Windsor's buildings and Thompson Square make our history accessible

Hawkesbury heritage consultant Carol Edds was told this 20 years ago, after she had been apologising to the Europeans about the relative youth of Australian historic buildings compared to theirs.

“We’d brought members from [an historical] conference out to the Hawkesbury,” Ms Edds said.

“One of the members was someone who assessed World Heritage sites and he turned to me and said ‘you don’t know how lucky you are – in Europe we can’t go back to our original court house, we can’t go back to places like St Matthew’s Anglican Church, the first church built in the Hawkesbury, we can’t go back to a unique place like Thompson Square, the only 18^th century civil square in Australia still absolutely readable today from 200 years ago’.

“That to me changed my perspective on Australia’s heritage and particularly the heritage of the Hawkesbury.”

Ms Edds was speaking in this week’s Gazette’s podcast on why historians and the CAWB group care so passionately about Thompson Square.

Also present was Councillor Pete Reynolds who said “you can still stand there [in the square] and look out on the same views they looked out on in 1795”. 

Ms Edds said when the square was formed at that time there were actually 118 farms in the Hawkesbury. “And 85 of those were working farms. In the early days the Hawkesbury had the same population as Sydney,” she said.

She said the square at that time had the soldiers’ barracks, a provision store, watch house and school chapel. 

“That’s what the RMS won’t acknowledge – it’s not a park, it’s a square. It’s the relationship of the buildings to each other across the open space. It has not changed.”