Gulgong, New South Wales
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Gulgong ( [1]) is a town of approximately 2300 persons in central New South Wales in the Mid-Western Regional Council. With a name derived from the local Wiradjuri Indigenous Australian people for "deep waterhole", Gulgong is located 26 km north of Mudgee on the Castlereagh Highway. As in Mudgee, there are numerous wineries about. There are also canola and sheep industries here.
Like a lot of towns in this area of New South Wales, Gulgong was a thriving gold mining centre in the 1870s, the Gulgong golfield was the last in Australia domianted by 'Poor Man’s Diggings' or terrain from which gold can be mined without substantial capital investment. Novelist and bush poet Henry Lawson briefly lived in Gulgong as a child while his father sought instant wealth as a miner. Around the same time, English author Anthony Trollope visited Gulgong and later mentioned the town in his book Australia and New Zealand. Thomas Alexander Browne, the author of Robbery under Arms, was police magistrate at Gulgong from 1871 and goldfields commissioner from 1872 from until 1881 and Gulgong is believed to be the source for the locations in the novel. Jimmy Governor, the original for The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, grew up in the Gulgong district and married there in 1898.
Gulgong was featured in scenes behind the portrait of Henry Lawson on the former paper Australian ten dollar note issued in 1966 when decimal currency was first introduced into Australia. This note was replaced by polymer notes in 1993. [2]
