Foxlow and its contents
One of the historic stations in this area is Foxlow. A couple of historic points:
The land and house were sold at auction a few months ago, and today there is an auction selling off the contents as the old owner is now living in Bungendore, presumably in a far, far smaller house. On the subject of the old owner, the second of the two points above is surprising, as he has had a reputation of being a misanthrope threatening dire consequences if anyone sets foot on the property. Perhaps he was flexible if paid enough? Certainly part of the reason we (and at least one other set of former locals) went to check out the sale was it was a chance to have a stickybeak at the place.
I'll get back to the contents sale later but here are some pictures. They had signs on the road, and indeed a lot of cars parked there as well.
The driveway was quite impressive, although the grounds didn't show much sign of active gardening.
This is the front of the house, which is actually the bedroom component! The front door is off round the left side of this view.
Here is a view of the back. This confirms the view we got walking through that bits and pieces (of utility rooms and a few more bedrooms) had been added on since the original homestead was built.
One of the main rooms, possibly the main reception room. Note the height of the ceilings - these days they'd have 2 storeys in that height! As might be expected with a place this old, it seemed quite dark inside.
This is the room immediately inside the front door. I presume the day felt cold to the Sydney auctioneers when they started up, but it was a lovely spring day at 18C.
Several of the fireplaces had these wooden inserts when the fire wasn't operating. This was the most colourfully decorated.
A barn had been converted to a second dwelling.
This is a view from the balcony in the barn. All the stuff in the image was for sale including a job lot of crockeryetc.
The unusual - in my experience - element of the sale was that it was possible to bid on-line before the sale started. As we couldn't get to the sale we put in a few bids that way.
In a couple of cases we were told that our bid hadn't reached the Reserve (which appeared to be the lower end of the expected price range). For another item our bid was accepted - we put in our maximum ($200) but the amount bid was $170, being $10 above the previous highest bid. The we got an email saying we had been outbid and asking if we wanted to up our bid. As we actually thought it worth $500 we squeezed out a few more $.
Here are a couple of snips from the catalogue, just before it closed off from on-line selling: In each case the bid offered was the minimum, rather than our maximum.
This was their minimum bid of $5: as it is Lot 517 out of 566 we hope most people will have lost interest by this time.
The most surprising lot was a history of WW1 in 12 volumes. This had an expected range of $80 -120 but the high bid on Saturday was $900.00! I am not sure if that meant the auctioneers had undervalued x10 or someone had hit the '0' once more than they intended!
I skimmed the results (and watched the last few lots on-line). Most things seemed to go for at least the expected price and many were well above the high end of expectations. We were under by about 50% for the lots on which our bids were over the Reserve! So we got zip!
The sale is summarised in a Canberra Times article.
To an anonymous commenter: sorry, I couldn't publish that!
- it was the home of Captain, the bullock who escaped and went to live at the Molonglo Flat, with the village now named after him; and
- some of the filming of the Ned Kelly movie starring Sir Michael Jagger was done on the property.
The land and house were sold at auction a few months ago, and today there is an auction selling off the contents as the old owner is now living in Bungendore, presumably in a far, far smaller house. On the subject of the old owner, the second of the two points above is surprising, as he has had a reputation of being a misanthrope threatening dire consequences if anyone sets foot on the property. Perhaps he was flexible if paid enough? Certainly part of the reason we (and at least one other set of former locals) went to check out the sale was it was a chance to have a stickybeak at the place.
I'll get back to the contents sale later but here are some pictures. They had signs on the road, and indeed a lot of cars parked there as well.
In a couple of cases we were told that our bid hadn't reached the Reserve (which appeared to be the lower end of the expected price range). For another item our bid was accepted - we put in our maximum ($200) but the amount bid was $170, being $10 above the previous highest bid. The we got an email saying we had been outbid and asking if we wanted to up our bid. As we actually thought it worth $500 we squeezed out a few more $.
Here are a couple of snips from the catalogue, just before it closed off from on-line selling: In each case the bid offered was the minimum, rather than our maximum.
I skimmed the results (and watched the last few lots on-line). Most things seemed to go for at least the expected price and many were well above the high end of expectations. We were under by about 50% for the lots on which our bids were over the Reserve! So we got zip!
The sale is summarised in a Canberra Times article.
To an anonymous commenter: sorry, I couldn't publish that!
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