The remnants of an original 19th-century water dripstone were found under the now courtyard verandah.
Most colonial houses had dripstones to filter and purify drinking water. They usually stood in the kitchen or on the verandah with a vessel underneath to collect the distilled water as it dripped through the stone. Most dripstones sat in a hardwood timber frame.
Norfolk Island is a known source for colonial dripstones, having large deposits of limestone and plentifully available convict labor. A porous block of limestone was hollowed out as a deep round stone bowl with an oversize square rim and suspended in a frame. Creek, rain or pond water was poured into the bowl from above and allowed to drain. As water leached slowly through the stone, impurities, sediment and particles were trapped, leaving clear, clean water to seep out below.
[[Norfolk Island|Norfolk Island’s]] calcarenite limestone (coral) was well suited as sand-sized grains made up about half its volume, creating pores for water to percolate through under gravity. Quarrying limestone and carving, it was hard work and very unpleasant when convicts had to stand in seawater to access an offshore outcrop. Convicts made dripstones during the second penal settlement of Norfolk Island between 1825 and 1853. Following that, Pitcairn Island settlers continued the industry on Norfolk Island.
The best dripstones came from Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. In 1787 lieutenant [[William Bligh]] purchased two dripstones at Tenerife for the ''Bounty’s'' voyage to Tahiti.
The limestone dripstone located in the servants’ courtyard at [[Elizabeth Farm]], [[Parramatta]], was previously located at Hannibal Macarthur’s ‘Vineyard’, a grand house and Parramatta riverfront estate at nearby Rydalmere. Hannibal was [[John Macarthur (wool pioneer)|John Macarthur’s]] nephew, his only brother’s son. This dripstone is believed to be from Norfolk Island and manufactured during the Island’s second period of the convict settlement, 1825–1853.
In the early 1830s, the office of the Colonial Secretary [[Alexander Macleay]] in Sydney controlled the distribution of these dripstones. Members of the military, Macleay himself and other colonial officials, were the privileged recipients. There was earlier illicit trafficking in dripstones from Norfolk Island convict settlement between August 1827 and November 1828 by the commandant Captain Thomas E Wright.
In 1851 the Lieutenant-Governor of Tasmania, Sir [[William Denison]], who also administered Norfolk Island, sent a dripstone made at that penal settlement to London. It was displayed at the World’s first international exposition, The Great Exhibition of the Works of the Industry of All Nations.
Dripstones were Norfolk Island’s only manufactured export at that time and were used for decades in Australian homes. After several typhoid outbreaks, they fell from favor in the 1890s when Professor Anderson Stuart, president of the NSW Board of Health, studied water samples with a microscope and demonstrated that Typhoid bacteria could multiply in the pores of dripstone filters.
Another dripstone can be found at the Macarthur’s [[Hambledon Cottage]], Parramatta. The limestone dripstone held by the Powerhouse Museum also came from Norfolk Island and is a similar size to others held by several Australian museums. This is smaller and the most common size suiting an average household or the occupants of a ship’s cabin. The Elizabeth Farm dripstone is larger being suitable for a larger establishment. The Powerhouse Museum Norfolk Island dripstone belonged to retired army Captain James little who came to Sydney in 1845 as a soldier in the 11th Devonshire Regiment of Foot. In 1851, his first wife, Ann, gave birth to Frances, reputedly the first child born in Victoria Barracks, Paddington. The dripstone was donated to the then Technological Museum by James Little’s son, David, in 1900 when James Little died while living at Moore Park. It was displayed for some time in the Harris Street Ultimo museum building and since 1988 has been displayed in the section of the ‘Steam Revolution’ exhibition devoted to Sydney’s water supply.
The dripstone held at Augusta Museum Western Australia was recovered off the nearby coast from the wreck of the sailing ship, Cumberland, and optical microscope and scanning electron microscope studies confirm the stone to be sourced from Norfolk Island.
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