‘Bundanoon’ was the name the first inhabitants, the Gundungurra people, used to describe the deep and spectacular gullies that surround the present day township.

Bundanoon Cottage was built 100 years ago in what was then, the main street of the village of Jordons Crossing. At the bottom of the garden was Jordons Crossing creek with a bridge where Ellesmore Road passes the cottage. On the corner of the adjacent park was the old Blacksmiths shop. The shop front, in Ebury Street, two doors up from Bundanoon Cottage, was the Saddlery. A neighbour of the saddlery, while building her new house in the 1990’s, found many old horseshoes scattered in her garden. Across the road from the shop front, is a white and blue house, which was the Butchery.

In 1868 when the railway line and station was built the village centre moved south across the line to where it is today. The settlement was officially renamed Bundanoon in 1881.

In the 1920’s a Mr Prowse purchased Bundanoon Cottage and set up business as a barber in the front sitting room.

A Mr Terry lived in the cottage for many years in the 1950’s when the Jordans Crossing Creek still flowed at the bottom of the garden. His grandchild told me she would catch bullfrogs and stack the firewood for the original fuel stove through a shoot just outside the existing kitchen. Mrs Terry is remembered for her good works in the community with a plaque on the sundial in the school grounds, which you can still visit.

Much later a stationmaster for Bundanoon Station was in residence and from all accounts was a passionate ‘bikie’. When we renovated the living and sitting rooms, drawings of motor bikes and ‘colourful’ graffiti were found high up on the walls of the original lining boards. When they were discovered our son-in-law exclaimed, “this must have been a bikies palace”! A ‘local’ told us that the motor bikes were housed in the sitting room and for the parties many a barrel of beer was rolled down the hill from the pub straight through the front door of the cottage.