Woden Homestead sits on the lands of the Ngunnawal people. Europeans first ventured into the area in 1820, opening it up for settlement. In 1832, Francis Mowatt purchased 2,560 acres and named the property Jerrabomberra. He erected a stone cottage on the land.

 

In 1837, Mowatt sold the property to Dr James Fitzgerald Murray, who renamed it Woden after the Norse god of war, poetry, and magic. He expanded the homestead and lived in it with his widowed sister, Anna Maria Bunn, author of the first novel published in Australia (The Guardian, 1837), and her son.

 

The Campbell family took ownership of Woden around 1869. It was part of the Duntroon Estate and initially accommodated tenant farmers until Frederick Campbell and his wife, Edith Catherine, moved in 1890. It has since been home to successive generations of Campbells: the current owners, Patrick and Emma Campbell, have lived on the property with their sons, Finn and Sam, since 2011. The Campbells manage a sheep grazing enterprise on the farm, and rare and endangered species inhabit its grasslands. It has heritage significance as the ACT's oldest continuously occupied homestead.

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The Stables are believed to date to the early 1890s as a replacement for an earlier convict-built structure. The blend of rough-hewn timber, salvaged wood, stone, and corrugated iron are quintessential representations of the Australian rural standard to reuse and ‘make do'. The stables were home to a riding school in the 1970s and 1980s, teaching horsemanship to dozens of locals. The stall walls feature the names of three horses that resided in the building: Slipper, Judy, and Vice.

 

Woden Homestead Stables has been painstakingly restored and reinvigorated over the last decade with the help of local artisan craftsman Myles Gostelow and the financial assistance of the ACT government.

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