Struan House

The wool boom in stone

Driving the Riddoch Highway south of Naracoorte, it is impossible to miss Struan House: a vast Italianate mansion rising from the paddocks, all towers, arches and sandstone dressings. It was built between 1873 and 1875 for John Robertson, a Scottish-born pastoralist who took up the Mosquito Creek run in 1843 and grew rich on wool, to a design by Naracoorte architect W. T. Gore.

The house ran to 40 rooms of locally quarried limestone, with ceiling mouldings worked with the bracken-frond badge of the Robertson clan and a celebrated white Italian marble fireplace in the drawing room. Robertson, famed for hospitality to rich and poor alike, opened it with a ball for 150 guests in 1876 — and died just four years later, buried in the small family cemetery overlooking his creek.

The South Australian Government bought Struan in 1948, and the house now anchors a primary industries research centre, so it is generally admired from the outside rather than toured. It remains one of the South East's great wool-boom monuments — see where the fleeces themselves were handled at the Glencoe Woolshed further south.