Before the mansion, this was Anaiwan ground. The hill where Booloominbah stands lies within the country of the Anaiwan, also written Nganyaywana, the Aboriginal people of the New England tableland. They built extensive trading networks with neighbouring nations, drawing on the region's rich plant and animal foods, and quarried its hard volcanic rock for tools and ceremonial use. The grand house and its sweeping lawns were laid over a landscape already shaped by tens of thousands of years of habitation — a history the colonial estate did not so much erase as build upon. Oral histories record that Anaiwan people later worked at Booloominbah itself as domestic staff, their labour woven quietly into the running of the great house.

This was wealth made visible. Booloominbah was designed by the Canadian-born architect John Horbury Hunt in the Federation Arts and Crafts style and built between 1884 and 1888 by William Seabrook and John Thomas Brown, as a summer residence for Frederick Robert White — a member of one of New South Wales's great pastoral dynasties and the great-uncle of the future Nobel laureate, the novelist Patrick White. It is the largest house Hunt ever designed, eclipsing even his celebrated Kirkham, and it remains a benchmark of early domestic Arts and Crafts architecture adapted to the Australian climate. Sprawling, gabled and richly detailed, it announced the standing of the pastoralist class as plainly as any building in the country could.

Step inside and the walls come alive with glass. Booloominbah holds more stained glass than any other house Hunt designed. Every main reception room glows with it, and so does the day nursery, where panels illustrate scenes from children's storybooks. The library windows carry portraits of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott; the dining room is lit by food and feasting imagery; and throughout the house, allegorical figures share the glass with some of the earliest and most prolific depictions of native Australian animals and birds in the medium. Crowning it all is the Gordon window in the main stair hall, made by the English firm of Lavers, Barraud and Westlake — the work White demanded over his architect's objection, and now recognised as the finest domestic stained glass in the nation.

Then the family gave it away. After the White era ended, the Armidale businessman and Anglican benefactor Thomas Richmond Forster — who had married into the White family and campaigned for years for a university in the district — bought Booloominbah and its grounds in the 1930s and offered the estate to the University of Sydney on one condition: that it establish a university college in Armidale. The university agreed. Teaching began in the mansion on 15 March 1938, founding the New England University College, the first such college in Australia located outside a capital city and the seed of today's University of New England. Listed on the State Heritage Register in 2006, Booloominbah now houses university administration alongside a cafe, bar and function venue — a pastoralist's palace turned into a place of learning.