by Jenny Golding
Updated: 12 November 2025
A sawpit, a bullock team and Craigie Lea’s first home
The joy of moving into a family-built timber home on Craigie Lea, the property on which Francis and Emma Craigie and eight of their nine children settled in Waterloo in 1889, can only be imagined. They came to rain-soaked Waterloo in July and suffered cold and miserable conditions for a year, living in three tents they and neighbours erected on the uncleared timber and bush-covered land.
A house was desperately needed and took twelve months to build. Father and grown sons axed jarrah trees on the property and boards were cut in a sawpit; one man standing in a purpose-dug pit, another on higher ground as the two-handled saw was pulled back and forth. The sawn boards were transported by bullock team to the site for the house which was built to face one of the few surveyed tracks in Waterloo, a track later named Dowdell’s Line. Family members were not to know they were building their east-facing home with its back to the later surveyed and more easily used Paradise Road.
This first Craigie Lea home consisted of two large rooms and a veranda, corners partly enclosed, the whole sheltered by an iron roof. A kitchen/living room was separate in case of fire and a separate bread oven was already in use.
Scottish-born Frank and Swiss-born Emma (nee Berthoud) and their family had come from a smaller property in Elmore in Victoria; the father having chosen the two adjoining five-hundred-acre blocks in Waterloo because of guaranteed rainfall. And rain it did!
Emma washed clothes and cooked and baked in miserable conditions in the ‘tent’ year and is reported as having said. “Water, water everywhere. What a place to bring a body to.”
The jarrah home was deeply appreciated and other homes were built as the sons married.
Dardanup Heritage Collective 