Meadowbank, Campbellfield - the Homestead

Date: 1850 [unknown]
Location: Campbellfield, Victoria, Australia

Meadowbank owned by Alexander Gibb.
The House built 1850 is a one storey, U shaped attic house construction of coursed rubble basalt with a gabled slate roof and hipped bay dormer windows. It is architecturally significant as an outstanding and extraordinary example of a Scottish vernacular style building in Victoria. The building has very distinctive hipped bay dormers and dwarf parapeted gable ends, which are typical of Scottish lowland buildings but seen rarely in Victoria.

The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946) Sat 28 Jun 1913 Page 8 MEADOWBANK, CAMPBELLFIELD, By HICKORY.
THE HOMESTEAD.
The quaintness and charm which characterise many old-world farmsteads, and at which the so-called Queen Anne villa aims, but seldom reaches, may occasionally be found in the homes raised by the pioneers in Victoria, and more often in the older State of Tasmania, whose temperate climate makes this style of house suitable to every part of the State. To the observer such a house as Meadowbank carries the feeling of "'home" in contradistinction to "dwelling," and this is emphasised with closer inspection. Built in 1856, of stone quarried in the neighbourhood, with walls two feet thick, chimneys and cupboards contained in the thickness of the walls, high eaves, a steeply-pitched slate roof, from which project quaint dormer-windows, and surrounded by stately plantation trees with garden and lawns in front, it stands a fitting monument of a family which has earned such high respect among the landed proprietors of Victoria. Mr. A. C. Gibb, the present owner and occupier of the house built by his father, can look with pride around him, as the trees surrounding his old home were planted by himself when a schoolboy, and he has watched them grow from slender plants into forest monarchs. Nor need he fear the reproach that the "big house,"-for so it was called by the country-side in the early days- is not as it was. The neatness of surroundings, convenience of arrangements, and the abundance of shelter for animals and implements, all indicate farming on sound lines.