Carwoola Homestead is a heritage-listed homestead complex at 1071 Captains Flat Road, Carwoola, Queanbeyan-Palerang Region, New South Wales, Australia. It was built from 1830 to 1850 by William Rutledge and later his brother Thomas Rutledge. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999. History The botanist Allan Cunningham journeyed across the Molonglo Plains in April 1824 while leading an expedition into southern New South Wales. He called this flat country Marley's Plains, unaware they had also been called Friday's Plains two years earlier. Both names were superseded by use of the word "Molonglo". In 1835 Cunningham's younger brother Richard, the Superintendent of the Sydney Botanic Garden, was clubbed to death by aborigines while accompanying the NSW Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell on his second journey of exploration. Allan Cunningham replaced Richard as Superintendent. The land (2560 acres/1036 ha) was granted in 1828 to Henry Gilbert Smith who formed the station. Smith arrived in Sydney in 1827. Use of the name Carwoola dates from at least 1850 and may be a derivation of the word Carrowillah, mentioned as early as 1827. Carwoola or Carrowillah is said to be an Aboriginal word for "the meeting of the waters on the plain", a lyrical, apt title because Carwoola station lies on river flats between hills bisected by the Molonglo River, which is fed by numerous streams. The meaning may also be found in the fact that Primrose Creek, a southern tributary of the Molonglo, meets that river to the north-east of St. Thomas' Anglican Church, built on Carwoola land. An historian writing in 1938 claimed that 'The Molonglo River was known to the Aborigines as the Yealambidgee, meaning a chain of waterholes, and the plains on the watershed of this river above Carwoola Gap as Molinggoolah, which name has been corrupted into the modern Molonglo. Moolinggoolah was subdivided by the Aborigines into Carwoola (still retained) and Enwoola (now Foxlow), meaning the centre and the end of the plain below and above the junction of the Tirralilly River.' The origins of Carwoola began with the construction of several small slab dwellings by Edward John Eyre. Eyre, later to become a famous explorer, bought 1260 acres from Smith in 1834 at 4 shillings an acre. Smith sold the land in 1836 to William Rutledge. Rutledge bought Eyre's two blocks in 1837. Later, Rutledge is said to have bought "The Briars",