Rosemeadow owes its name to early settler Thomas Rose, who in 1818 bought a farm called Mount Gilead which covered parts of modern-day Rosemeadow and neighbouring Gilead. Rose was a baker and publican as well as a farmer, building a mill on his property and a couple of large dams which helped him and his neighbours survive the drought of 1829.
The area remained farmland until the mid-1970s when Sydney's urban sprawl reached it and the suburb was officially named in 1976.[2] The Rosemeadow public housing estate is an example of the American Radburn design for public housing which turns houses around so they back on to streets with the fronts facing each other. This design has been criticised in Sydney as contributing to social problems and following an incident of street violence in 2009 orders were made to partially demolish the estate.[3]
Since the partial demolishing of the suburb, the streets have begun to be renamed.
Streets in Rosemeadow are named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare, such as:
Hamlet Crescent
Macbeth Way
Othello Avenue
Donalbain Circuit
Romeo Crescent
Juliet Close
Cleopatra Drive
Anthony Drive
Antonio Close
Desdemona Street
Commercial area
Rosemeadow Marketplace, on the corner of Copperfield Drive and Fitzgibbon Lane, is a medium-sized shopping centre. The local post office sits within the Marketplace and nearby is a community health centre, fire station, high school and an Anglican church.[4]
Schools
John Therry Catholic High School is the oldest school in the suburb, having opened in 1981.[5] Next door is its feeder school, Our Lady Help of Christians Parish School. Public schools include Rosemeadow Public, Ambarvale High and Mary Brooksbank Special School. The oldest school built in the suburb is Rosemeadow Public School, located on Anthony and Copperfield Drive.[6]
Parks & Reserves
There are a number of parks and reserves within or boarding Rosemeadow. These are:[7]
Canidius Reserve
Octavia Reserve
Demetrius Reserve
Greco Reserve
Flagstaff Reserve
Oswald Reserve
Heydon Park
Rizal Park
Rosemeadow Reserve
Transport
Rosemeadow can be accessed via Appin Road or via surrounding suburbs of Ambarvale and Glen Alpine. The main road passing through Rosemeadow would be Copperfield drive. The suburb is serviced by TransitSystems buses, which provide links to Macarthur and Campbelltown railway stations as well as occasional services to Appin and Wollongong via the 888 and 887 buses.[8]
According to the 2021 census, Rosemeadow had a population of 8,007 people. There were higher than average numbers of families with children (72.1%) and common occupations included clerical and administrative workers (14.9%), professionals (13.6%), technicians and trades workers (13.5%) and machinery operators and drivers (12.9%). 84.3% of the suburb is detached housing with the remaining semi-detached or townhouses (14.2%); just 1.4% were apartments. Nearly half the homes (41.2%) are being purchased while around a third (33.4%) are rented from the Department of Housing.[1]
