A Colourful Surprise

Undoubtedly, one of the most exciting discoveries from Campbelltown Library's Great Australian Dream Project from earlier this year was this photograph above of Tom Cooper's famous colourful house at Menangle Park. Donated by Barbara Edney and taken by Max Keegan, this low quality but very significant image shows Tom Cooper's "Eye Stopper" in all its wonderful glory. Tom's house has been written about in two previous History Buff posts and covered in an episode of the library's Curious Campbelltown, so we were thrilled to at last to see what it looked like. 

Tom Cooper was an eccentric character that lived in a tin shanty on his property at Racecourse Avenue at Menangle Park. His neighbour Melva Thomas wrote an article about Tom in the Literary Review in the 1960s. She described how he was ordered to demolish the shanty by Council. He then built a new home at the same location. Tom loved bright colours, and this led to his new home being brightly painted in a variety of gawdy colours. The house became a kind of tourist attraction and people would gaze and take photographs from passing trains on the adjacent train line. 

Following his death in 1968, the new owners removed the colours to a more mundane single finish. This photo below taken by Barbara Edney shows the house in 1972. Taken from the same angle as the above photo that showed the house in bright colours, the house no longer attracts any attention.

The view in 2024 is very different. The house has since undergone major alterations and barely resembles the original structure (and colour)!

Thank you to Barbara Edney for sharing her photographs.

Written by Andrew Allen