the valley was occupied, fenced and enclosed by the early colonists, First Nations people sustained the landscape, maintained their knowledge and practices and were in turn sustained by their Country. Much of the Estate still looks as it once did in the early days of the British colony when it was established by the early pastoralist Cox family through a series of land grants to William Cox and his sons. The Cox family were significant in the British colonisation of Mulgoa Valley and beyond over the Blue Mountains.  

The experience of Aboriginal people following colonisation of the Sydney region by the British has been recorded at Fernhill and in the Mulgoa area. Aboriginal people were affected by introduced diseases, expanding agricultural settlement and frontier violence at that time.