For sale: Berrima Correctional Centre in NSW hits the market for $20m

For sale: Old jail with grisly history, ghosts and some very angry locals

Words: Rhiannon Down Producer: Louise Starkey Picture: State Library of Victoria

If you're in the market for one of Australia’s oldest lock-ups — complete with a grisly history, ghosts and some very angry locals — now is your chance. Picture: State Library of Victoria

The Berrima Correctional Centre — built by convicts in the Southern Highlands, 120km south of Sydney, in the 1830s — has hit the market with an asking price of $20m.

The building has housed some of NSW’s most notorious felons, such as Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid, bent detective Roger Rogerson, corrupt corrective services minister Rex “Buckets” Jackson and celebrity drug dealer Richard Buttrose.

Rogerson, who did a three-year stint there for hiding $110,000 in secret bank accounts, once described the place as "a dog's jail".

The 1.9ha complex includes 60 cells, a watchtower and two cottages, all ringed by sandstone walls.

If those walls could talk, the former prison's colourful history would be unveiled, with six people being marched to the gallows inside what became the Berrima Correctional Centre. Picture: State Library of Victoria

Lucretia Dunkley was hanged in 1843, alongside her lover, Martin Beech, for murdering her husband with an axe. Her sentence was one of the most famous as the judge ordered the pair to be buried standing up, so they would never rest in peace. Picture: Gunning & District Historical Society

Their severed skulls were sent to the Sydney Museum to be studied, but their graves remain within the prison grounds, believed to be marked by two small crosses on the southwest corner. Dunkley's ghostly presence is very much alive and hanging around the grounds to this day.

Australia’s first serial killer, John Lynch, was also executed at Berrima in 1842 after he went on a rampage murdering 10 people — including a young girl named Mary McNamara. Picture: HeadStuff.

Berrima Residents' Association's president, Eric Savage, said the prison cast a long shadow over the town of about 700 residents, many of whom strongly oppose the prison from falling into private hands. Picture: Friends of Wingecarribee

“It is intricately involved in the history of Berrima. If all the promise and opportunity that the jail provided in public infrastructure is sold off in a fire sale, it would be a tragedy,” Mr Savage said.

Picture: State Library of Victoria Learn more