Gulgong heritage town. Faint old advertising on a shop wall for the Herald Mail, The Sunday Sun and the Telegraph newspapers.
Image by denisbin
Gulgong. Population 2,500.
This charming little town was depicted on the original Australian note (from 1966 to 1993) but alas it is not on the new plastic notes. Which is a shame because Gulgong is a very historical town. Its history is well documented especially through a world important photographic collection. The photographers concerned were Henry Beaufoy Merlin and Charles Bayliss from Melbourne who photographed almost everything in the town in August 1872. 500 glass plate negatives of their photos have been bought together in the Holtermann Collection which is of international significance and it is housed in “The Greatest Wonder of the World”. This does not refer to the photographic collection but to this building which was a former American tobacco warehouse which adopted this name as an advertising stunt. It is called the Holtermann Collection because the negatives were purchased by Bernard Holtermann after Merlin’s death in 1873. Holtermann added the Gulgong photographs to his extensive collection. The collection is on a UNESCO register of heritage.
The white history of Gulgong goes back to 1821 when William Lawson (the explorer who crossed the Blue Mts in 1813 fame) explored the district. Richard Rouse a squatters moved into the region in 1822 and he and others eventually obtained licenses to legally occupy runs. In 1825 Rouse got a grant of 4,000 acres. When Major Thomas Mitchell came through here in 1831 he named the district Gulgong using an Aboriginal word meaning “deep waterhole”. Although a little gold was discovered in 1866 the district was transformed in 1870 when a major gold lode was discovered and within six weeks 500 people were on the site. The town of Gulgong was surveyed in 1870 and when gazetted in 1872 there was an estimated 20,000 people on the goldfields. 15,000 kilos of gold was extracted from the gold mines over the next decade. Much of the town however dates from the early 1870s and the first developments were around the intersection of Mayne and Hebert streets. Among the early settlers was the family of Henry Lawson and Rolfe Boldrewood the local police man who wrote Robbery Under Arms in 1882. Lawson in 1904 wrote a poem about the gold rush at Gulgong saying
Paid in laughter, tears and nuggets in the play that fortune plays —
‘Tis the palmy days of Gulgong — Gulgong in the Roaring Days.
Like all mining towns Gulgong soon had hotels, banks, stores and entertainment venues like the Prince William Opera house. Solid stone and weatherboard houses came soon after. When the gold ran out the businessmen stayed on to service the farming area around the town. The bark hut of the 1871 Union church was replaced with brick and stone churches- The Anglican built theirs in 1876 to a design of architect Edmund Blacket and the Catholics built their first church in 1885 and the Presbyterians replaced their wooden church with a stone church in 1909 and the Methodists built a church in 1871 and replaced it around 1905. The first Town hall was built in 1892, the Courthouse in 1898 etc. A railway reached Gulgong in 1909. After the mining became big business requiring companies and shafts the government opened 24,000 acres around the town up for farming in 1876. Wheat became a major product as well as wool. A flour mill was built near the town and a new large mill in 1894. Once the railway arrived another new flourmill was erected with silos.
The town has more than 130 heritage listed buildings.
