If you stare at the surface long enough, you can just make out the once-white stucco walls and, even after all these years, the tinge of the formerly red, corrugated iron roof.
The stone and hand-hewn timber homestead once stood proudly overlooking the river valley that almost a century and a half later would be its death knell: the dammed waters swirling through and over it, submerging it forever.
Around eight kilometres south of the regional city of Queanbeyan, NSW, close to the now border with Canberra, “Googong”, the original property of 1845 was first known as “The Googongs”, later rechristened “Beltana”. Drowned to build a mighty dam, it's not the only lost heritage of what is much more than what has now become Queanbeyan's newest suburb.
A schoolhouse from the 1880s that vanished more than a hundred years ago may yet be one of those to re-emerge in what is actually one of the old city's earliest European-inhabited areas.
As such, the place that was for those arrivals the very “edge of civilisation”, is more obscure and enigmatic than might be expected, encompassing tales of everything from disappearing skeletons to a local “hairy man of the woods”.
First officially mentioned in the registers of Queanbeyan's Christ Church in 1848, the “forest country with some scrub, intersected by rugged gullies” was sighted by white explorers 25 years before that.
In 1825, it was taken up by one of the region's pioneering – and largest - landholders, Robert Campbell. Responsible for Duntroon House (1833), the Campbells purchased almost 2,000 acres in the area in 1836, then referred to as “The River Station”.
The source of that bountiful river to which it referred is high up in the southerly hills of the Australian Alps. Its course originally formed the route from Goulburn through Queanbeyan and on to the goldfields of the Monaro and Kiandra – our very own road to El Dorado.
How it came to be “Googong” is one of the outlier's many mysteries (so too, its meaning which similarly remains unknown). One version suggests it became thus about the time it was sold to a raffish Irishman, John Feagan. Legend has it, Campbell didn't think Feagan could pay – until he opened his saddle-bags to reveal the gleam of his discoveries on the Araluen goldfields.
Following the former gold-miner's death in a riding accident, his son-in-law, Albert William Studdy, became master of all he surveyed.
He would build a new homestead on higher ground with a picturesque view of the river running through it and ringed by the hills beyond.
It was this natural amphitheatre that also saw Walter Burley Griffin incorporate it as a potential reservoir in his Canberra plan.
Studdy's concern about this very possibility resulted in the sale of his home to grazier, J.C. Gorman, in 1920.
John Gorman was of a family "reputed to be descended from Viking raiders, who landed in Ireland about the 9th century".
Having served in the 1st Royal Tank Division in WWI, Lieutenant Gorman and his soon-to-be wife took up residence of their new home in 1921. They'd have three children, the youngest of whom, John Jnr, would eventually inherit the estate.
Born in 1926, according to John's memoir, "Googong had a fairly large weatherboard house [with] a whole lot of rooms".
"Separate from that was an area built in about 1860 of pise - rammed mud and walls that were half-a-metre thick and the mud was faced with cement. That had a bathroom, two bedrooms and a schoolroom - so the house was in two portions".
Further away was "the old house". Built of stone, it was "quite a substantial house, every room ran into every other room, there were no corridors and there was a small verandah. There was no kitchen and there was no bathroom".
By that time officially the stockmen's residence, there were numerous other outbuildings, including stables and workshops.
Two of them were wooden-slab - one containing a blacksmith's shop complete with "a huge anvil and great big bellows". A live-in farrier made "horseshoes out of bars of iron".
All of them were either demolished, or left to rot away at the bottom of a dam that continues to provide much of the water reserves for a nation's capital.
In a revision of the account of how the property came to acquire its name, detailed by the Queanbeyan Heritage Committee in 2010, it was suggested the name “Googong” had been “pinched” by Studdy or Gorman, the name attributed to another settler, James Brown, who also acquired much land in the vicinity. Eventually, his patch came under the ownership of William Joseph Wells, also in the 1920s, who it's alleged at that time changed it from “Googong” to “Wellsvale”.
Whichever account is correct (and the first appears most likely), it was on Brown's property the now disappeared Googong Public School was situated from 1883.
Described as “a single-roomed slab building with a chimney, that was open to the weather”, after almost three decades of use, for some unspecified reason, it was moved closer to Queanbeyan. By the end of 1913 though, its tenure was at an end.
With no existing records of its actual placement, it was overlooked and eventually forgotten, any remains covered with the inevitable sands of time. Now an archaeological dig has uncovered old-style pencils and stone foundations its hoped will see the schoolhouse re-imagined, reminding the young students of the area's latest educational facility of how different things were for their forebears.
In the meantime, there are those that will never rise again - the skeletal remnants of that very first building which went to its watery grave in 1976, at that point offering an ominous prediction of the potential fate of the city lying below it.
The Googong Dam wall holds back the equivalent of 50,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools and when it stood only 17 metres high, Queanbeyan was subjected to its third most dramatic flood event on record. So serious were the fears the wall would be breached, 5,000 residents were evacuated from low-lying ground.
As to Googong's other anomalies, they've been vouched for by many a prominent source including a local policeman who in 1874 discovered human bones hidden in a cave at nearby Burra. In the time it took him to get to Queanbeyan and back again, they'd apparently gone missing, never to be found again.
And yet. Almost two years later, what seemed to be a "rediscovery" of "a skull and a quantity of bones" led to an official inquiry.
Originally thought to be "those of an Aborigine", the examiner Doctor Charles Johnson was adamant they belonged to "a European ... a young man about 30 years old".
However,one pelvic bone belonged to either a female or a much younger male.
The mystery deepened ever further.
Another local, William Naylor, would state that a decade earlier he'd come across the skeleton of a horse, a saddle and stirrup irons "about two miles from the cave" which was close to an "old road to the Monaro".
The verdict on identity and cause of death remained unresolved.
One of the region's most decorated war heroes, Major General Sir Granville Ryrie, recalled yowie encounters when he was a boy in the 1860s.
Even The Queanbeyan Age reported the drowning of one of the mythical hominids in the '76 flood.
With all of that, who wouldn't want to be a Googonian?
History blogs and info warm my heart and I thank you Nichole🌞