Australia's first house museum, and I turned up on the day it was shut.
The first man to build here was Sir Henry Browne Hayes, an Irish knight transported in 1802 for abducting the daughter of a Cork banker in the hope of marrying her fortune. Governor King thought him a troublesome character and was glad to have him three kilometres out of town. In 1803 Hayes bought the land, put up a cottage, cleared fifty acres, planted several thousand fruit trees — none survive — and named the place Vaucluse after Petrarch's spring in Provence, which for a convicted abductor in a penal colony is a remarkable piece of self-presentation. He was pardoned in 1812 and went home to Ireland to live another twenty years.
William Charles Wentworth bought the estate in 1827 — explorer, barrister, newspaperman, and the colony's most unforgiven native son — and spent twenty-five years building a Gothic Revival house around Hayes's cottage until the cottage disappeared inside it. Turrets, crenellations, a sweeping stair, a sandstone stable of 1829, a kitchen wing, convict barracks; at its greatest extent the estate ran to some five hundred acres, most of the present suburb. And then it stopped. The full facade Wentworth intended, the formal entrance, the extra bedrooms — none of them happened, undone by the depression of the 1840s. Two harbourside houses, one headland apart, both left short of their own drawings. That is the thing I want to see with my own eyes, and have not.
The contents were auctioned in 1900, the government resumed the estate in 1910, and by 1915 it was operating as this country's first official house museum — a fact I keep repeating to people who assume the genre was invented in Europe. Eleven hectares of grounds survive with it, which is why everyone I trust talks about the garden first and the rooms second. My own attempt was a March afternoon and a closed gate: the museum keeps Wednesday to Sunday, and I had not checked. I looked at the wall, which taught me nothing, and I owe the place a proper morning.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.