Yasmar House: Gentleman’s Colonial Villa to Reformatory for Delinquent and Wayward Youth

Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Natural Environment, Town planning
Through the arboreal jungle: Road to juvenile remand

In the West Connex neighbourhood that is Parramatta Road, Haberfield, there’s an entire block on Cadigal land with the street frontage almost completely camouflaged by a dense outgrowth of foliage, overgrown Moreton Bay figs and other assorted large trees. If you stop and peer through the ancient but imposing gates, beyond the locked high wire fence, you’ll see a deserted, winding driveway, bisecting the sprawling green maze. At the end of this serpentine path is Yasmar House in the inner west suburb of Haberfield. The name sounds vaguely Middle Eastern (Arabic female name?), but is actually less exotic than it sounds, “Yasmar” is simply “Ramsay” spelt backwards. Ramsay is the name of an early 19th century landowner in what was originally called the Dobroyde Estate, David Ramsay𖤓. Ramsay’s son-in-law Alexander Learmonth and daughter Mary Louisa Ramsay commissioned architect John Bibb to design their Yasmar House as their family residence on a parcel of the estate land.

(source: Stanton & Son)

Yasmar House (1854–56), still extant today, is the sole remaining villa estate on Parramatta Road, Australia’s oldest and busiest road. The once grand building is U-shaped with rear wings (originally servants’ quarters and service rooms) and stables, the buildings set well back from the front entrance…architecturally, it is a Regency designed villa in the Greek Revival Style (John Bibb’s speciality). The classical gateposts, made of Italianate style sandstone with Gothic recesses and a ball motif atop them are connected to a high, ornate iron palisade fence. After Yasmar became a borstal the entrance was widened to accommodate prison trucks. The garden design of the arboretum and Georgian landscaping adhered to JC Loudon’s “Gardenesque” principles. During this period many exceptional and unusual species of flora were planted…to a large part this was the work of Mrs Learmonth’s brother Edward Ramsay who had a keen botanical interest. Among the rare or uncommon plantings that survive are palo blanco trees, Chilean wine/coquito palms, Pacific kauris and a Chinese midenhair tree [Jackson-Stepowski, Sue, Yasmar, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/yasmar, viewed 02 Nov 2024].

Yasmar House in its juvenile detention period

Yasmar House has had only three owners in its nearly 170-year history – the Learmonth family, the Grace family (co-founder of the iconic Grace Brothers Department Store Joseph Neal Grace and his wife Sarah Selina Smith) and the NSW state government.

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Beyond these gates… (photo: Michael Wayne)

Yasmar House has bore many names and many uses over the course of its existence, including Yasmar Hostel, Yasmar Detention Centre, Yasmar Child Welfare Home, Yasmar Shelter, Yasmar Juvenile Justice Centre, Ashfield Remand Home. It also functioned as a Sunday school in the 1860s. At one point the site included a reform school facility for girls, the Sunning Hill Education and Training Unit.

Carpentry class, Yasmar Shelter, 1948 (source: www.findandconnect.gov.au/)

Currently, the complex operates as the Yasmar Training Centre (administered by the Department of Corrective Services). The state government acquired the villa in 1944 after it had served as army officers’ quarters during the war. In 1946 Yasmar House became a remand centre for delinquent boys, with its grand reception rooms serving as a children’s court and other rooms assigned for attending magistrates.To accommodate the increase in juvenile inmate numbers at Yasmar, timber structures were built on top of the property’s tennis courts and croquet lawns§ (Jackson-Stepowski).

183–185 Parramatta Road

 In 1991 Juvenile Justice relocated away from Haberfield and Yasmar House became vacant, leading to a marked deterioration in the condition of the heritage-listed villa and the gardens. Consequently, Yasmar has been described as “a landscape at risk”, prompting locals from the Haberfield Association to volunteer their labour to try to restore the garden to its comely former state.

𖤓 nearby the Yasmar site there is both a Ramsay Street and a Yasmar Avenue

§ former inmates of the Yasmar institution from decades ago paint a picture of harsh living conditions, brutal treatment, beatings at the hands of the guards and other abuses of authority [‘Yasmar – Ashfield, NSW’, Past/Lives of the Near Future, (Michael Wayne), www.pastlivesofthenearfuture.com]

From Lower Canada to Concord, NSW: A North American Exiles’ Journey in the 1840s

Local history, Regional History

From it’s founding in 1788 as a penal colony Sydney served as a destination for Britain’s burgeoning surplus of convicted persons up until 1850. One of the most distinctive episodes of the transportation history in the period involved the sojourn in New South Wales of 58 French Canadians from Lower Canada (today Quebec) in the early 1840s.Their crimes, having participated in revolts against the inequities of British rule in Canada in 1837 and 1838.

(Image: Canadian Encyclopedia)

Both Lower Canada and Upper Canada (present-day Ontario province) rose up against the prevailing political “stitch-up” in British Canada. Power in Lower Canada rested firmly in the hands of a English speaking merchant oligarchy known as the “Château Clique”Ⓐ, controlling the executive and legislative councils, the judiciary and the senior bureaucracy. An additional grievance of the Francophone discontents was economic – widespread crop failures in 1836/37 had forced many into subsistence farming. The Les patriotes movement under Louis-Joseph Papineau, repeatedly thwarted by the ruling aristocracy in it’s efforts to secure a better deal, took to arms. The rebels in Upper Canada led by William Lyon Mackenzie, similarly frustrated by the denial of political reform, followed the lead of Les rébelles francophones, declaring the “Republic of Canada”. Mackenzie’s forces were aided by the incursion of American volunteers from the borderland states, partly inspired by patriotism and partly by a sense of adventure and the desire to strike a blow against the thraldom of their northern neighbours by the British (Maxine Dagenais, ‘The American Response to the Canadian Rebellions of 1837-38’, The Canadian Encyclopedia, 09-Oct-2019, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca). Both insurrections however were easily and comprehensively crushed by the superior British and loyalist forces…the principal leaders of the uprisings fled to the USA but some 29 of Les patriotes were executedⒷ.

Historic map detailing extent of Longbottom area (Source: docplayer.net)

Political prisoners removed to the remote Antipodes
A further 58 French speaking Canadian rebels from Lower Canada, originally intended for the “hell-hole” of Norfolk Island, were allowed after intercession by Catholic Archbishop Polding to serve their sentences in Sydney. The patriotes were assigned to the Longbottom Stockage (formerly the Longbottom Government Farm) in Concord (map), housed in crudely-built trenches on the present site of Concord Oval. The less skilled of the exiles found themselves in a quarry gang, tasked with the back-breaking work of breaking and carting rocks for construction of Parramatta Road. Others were employed felling trees and sawing blocks of wood for house construction or firing bricks for use in public works.

“Of good character”
The French Canadians political prisoners were far from the hardened criminals that could be found in much of Sydney Town at the time. In fact they had no previous convictions before being transported, some had been skilled rural artisans in Canada. By the account of no less than Governor Gipps himself, the exiles’ behaviour during their term of imprisonment had been ‘exemplary’, though unbeknownst to the authorities some of their number were also engaging in the odd illicit activity to earn a bit of money on the side, selling purloined wood, collecting oyster shells in nearby Hen and Chicken Bay to sell (Sheena Coupe, Concord – A Centenary History, (1983)).

Ticket-of-leave from Longbottom
The French Canadian exiles were deemed sufficiently responsible that by 1842 the government started releasing them from the stockade to live with ”respectable people”, working for food and lodgings. The political prisoners were then issued with tickets-of-leave into the community so they can earn wages. By the end of 1843, early 1844, the governor awarded free pardons to all of the exiles. 55 of the patriotes took the chance to return to Quebec (once they had raised the necessary passage – which took some up to four years as jobs were scarce in the 1840s Depression) and only one, Joseph Marceau, opted to stay, marrying an Australian woman and settling near Wollongong (two of the original exiled men died while in prison). With the departure of the Canadians the Longbottom Stockade fell into disrepair, its only practical use, a makeshift lockup for ”noisy drunks apprehended on Parramatta Road” (Coupe).

1890 map identifies “Longbottom Estate” (Source: Coupe)Reminders of the Canadien exiles’ presence
While nothing remains of the stockade (above ground anyway), the exiles are remembered in the Concord locale’s nomenclature – Exile Bay, Canada Bay, France Bay, Châteauguay Walk (named after Prieur’s village in Montreal), Marceau Drive. Bayview Park in Concord—where the French Canadians disembarked at the park’s wharf in 1840 on route to Longbottom Stockade—contains a monument to the exiles.

First-hand accounts of the exiles
Three of the 58 transported Canadiens left accounts of their time in Sydney—Francois-Maurice Lepailleur, Léon Ducharme and Francois Xavier Prieur—the only transported convicts in 1840s Sydney who kept daily records of their experiences (Beverley Boissery, A Deep Sense of Wrong: The Treason, Trials and Transportation to New South Wales of Lower Canadian Rebels after the 1838 Rebellion , (1995)). Impression Bay Probation Station. North American prisoners did hard labour at the network of probation stations on Van Diemens Land’ (Image: UTAS)

American ‘Borderlander’ political prisoners in Van Diemens Land
The same ship that brought the Canadiens to Sydney, HMS Buffalo , also transported between 82 and 93 Upper Canada rebelsⒸ to the penal colony in Van Diemens Land. These were predominantly American ‘borderlanders’ who had invaded Upper Canada to ’liberate’ the Canadians from the British ‘yoke’. The American prisoners‘ experience ran parallel to that of their French Canadian counterparts but their suffering and hardship in the Van Diemens Land colony was much, much worse. Some of the US exiles like William Gates, Linus Miller and Benjamin Wait(e)Ⓓ later wrote accounts of their treatment in Tasmanian prison camps …chain ganged together, treated like slaves, subjected to draconian regimes of labour and living conditions (14 of the patriots died during the incarceration). And unlike the well-regarded Canadiens in Sydney the Americans were vilified by the local press as the epitome of disloyalty (“Americans of the lowest order”) (Carter, J. C. (2009). Most achieved their ticket-of-leave after three to five years although a few escaped on whaler boats ‘One Way Ticket to a Penal Colony: North American Political Prisoners in Van Diemen’s Land’, Ontario History, 101(2), 188-221. http://doi.org/10.7292/1065618ar).

Concord Oval: Longbottom trenches excavated in 1984 (Credit: Canada Bay Connections)

Endnote: Longbottom Stockage and surrounds encompassed a large area. The stockage itself sat on land which today is occupied by three recreational fields, Concord Oval, St Luke’s Park and Cintra Park.

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Ⓐ the equivalent dominant entity in Upper Canada was the “Family Compact”
Ⓑ the (failed) rebellions nonetheless indirectly led eventually to responsible self-government for the Union of the two Canadian provinces (as proposed by Lord Durham)
Ⓒ accounts differ as the number, possibly due to conflation as a number of other American prisoners arrived from Canada in 1839
Ⓓ Wait (or Waite) was Canadian by birth though his father was American and Wait on return lived the rest of his life in the US