Our nearest town is called Gulgong, an old gold rush town that in the 1860s held hundreds of thousands of 'diggers'. The shopping centre still has the main street winding through town, a legacy of the fact that gold rush towns were built before government surveyors could get to them and lay out the city centre in military base squares. (Look at the street maps of Bathurst and Tamworth. They were pegged out by military men and have the geometry of an army camp - all squares and right angles.) Many of the original buildings still stand, which gives Gulgong a the feel of a set for a movie. At its height, the Gulgong rush was the biggest in Australia and every language on earth could be heard on the street corners. It had its own Opera House - named after the Prince of Wales.
Many men ran away from their jobs in Sydney and Melbourne to make their fortune "on the Gulgong." This was the last of the gold rushes for the small operator. When the huge wave of humanity swept on to the next "strike", what was left was the township of Gulgong, today home to 2000 souls.
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