Bungonia State Recreation Area

Bungonia village, at the entrance to the recreation area, was once more important than Goulburn as a district commercial and business centre. The decision in 1833 to reroute the Great South Road through Goulburn and bypass the village, led to its demise.

Bungonia State Recreation Area covers almost 4000 hectares and is the largest state recreation area in New South Wales. Bounded by the waters of the Shoalhaven River and Bungonia Gorge, its official designation is relatively new although the spectacular landscape has attracted visitors and walkers for many years.

Bungonia Gorge, also known as the ‘Grand Canyon’ has nearly vertical walls 300 metres high. One unbroken rockface of 275 metres is the highest in New South Wales. A huge pile of house-sized limestone boulders has choked the lower end of the gorge.

Jerrara Falls – these spectacular falls are best viewed from Adams Lookdown … especially after rain. The name Jerrara comes from an Aboriginal word meaning ‘place where eels sleep or rest’.

Source: “Readers Digest Illustrated Guide to Australian Places” (1993).


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Southern Tablelands County Council

A Brief History

The power to “manufacture and supply” electricity was conferred on the Council of the Goulburn Municipality by proclamation published in Government Gazette No.112 of 24 August 1911. In May, 1914 the power house was completed and the undertaking commenced, Mr HK Coutts being the first Electrical Engineer. The 8840 units generated in the first month of operations were distributed to: Power House 3240, Street Lighting 4672 and Sales to customers 829. A total load of 370 kW was connected in the first year.

In 1933 supply was taken from the Public Works Department (Burrinjuck system) which in 1940 was tied in with Port Kembla system. At the time of taking supply from the Public Works Department, the city undertaking was serving 5130 customers and generating 5,277,638 kWh per annum. To assist the rural development the Public Works Department (Southern Electricity Supply) transferred its 11,000 volt lines supplying the Crookwell and Gunning Shires to the City Council in 1950. At the date of the transfer to the County Council the undertaking was supplying 22,743,700 units per annum to 4879 customers.

Crookwell Shire Undertaking
This undertaking was established in June 1920, Mr EP Woodward being appointed the first Electrical Engineer. 100 customers and 27 street lights were connected in the first year with a total load of 24KVA. In 1943 representations were made for a bulk supply line to be constructed from Goulburn to Crookwell to meet the growing load. This line was built and commissioned early in 1946. With the bulk supply available the Shire council investigated the possibilities of rural extensions, the first line, Crookwell to Laggan, being completed on 21st March 1950 and by the time the undertaking was transferred to the County Council on 1st July 1955, 402 rural consumers had been connected. The undertaking at this date of transfer was serving a total of 1088 customers with an annual consumption of 2,666,786 kWh and system demand of 802 KVA. The revenue for this undertaking was approximately £45,000.

Gunning Shire Undertaking
The Gunning undertaking was commenced in September 1940 when supply was taken to Breadalbane, Collector and Gunning from the Public Works Department’s substation at Goulburn. In the first three months of operations 9,508 kWh were sold, the total revenue being £2,156. In 1949 the Council commenced its first rural extensions by taking supply to Oolong-Jerrawa and Dalton areas. No further expansion was undertaken until 1954 when the Council commenced a scheme which had been adopted in 1952 for the complete electrification of the Shire over four years. At the time of the undertaking’s transfer to the County Council, 450 customers were being served, the annual consumption being 620,000 kWh and the annual revenue approximately £20,000.

Other Shires and areas being served by the Southern Tablelands County Council are Tallaganda Shire, Yarrowlumla Shire, Goodradigbee Shire and the Municipalities of Yass and Queanbeyan. Up until 1961 more than 15,000 consumers were connected to the supply.

Source: Goulburn Evening Post, 12 March 1963.
Photos by Donald C Wheeler (entries in STRL’s ‘History in Focus’ Photographic Competitions) depicting STCC activities in 1954 and 1969 respectively.


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The Dog War 1840

One of the highlights of Goulburn’s history was the ‘dog war’ of 1840. Stray dogs had become such a menace to the town that the police force instituted a campaign to round up all the mongrels and destroy them. The townspeople were asked to subscribe for a ‘solid silver plate’ to be given to the constable bagging the largest number of tails. It is recorded that one policeman was caught by the nose by one of the hounds, and another was bitten in a certain part of his anatomy which the official records described as ‘a vulnerable spot’.

Source: Tales of Old Australia by Bill Beatty (1966).

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St Patrick's College, Goulburn

The beginnings of Catholic education in Goulburn

When St Patricks College, Goulburn closed its gates at the end of 1999 it was, by Australian standards, a very old school. Steps towards its establishment were taken a generation before Federation; its first intake included boys born in the gold rush decade; its founder, William Lanigan, attended the First Vatican Council; its golden jubilee was celebrated before ANZAC memories were a decade old. It was a country school conceived in an age of pastoral expansion when the wealth of the colony was in the land and Sydney served the needs of a gold-enriched and wool-rich interior. It was a defiant school, the brainchild of a bishop bent above all on keeping education in the Church’s control, for whom schools were the Church’s future and who claimed government assistance on the Church’s terms. Like counterparts in Bathurst and Maitland, it signalled the determination of Irish bishops not to be beholden to Sydney with its English Benedictine archbishop. And it expressed a resolve on Lanigan’s part to provide for the sons of his better-off families an education equal to what was offered by established Protestant schools.

Launched in mid-Victorian times (1874), the College survived by adaptation through a century and more of many-sided change – economic, social, educational and ecclesiastical. After an early run of good seasons settlers came hard up against the limits of the driest of continents and its harsh unreliability. In Church terms, a lesson was that country dioceses lacked the wealth and numbers to sustain boarding schools offering a classical education. St Pat’s was saved by an order of teaching Brothers. The transfer of responsibility in 1898 meant that the College operated on much the same footing as Lanigan’s swelling numbers of parish primary schools – dependent on the low-cost labour of dedicated religious. It thus embodied an anomaly, offering classical learning to the ‘higher class’ while being a charity school for a country clientele which mostly could not afford the real cost of a college and boarding school education. Social improvement as well as religious formation was a conscious aim of the Church’s investment in education; at St Pat’s, the Christian Brothers kept the entry barriers low.

A serious problem was the post-school draw of the city, where the more successful of the St Pat’s alumni furthered their studies and launched their careers, often keeping in touch with school friends but not becoming part of a consolidated St Pat’s family. Thus the College was always short of a clientele capable of enhancing its facilities and its educational offering by paying more than nominal fees or making large bequests. St Pat’s had a site city schools could only envy, but acres on the edge of a country town do not translate to wealth. The farms, businesses and employments of rural Australia fell behind as the 20th-century economy evolved. Thanks to the Brothers, and from the 1960s, to state aid, the College survived, acquiring at least some of the qualities of leading independent schools. But the St Pat’s family was never able to ensure the school’s financial independence. In the economist’s terms, St Pat’s always ran at a loss. When the Brothers ceased to subsidise it, by manpower and later money, it ceased to run. Of St Pat’s one may say, as Gibbon said of Rome, it was its endurance that is remarkable, not its fall.

Text Source: Up On The Hill by David Bollen (2008).

Images: St Patricks College 1910; Brother Joyce, President, St Patricks College 1915; St Patricks College ca.1980.

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The Gundaroo Store

The store opened in 1893 with a trendy billing as “The Gundaroo Arcade”. The opening was marked by a banquet and ball.

It was built by Thomas Coleman who had migrated from Warwickshire in 1855. He worked a bullock team between Gundaroo and Sydney for some time and built up a property near Gundaroo which he called Glenrock.

The Arcade was eventually operated by his son, Edward, in partnership with James Chalmers who had gained retail experience as a shop boy while working for Sally Paskins. The Gundaroo Supply Company, a co-operative, bought the Store in 1920, but collapsed in the Depression years a decade later. WJ Affleck of the Caledonia Store bought it in 1947. It was acquired by Jenny and Peter Thorne in 1975 and turned into an arts and crafts centre. Apart from being an exhibition centre and retail outlet, the Store and outbuildings were used from time to time for demonstrations of various crafts.

Source of image and text: “Gundaroo: a relic of 19th century Australia” by Ronald and Jim Revitt (1978).


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