The Mill, Cowra, NSW.

The Canberra Times

The year: 1861. Burke and Wills perished in the Australian outback, it was the first year of the American Civil War, convicts were still being transported to the colonies and Queen Victoria had 40 years to reign. It was also the year that the Steam Flour Mill opened for business in Cowra. An imposing three-storey bluestone building, as grand as it was functional, it was the scene of much activity as it churned out its supplies of flour to feed the colony’s growing population. Not long after Queen Victoria’s death, the mill closed its doors, standing dormant for around 90 years.

As the building fell into disrepair, its only inhabitants the pigeons who left vast mounds of excrement in their wake, various proposals were put forward for its use. There were, too, the inevitable threats of demolition. But thanks to the tenacity of a local family, the O’Dea’s, the building once again stands proud. In its new guise as The Mill, it houses a restaurant, art gallery and wine tasting facility that is helping to put Cowra on the tourist map. The story of the building’s transformation is a remarkable one, not least of which because it was achieved in just 12 months. Its sensitive use of recycled materials and the dedication shown by all involved in the project are also noteworthy.

Today, The Mill is the oldest remaining building in Cowra. Located in the centre of town, in Vaux Street, it was built by the Walsh family and operated as a flour mill till 1905. During its long period of idleness, the future of the building was put in the too-hard basket. At one stage, it was considered as a venue for the Cowra visitor’s centre, but the idea was dismissed in favour of a newly constructed building on the town’s main thoroughfare. Eventually, a proposal for the building’s demolition was put to the local shire council but fortunately the motion was defeated. And so the O’Dea family stepped in.

David O’Dea and his wife Wizz are long-time farmers in the region, arriving from Sydney in 1959, when they bought their first 125ha of broadacre farm between Cowra and Canowindra. The couple ran sheep and cattle, grew wheat and lucerne, and gradually expanded their holdings to 700ha. “In 1987, we decided we could do more with our land, so we developed a cherry orchard of 1450 trees and in 1988 we put in our first 33 acres (13ha) of vineyard,” David said. The venture proved highly successful and less than a decade later, the family either owns or manages and controls around 240ha of vines. Their Windowrie Estate vineyard boasts state-of-the-art trellis and irrigation systems, and their wines are winning medals on the show circuit. Indeed, their 1994 Chardonnay won gold medals at every capital city wine show.

In 1995, with the encouragement of their son, Steph, who is studying for a degree in construction management and economics at the University of Canberra, the O’Dea’s embarked on their biggest project yet. Preserving the mill was a challenge to say the least. “It was just a mess,” David said. “The whole of the inside had collapsed. There was tonnes of pigeon poop - we took out two tipping trucks full of rubbish. It speaks volumes for the strength of the building that any of it still stood.” But Steph’s goal was to return the building to its original character. “He wanted to restore it to its former glory, plus some.”

According to David, much of the credit for the project goes to Steph and the project manager, Casey Proctor, who rallied around to acquire the services of the best local trademen they could find. While the local council was quite helpful in its support for the project, “financially we were on our own,” he said. While modern reproductions might have cut costs, the O’Dea’s were anxious to use as much recycled material as they could find, even when it meant using an old-time adze (like a mattock) to transform timber which had proved too hard for modern equipment to deal with. Beautifully reworked using 95 per cent recycled timbers and natural products, The Mill is as true to its original character as it could possibly be. “If you have a building that was opened 10 years before the Paris Opera House, you don’t want to jam new stuff in it,” David said.

John Andrews, a semi-retired architect who lives at nearby Eugowra, was called on to draw up the plans for the project. Andrews has extensive international experience behind him, including the design of numerous public buildings in Australia, Canada and the USA, retained the existing walls and roofline, adding a wide veranda on two sides which largely follows the lines of a corrugated iron extension depicted in a turn-of-the-century photograph of the mill. Inside, the installation of huge horizontal timber support beams under each floor has removed the need for vertical support posts, more windows have been added and some windows have been enlarged to take doors. Thus, each floor has become an open, light-filled space, the first floor housing the cellar door for Windowrie Estate wines, the second floor a restaurant and the third floor an art gallery/presentation space.

Built of bluestone with sandstone quoins around the windows, the walls are a massive 800mm thick, reducing to a thickness of 600mm at the top of the building. The enormity of the project had confounded several stonemasons asked to quote on the project. All shook their heads, said it would cost a fortune and could not give an estimate of how long the restoration would take. But in one of those great twists of fate - “we had a very good spirit on the job,” said son Steph - the O’Dea’s were fortunate to secure the services of Jack Green, a highly experienced stonemason from South Australia. “He had done a lot of work with old buildings in the vine areas and was travelling around Australia in a caravan with his wife,” David said. “They happened to be staying overnight in the caravan park with a flat tyre and he came over for a walk to have a look at the building.”

Green, who ended up staying for several months to do the job, was the only non-local labour used on the project. According to David, the entire project was an “absolute feat of tradesmanship”. As well as Green’s stonemasonry, the restoration features some impressive metal work, including handcrafted door handles, by Danny Sutcliffe and painstaking carpentry by Bernie Nelson and Maurie Sheridan. “We had two guys here who really just had a love affair with wood.” Much of the timber used in the structural work - flooboards, ceilings and most of the veranda timber - came from the demolition of an old woolstore in the Sydney suburb of Glebe. The huge timber beams supporting the second and third floors came from a bridge in Echuca, while the ironbark and blackbutt doors, window sills, railings and stair treads came from a cattle shed on the O’Dea’s Windowrie property.

It is with great pride that David tells the story of the latter. The timber originally came from a woolstore in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, which David’s father, Cec, demolished at the end of World War II. Cec O’Dea incorporated the timber in a barn on his farm at Richmond, and when he sold the farm, David won a tender to demolish the structure. The timber served David well on his own farm for many years and now looks right at home in its splendid new setting, “having been through three generations of O’Dea’s”. Nearly every item in the building tells a story. The tanks positioned at each corner of the building to collect rainwater are old sea-wall piles, removed to extend the runway at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport. The spittoon in the wine-tasting area is an old metal baby bath given to the O’Dea’s by one of the plumbers involved in the project.

The ceilings in the toilets are made from old kerosene drums which had previously been used for the ceilings of an old pise house at Wattamondara. The ground floor is made from locally quarried granite, which had been rejected for the export (predominantly Japanese) market. The glass pyramid-shaped cap over the outdoor well was designed by Gordon Andrews, who also designed Australia’s original decimal currency. The well was discovered when the wheel of a tractor used in excavating the land around the building sunk into the ground. The well, which had been filled in, originally provided the water to run the flour mill. With the fill removed, Cowra now has the biggest spittoon in the world, jokes David.

The Mill now operates as Windowrie Estate’s cellar door, offering tastings of wines from both its premium Windowrie Estate label and its less expensive label, The Mill. To commemorate the restoration of the building, the O’Dea’s released a special 1995 semillon/sauvignon blanc blend called The Mill Builders. The front of the specially commissioned label features a sketch of an adze and a window of the building, while the back label features the signatures of everyone who worked on the project, from the architect to the labourers. The grounds surrounding The Mill have been beautifully landscaped, with 80 grapevines transplanted from the Windowrie property. Only one vine was lost in the process.

David O’Dea says the building’s restoration in just 12 months and its surprisingly low budget - around $500,000 - “speaks volumes for the work of both Steph and Casey”. “We’ve got to try to look after as much of our human history as we can, and this has given us a golden opportunity to do that,” he said. Adds Steph: “The materials we used had a previous history which we didn’t try to hide in any way and that is what gives the building its character and integrity.”

© Christine Salins

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