Square and Compass Inn

By IM, April 7, 2015

Another building that featured in my romantic childhood view of history, an old Cobb and Co inn (or so I was told) at Lidsdale. It also happened to be where my kindergarten teacher Mrs Holt lived. I thought of it as incredibly ancient and exotic, built by early settlers. After a few years when the idea sunk in that aborigines had existed I asked about them and was told there weren’t any around here or they had just all disappeared. I now know that when they moved the highway from in front of the inn to behind it in the 1990s they did an archaeological dig that uncovered thousands of artefacts tens of thousands of years old. The Coxs River behind the inn had been lined with carved trees and blaze trees and there was a burial ground about half a kilometre away near where Thompsons Creek and Coxs River used to meet.