Ormiston House Estate

This most beautiful estate overlooking Raby Bay is open to the public most Sundays. The Ormiston House web site provides details of events and opening times. The estate was established by the Hon. Louis Hope in 1858 and the slab building on site dates to that time. Hope further developed the property in 1862, erecting a small brick cottage, huts for the farm workers, an overseer’s house, barn, stockyard and milking yards. Hope erected Queensland’s first sugar crushing mill and the first commercial sugar was produced here in September 1864. Construction began on a substantial house of locally made bricks at this time and workers were brought from Scotland. Local cypress logs were sent to England to be turned for the Tuscan columns on the verandas. Hope continued to produce sugar. However, a dispute with a neighbour over milling led him to leave Ormiston in 1865, and his overseer at the time, Gilbert Burnett, leased and later purchased property and equipment and moved it to Wellington Point. Ownership of the property was transferred to John Macartney of Waverly Station at St Lawrence in 1912 and in 1959 it was sold to the Carmelite nuns who erected a brick monastery adjacent.