First step

A red letter day. We made the first bookings for a little driving trip in NSW next month. It feels liberating!

This is one of our planned stops, the goldrush town of Gulgong. Gold was discovered here in 1870 and for a few years Gulgong boomed. As well as a great many hotels and stores serving the prospectors, it had an Opera House where Nellie Melba once performed.

In a few years the gold ran out and Gulgong declined to become a small and not very prosperous country town. In one way that was fortunate, because it meant that the buildings that remained were largely untouched by progress. Gulgong has 130 heritage listed buildings and a walk around its streets is like a glimpse back to goldrush times.

Gulgong also has a claim to fame as ‘the town on the ten dollar note’. When Australia went decimal, on 14 February 1966, Gulgong featured on the ten dollar note as background to it’s most famous son, Henry Lawson the writer and bush poet. (Sadly, when paper gave way to polymer, in 1993, both Gulgong and Lawson disappeared from the note.)

In 1999 when our friends Pam and Peter visited from England we took them on a trip out west. Here they are on the verandah of one of the many former hotels in Gulgong (now a real estate agency).

This will be our first return to Gulgong since that never to be forgotten trip.