Tintagel – Sculpture Park
Tintagel in the UK is a dramatic hillside town, claimed to be the place of King Arthur’s Castle. Its namesake in Australia is a hillside property perched on Mt Gibraltar in the NSW Southern Highlands, owned by Geoff and Gayle Cousins. The property is dramatic with a cascading stream, lush, tree-studded lawns, and is home to one of the few sculpture parks in Australia.
Sleeping giants
Described as the finest private collection of contemporary sculpture in this country, the individual pieces are sited carefully against the backdrop of the park, allowing each piece to have its own space. Paul Juraszek’s ‘Minotaur’, a magnificent bronze figure with two heads, is placed against a screen of dark-green cypress trees while Bruce Armstrong’s ‘How Goes The Night’, a huge resting figure, lies under a large cherry blossom tree.
More garden delights
But the sculpture park is just one part of Tintagel. The Cousins live in a rough-hewn stone house with a wooden gazebo uphill and a swimming pool downhill. The large informal country garden was designed by landscape architect, Michael Bligh. Every tree is surrounded by a garden bed which makes maintenance easy, simply mowing the lawn into the edges of the garden bed. An outdoor setting nestles invitingly amongst the greenery and curving pathways beckon to new discoveries like a stone wall, or the tumbling, burbling stream. The stream is a triumph of landscape architecture appearing like an existing waterway. It splashes over boulders in a series of waterfalls to be collected in two underground storage tanks. The water is then pumped back up to start its rushing downhill journey again. The stream has a simple wooden bridge which takes you back to the sculpture garden.
Further information
The Cousins began their sculpture collection in 1988, and it now includes 18 pieces. Thanks to their generosity, 15 pieces of the fantastic collection will be on display in the gardens of Government House in Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney for the 1999 Sydney Festival from 2-26 January 1999.
For more details on Tintagel read the article by Kay Coombe in the January issue of the Burke’s Backyard magazine.