"Where fortunes were made" a Gulgong Travel Page by iandsmith

If history is a turn on for you then you won't be disappointed with Gulgong. With nearly 130 National Heritage listed buildings dating back to the gold rush days of the latter 19th century it still has a wealth of things to see.
The edifice shown here for instance once had Dame Nellie Melba belting forth with her dulcet tones.
The appalling history before then often gets ignored unfortunately, but I'll give you a brief summary.
Prior to the settlement you see today, the area was occupied by the Wiradjuri people from whose language the term 'Gulgong' comes, said to mean 'deep waterhole'.
Initially, the relations between the new colonists and the natives was amicable. That was when there were few white people. However, as settlement of the western plains attracted more bodies after the 1820s, conflict increased. Kangaroos and possums, part of the staple diet of the Wiradjuri, were slaughtered wholesale, sacred sites were desecrated, prime riverside land taken.
By 1824, with Martial law in force, armed settlers roamed the countryside slaughtering Aborigines on sight, thus decimating the tribe by the 1840s. William Cox, one of the main offenders, claimed the last local black died in 1876.
Cox's sons extended their Mudgee holdings into the Gulgong area when they established the 'Guntawang' cattle run in 1822, 8 km south-west of the present townsite. Altercations with the indigenous tribe saw them withdraw. However, the Rouse brothers took cattle to the property and, in 1825, Richard Rouse was granted the station, upon which the village of Guntawang developed.
The discovery of gold saw the gazetting of the Gulgong goldfield in 1866 but initial finds were negligible.
On the day before Easter, Maundy Thursday, 14 april 1870, as he watched over a flock of sheep belonging to his employer, Richard Rouse of Guntawang Station, a shepherd named Tom Saunders picked up 14 ounces of bright gold on what is still known as the Red Hill. It was this momentous find that started the gold rush to the area and the rough township of Gulgong sprang up like a mushroom at the foot of the hill. There were 500 people on the site six weeks later and when the town was gazetted in 1872 there were reportedly 20,000 people in the area though numbers given from those times were often a bit suspect.