Thomas James Bridge wins top engineering honour — nearly 200 years after convicts built it
Thomas James Bridge, a sandstone crossing built by convict labour in the 1830s, has just won the Judges’ Excellence Award in Heritage at the IPWEA NSW & ACT Engineering Awards 2026. Hawkesbury City Council’s acting general manager, Will Barton, picked up the award at the State Conference in April.
It’s a remarkable ending to a project that started in disaster. In 2022, floods and storms battered the bridge so badly that the eight-metre sandstone retaining walls, holding up the entire structure, nearly collapsed. The bridge had stood for close to two centuries. Within months, it was in pieces.
The council spent two years putting it back together. The job cost $23.5 million and was funded through Federal and State Government infrastructure recovery programs, and was completed in November 2025. Engineers couldn’t just patch the damage.
They dug all the way down to bedrock to lay new steel and concrete footings and rebuilt the drainage so the bridge could actually survive the next flood. Every sandstone block in the retaining wall was removed, numbered, catalogued, and stored. Then reassembled, by hand, in the correct order.
The timber deck was reinstated, not because timber is the most practical material in 2025, but because it has always been there.
Barton was direct about what the project meant. “We met the disaster-impacted community in their place and time,” he said, “keeping them at the centre of our decision making.” He also noted the team managed the whole project in-house, which, given the complexity and the dollar figure, was no small thing.
The bridge crosses a creek near Lower Macdonald on what was once the Great North Road, one of eight surviving bridges from an original 22. The stone was quarried from the surrounding hillside, cut and moved entirely by hand. It still spans 16.3 metres.
The man the bridge is named after, Thomas James, arrived in New South Wales in December 1819 aboard the Recovery, aged 24, sentenced to life for a crime the records don’t specify. He was one of 188 convicts on that ship. By 1824, he was working on the Bathurst Road at Richmond. By the time the bridge was built, he was supervising the No. 25 Road Party at Wisemans Ferry. In 1837, he was living at Penrith. In 1842, he received a conditional pardon.
