Australia’s historic homes are rich with stories, reflecting the eras in which they were built and the lives of those who once called them home.

From opulent manors and grand estates to humble farms that once housed convicts, we've rounded up the best period properties across the country based on reviews, ratings and historical significance.

Click or scroll through to discover the most incredible historic home in every Australian state and internal territory. To enjoy these pictures on a desktop computer FULL SCREEN, click on the icon at the top right of the image...

Built on the ancestral lands of the Birrabirragal and Gadigal peoples, this manor started life as a single-storey cottage constructed in 1805. It was commissioned by Irish knight Sir Henry Browne Hayes, who had been exiled to New South Wales for attempting to kidnap a local heiress.

Named Vaucluse after a village near Avignon in southern France, it's thought Hayes surrounded his new home with Irish peat to protect it from snakes.

Barrister and explorer William Charles Wentworth took over the cottage in 1827 and transformed the small house into a grand estate. 

Additional bedrooms, a dining room, sitting room and a two-storey kitchen wing were added, while the drawing room (pictured) was designed to impress suitors looking to charm the owner’s daughters. Imported ceiling and cornice ornaments, hand-blocked floral wallpaper and a Carrara marble chimneypiece were all added to give the room a sense of grandeur.

An array of outbuildings were also installed, including sandstone stables and a coach house. The addition of corner buttresses, arches, castellated turrets and carved Gothic detailing transformed the humble home into the imposing manor it is today. 

While extensive work had been carried out to upgrade the cottage into an architectural masterpiece, crucial elements were still missing by the 1860s – including a front door. The property also didn't have enough bedrooms to accommodate all 10 of the Wentworth children. Historical texts collected by the Museums of History New South Wales reference one child sleeping in his "room in the hall".

Historian James Broadbent described Vaucluse as a "fragmented" and "muddled" house that reflected the nature of its owner at the time. Nevertheless, its grand interiors meant Vaucluse House became Australia's first official house museum in 1915.

Cooks’ Cottage in Victoria was built by the parents of British navigator and explorer Captain James Cook, who is widely credited for mapping New Zealand and large parts of the Great Barrier Reef in the 1700s.

Despite being one of Australia’s oldest buildings, Cooks’ Cottage wasn’t even built in Australia – it was built in Yorkshire in England and the entire cottage was transported to Melbourne by Sir Russell Grimwade in 1934. Each brick was numbered, packed into a barrel, shipped thousands of miles and then reassembled on the other side of the world.

Bizarrely, Captain Cook himself never actually lived in the property – he’d left almost a decade before his father built the house – but just the connection to the revered explorer was enough for Grimwade to relocate the entire property.

Having transported the bricks so far, Grimwade ensured Cooks’ Cottage was rebuilt to the same original specifications. Local newspaper The Herald wrote on 17 April 1934 that "even the creak on the stairs may be built in".

Very few of the furnishings are now the same as those used by the Cook family, but the house has quaint furniture and antique pieces that would have been typical of the time period.

The cottage still has its handkerchief English garden and ivy spiralling up the brickwork – cuttings from the original ivy plants were transported from England and replanted.

Prior to its reconstruction, The Herald acknowledged how exact the recreated house would be to its original: "But apart from the ivy and, possibly a few borers in the beams and rafters, the cottage will be preserved in such a way that were Captain Cook's relatives brought back to life they would be able to detect no difference."

In 1913 a man called José Paronella travelled from his home in Catalonia, Spain to Australia. The following year he found a 13-acre (5.3ha) stretch of land along Queensland’s Mena Creek and spent the next decade working on sugar cane farms until he could afford to buy it. He spent a total of £120 on the plot in 1929, which is the equivalent of AUD$11,630 ($7.3k/£5.7k) today. 

Paronella and his wife Margarita lived in this stone cottage, which was the first building on the site.

The couple then started developing the site for the public, adding pleasure gardens and entertaining spaces, such as the lavish lower refreshment room pictured. 

The incredible building transformed into a movie theatre at weekends and hosted balls with live music. A rotating 'myriad reflector' made from 1,270 tiny mirrors was suspended from the ceiling in the hall. An early iteration of a mirror ball, it was designed to throw pink and blue light across the walls and the floor.

More than 7,000 trees were planted to help the park blend in with its stunning creek surroundings. Bridges and cascades built from rocks are peppered throughout the park, ensuring you can always hear the sound of water.

Unlike the cottage, the rest of the plot’s structures were built from poured concrete reinforced by old salvaged railway tracks. The plaster was made by combining clay and cement and applied by hand, meaning the fingerprints of workers are still visible across the walls.

Carrick Hill is an English-style manor that sits at the foot of the Adelaide Hills in South Australia. The land that this extraordinary property was built on was given to Ursula and Bill Hayward as a wedding gift from her father in the 1930s. The newlyweds then set about building South Australia's most impressive stately home.

The pair’s marriage was seen as unorthodox – one local paper ran the headline 'Heiress Marries Shopkeeper' to announce their big day – and the unusual design of their home was thought equally unconventional.

Within the stone walls the Haywards housed treasures they had brought home from their honeymoon in England, including paintings and fine furniture that spanned centuries of wealth. 

The couple rescued the home's famous Waterloo Staircase from Beaudesert, an English stately home that was demolished in 1935. The fixture is thought to date back to the reign of British King George V in the late 1800s. Its name came from a painting depicting the Battle of Waterloo that was once displayed at the top of the staircase.

This remarkable archive image from 1984 shows the grandeur of the home and its gardens, which were designed by Lady Hayward for hosting elegant social gatherings and tennis parties. Queen Elizabeth II and British actors Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh are among the famous faces to have attended the estate's soirées.

The Haywards hired a large team of gardeners to maintain the grounds. One man called Cliff Jacobs was particularly devoted to the garden, pruning the hedges and tending to the flowers for a total of 50 years before retiring in 1986.

Woodbridge House sits on the banks of Swan River in Western Australia. The site, which is the ancestral land of the Whadjuk Aboriginal people, was first developed by British Naval officer Captain James Stirling, who had explored the area in 1827 before erecting a small cottage on the grounds. The 4,000 acres (1,619ha) of land were named Woodbridge after Stirling’s wife Ellen’s family home in Surrey, England.

The estate was later sold to entrepreneur and agriculturalist Charles Harper and his family, who built the red-brick mansion that we see today. When construction on this sweeping 19th-century home was completed in 1884, the house was described as the "handsomest private residence that has yet been erected in the colony".

The home was also used as a school for Charles Harper’s children and other locals, with a small teaching space set up in the billiard room for the older children while the younger ones were taught on the verandah.

The home had various uses throughout the First World War and Second World War, including housing residents of a local elderly home. Consequently, the interiors of the property were altered over the years to accommodate a large number of residents.

Not much of the original furniture remains, but the furnishings aim to show how the wealthy classes lived in the late Victorian era.

The grounds of the estate were historically used for growing wheat, alongside orchards of apples, pears and peaches and a commercial nursery. 

The house is pictured here back when it was a school, sometime between 1921 and 1942, just before the Second World War led to its closure. 

When the care home that replaced the school closed in the 1960s, Woodbridge House was threatened with demolition. However, its future was secured when the home became a National Trust property. 

Woolmers Estate is considered one of the most historically and architecturally significant buildings in Australia. Established in 1817 by Thomas Archer, the rural settlement has passed through six generations of the Archer family.

This manor house is just one of several buildings peppered across the estate’s 203 acres (82ha), which also feature smaller family houses, workers’ cottages, a former chapel, stables, a bakehouse and a pump house. Woolmers Estate is a UNESCO World Heritage site, primarily because of its convict history.

Under the assignment system used through the 19th century, transported convicts were assigned to free settlers, who were then responsible for feeding, clothing and housing them in return for their indentured labour. Woolmers Estate was maintained by convicts assigned to work there and many opted to remain at the farm once they were free.

Pictured here is the cider house. Convicts would collect huge numbers of apples grown in the orchards and press and ferment the fruit into alcohol, which was later sold.

Up to 100 people could be living on the farm at any one time, making the estate feel like its own village.

Pictured here is the manor house's grand colonial exterior back in 1919, complete with an open touring car parked outside.

Today, the buildings are fitted with antique furnishings and artefacts, which offer insight into rural life during the early European settlement of Tasmania.

The grounds where the various outhouses sit are equally as impressive and include the Rose Garden, which was inspired by French formal gardens popular in the 1600s and is home to hundreds of varieties of the flower.

This restored 1850s homestead is another example of convict-era buildings that housed people who had been banished to Australia. Between 1788 and 1868 more than 162,000 convicts were transported from overseas, the vast majority of whom had committed crimes in Britain and Ireland.

Lanyon Homestead was established by British settler James Wright, who migrated from England to Australia while recovering from illness on the advice of his doctor. He purchased a block of land in 1835 and was allocated a workforce of convicts who laboured over many years to build the houses, huts and barns that make up the estate.

A number of families took on ownership of the homestead over the next century, each extending and redecorating its various buildings. The Federal Government reportedly acquired Lanyon for AUS$3.7 million in 1974, which is the equivalent of around AUD$37 million ($23m/£18m) today.

The main house has since been restored and furnished to reflect its rich history. Wisteria more than a century old grows around the entrance to the main house, welcoming guests into the pioneer past of 18th- and 19th-century Canberra.

This photo, taken sometime between 1925 and 1957, shows how the estate used to look. The forms of the main buildings are relatively unchanged from today.

Set in the foothills of the Brindabella Ranges, Lanyon Homestead still features large swathes of grazing land for cattle. Elsewhere, lush gardens provide a more fragrant offering with roses and dahlias growing alongside pumpkins and assorted vegetables.

Today the historic homestead is open to the public and features a museum of paintings by artist Sir Sidney Nolan.

An example of mid-Victorian Gothic architecture, Government House in Darwin is the oldest European building in the internal territory. It has been home to officials since 1871 and is the current residence of the Administrator of the Northern Territory – a representative of the British Crown.

When first constructed, it contained a stone-walled central hall, six bedrooms, a kitchen with a stone chimney and a pantry. It was redesigned by esteemed architect John George Knight in 1878 after white ants destroyed a second-storey addition. Despite numerous renovations over the years, its drawing room is the oldest surviving continuously occupied built structure in the territory.

The distinctive shuttered verandah allows air to circulate while keeping the outdoor living spaces cool and shielded from the sun. It reportedly also served as one of Darwin's first courtrooms.

Government House has weathered the wrath of nature over the decades. In 1897, 1937 and 1974, the structure sustained damage from cyclones, and it took a direct hit from bombing in the Second World War. Despite its misfortune, the home has remained standing for over 150 years.

This incredible image from around 1900 shows how little Government House has changed over the centuries. Aside from the brickwork, which has since been whitewashed, the unique shuttered verandah, Gothic windows and distinctive gables remain intact. The exterior is reportedly unchanged since 1937.

In a homage to the past, the home was refurbished in 2003 with the interiors restored to reflect its appearance in the late 1930s and 1940s. The extensive overhaul was carried out over a number of years and was finally completed in 2010. 

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