Greenoaks.
A house in the Gothic taste,
above the harbour. Acquired 1846 · Transformed 1846 — 1878

A cottage acquired, a mansion conceived.

In 1846 Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, then but three years into his Sydney auctioneering business, purchased the ironmonger Thomas Woolley's two-storey sandstone cottage on the eastern slope of Darling Point. Built in 1841 and known as Percyville, the house and its 2.8-hectare allotment were acquired for £2,500 — a sum that, by the standards of the colony, signalled an ambitious establishment.

Mort renamed the property Greenoaks — a spelling he carried throughout his life, occasionally rendered as Greenoakes in the family's own correspondence. The original modest cottage was, between that year and the 1860s, progressively transformed into one of Sydney's most distinguished private houses.

The first hand laid upon the place was that of the architect John Frederick Hilly, who began the conversion to a gentleman's residence in the years immediately following Mort's purchase. In 1859, returning from a long visit to England, Mort engaged the colony's foremost ecclesiastical architect, Edmund Blacket — designer of the University of Sydney — to undertake more substantial Gothic-revival additions, including the celebrated picture gallery in which Mort displayed the paintings, suits of armour and curios he had gathered abroad.

The leading and model private garden in New South Wales. — Horticulture Magazine, 1865

Mort opened both the gardens and the gallery to the public — an act of singular generosity for the time, and one consistent with the character of a man whose commercial life was, in equal measure, a programme of civic improvement.

A garden unsurpassed in the colony.

From 1849 Mort engaged the celebrated horticulturist Michael Guilfoyle — father of William Guilfoyle, later director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens — to lay out the grounds at Greenoaks. The result, in time, became one of the most admired private gardens in nineteenth-century Australia.

The grounds combined exotic specimens with terraced walks, summerhouses and water features, set against the long view across the harbour. By 1865, Horticulture Magazine pronounced Greenoaks "the leading and model private garden in New South Wales".

Mort opened the gardens to the public — a generosity, like the picture gallery within the house, that placed his estate quietly in the civic life of the colony. Much of the original planting was lost in the subdivisions that followed 1895, though one notable survivor — a stone statue of the Dying Gladiator — remains in the garden of 2D Greenoaks Avenue.

The greatest benefactor that the working classes in this country ever had. — Spoken at the funeral of T.S. Mort, May 1878

Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, of Greenoaks & Bodalla.

Born at Willowfield in Bolton, Lancashire, on 23 December 1816, Mort sailed for Sydney in 1838 with little beyond letters of introduction. By 1843 he had opened his own auction rooms and held what is generally regarded as the first specialised public wool sale in Australia.

From that beginning came a career almost without parallel in colonial commerce: founding director of the AMP Society (1848); founder of Mort's Dock at Balmain (1854) — Australia's first completed dry dock; pioneer of mechanical refrigeration through his patronage of Eugène Nicolle; and architect of the model dairy settlement at Bodalla.

Greenoaks was, throughout, his Sydney house — and the seat at which he raised his nine children with his first wife Theresa Laidley, whom he married in 1841 at St Lawrence's, Sydney. He kept Bodalla in the country, and Greenoaks in town, until his death in 1878.

The first public statue erected to any Australian was raised at Macquarie Place in 1883 — to him. It still stands.

Read more at Goldsbrough Mort →

Since 1910 the house has been known publicly as Bishopscourt, having served for over a century as the official residence of the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. It is listed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register, and remains one of the few intact Gothic-revival mansions of its scale in the city.

The original 2.8-hectare estate has, through three successive subdivisions — 1895, 1911 and 2006 — been reduced to a fraction of its original ground, though the principal house and its immediate setting remain. Greenoaks Avenue, opened in 1911 through what was once the southern lawn, takes its name from Mort's house.

This site exists to record the history of Greenoaks and to honour Mort's stewardship of it — alongside the broader documentation of the family's work maintained at Goldsbrough Mort.

— ListedHeritage Status

NSW State Heritage Register · Local Environmental Plan (Woollahra Municipal Council) · National Trust register.

— AddressLocation

11A Greenoaks Avenue, Darling Point NSW 2027 · Approximately 4 kilometres east of the Sydney GPO, on the eastern slope of Darling Point.

— NoteVisiting

The residence is private and not open to the public. Greenoaks Avenue itself, however, retains several heritage-listed survivors of the Mort estate that may be viewed from the street.