I am an artist and blogger living in Sydney, Australia. I am interested in Australian landscapes and lost suburbia, capturing them in photographs, paintings, prints and mixed media.
@s_graham_art
We’ll explore the neighbouring village of Gerroa. Historically, Gerroa has been the much smaller sibling to Gerringong, but in the last 10 years, estate developments in between the two towns mean that they’re really now joined at the hip.
Gerroa is located on the north end of Seven Mile Beach – which stretches all the way down to Shoalhaven Heads. It’s another stretch of coast that I’m very familiar with.
It is a collection of beach-side caravan parks and houses that are perched up on Black Head. Black Head itself consists of dark basalt produced by a volcano that was active in the area about 30 million years ago.
Gerroa is perfect if you just like a paddle in the surf or a really long walk along the beach.
We’ll break up our adventures in-land with a bit of a seaside sojourn to the near South Coast. Gerringong is now a hop-skip-jump from Sydney since the Princes Highway by-passes were completed. It is usually very popular on weekends and in the summer.
Our visit however was on a particularly changeable weekend in winter 2022. We stayed close to the beach, so although the weather wasn’t the best, the first thing I did in the morning was venture out to Werri Beach, where I was greeted with a rainbow (or two). As you can see, I was obviously one of the more enthusiastic visitors that morning.
It’s worth getting up early for the sight of the lovely, stormy beach.
We concluded our trip with a visit to the Southern Tablelands directly south of Abercrombie Caves. Lots of gentle landscapes here, west of the Dividing Range. We stayed in the middle of it near the hamlet of Laggan.
We took little drives around the area, visiting the slightly bigger village of Taralga. Taralga was a pretty sleepy place, but it had some nice architecture of varying vintages along its main street.
That’s all for our drive around Central NSW that took place back in December 2021. Almost two years have passed since then, so I’ve got a lot more of NSW to share. I’ll be back next time with another drive around this lovely state.
I haven’t posted about caves in a long time. Probably because I haven’t been to any in about 10 years. We’ll visit a less well-known one in this post – Abercrombie Cave.
Often outshone by the much more extensive Jenolan Caves or Wombeyan Caves, Abercrombie is tucked away in the western side of the Great Dividing Range, off the Bathurst to Crookwell Road. It’s just one cave, really, and a relatively short and straight-forward one, so it’s self-guided – the ranger let’s you in and then walks away! But because it’s so secluded, we got the cave all to ourselves for a whole 30 minutes!
Only 25km south-west of Milthorpe in the small town of Carcoar. It’s another picturesque country town with a great collection of preserved heritage buildings.
Tourism is starting to ramp up a bit more here but it’s generally still quite sedate compared to Milthorpe. It’s still pretty much a working town, which adds to its authenticity.
We’re continuing on our tour of NSW country towns. The next town we’re exploring is Milthorpe. It’s located on the other side of Bathurst to Hill End, 240km west of Sydney and 40km south-west of Bathurst. Unlike Hill End, it’s a very accessible town, located mid-way between the large towns of Bathurst and Orange. The land around it is generally flat, which attracted agriculture and grazing. It, like Hill End, is in the country of the Wiradjuri, whose lands extended from Mudgee, all the way across to Hay.
Milthorpe grew prosperous from agriculture and even has a railway station on the Western NSW line, with daily stops by the Dubbo-bound train. It is a busy tourist town of 1,300 people, and gets many visitors on weekends and school holidays. People love the living historical buildings, lovingly maintained. It’s also lucky that it’s now within the Orange wine region.
It might be a touristy town, but unlike towns of similar ilk closer to Sydney, I don’t think it is yet too well-loved.
We’ll round up our visit to Hill End firstly with the wildlife we encountered. We saw lots of Eastern Grey kangaroos at dawn and at dusk in the outskirts of town.
And various local parrots feeding at the back of the pub all day, every day.
They reminded me that Hill End is still a remote town, surrounded on all sides by forested hills, and quite a bit of wildlife (though nothing really human-eating, as in the North American Gold Rushes when those miners were faced with wolves, bears, coyotes etc.). Still, it would have been a bit of an effort to reach the town during the Gold Rush, when there were only rough tracks and no public transport. The miners and their families would have had to walk in from Sydney (a distance of over 250km nowadays, and might have been much longer in those days) with all of their possessions in tow.
On the outskirts of town, there were more remnants of the town’s mining past. These open tracts of land used to host miner’s campsites. Nowadays it hosts tourist campsites.
And we passed an old miner’s shack, ironically named. Then again, it would have been one of the more luxurious modes of accommodation available, especially in the early days of the town when most people would have been sleeping under canvas.
And from a nearby lookout, we could still see the scars on the hill-sides where the diggings were.
During the Gold Rush, the valley would have been filled with the noise of miners and their machines working. Now, we heard only the sounds of nature.
The most delightful buildings for me in this little town are its little historical cottages. They come in different shapes and sizes, and some look as if it’s been little changed since the Gold Rush.
As you can probably tell, they’re pretty well maintained and some are even lived in. Although I suppose if you’re a resident you’d have to tolerate tourists like me taking snapshots of (potentially) your washing.
Given that Hill End was home to 8,000 people at its height, there are quite a few buildings of note. They are a good representation of 19th Century Australian country architecture. Many are no longer in use, and the two that are, are predictably, the pub…
And the general store/cafe.
They both seem to do a good trade catering to the needs of the locals and visitors.
Around the village was a full complement of traditional churches that seemed to still be in operation as well.
But there were also a lot of buildings that seemed to have been commercial premises at some stage of their lives but are now either empty or used for residential purposes. I wonder what they were all used for?
Ok, this building seems to be a business of some sorts, but had very reduced opening hours.
At the end of 2021, after nearly 2 years of Covid-19, we took a car holiday in NSW. Not wanting to travel too far from our home in Sydney, in case the state borders, or the city borders, locked down once again (as it had done multiple times in the preceding months), we set our sights rather close to home to Central NSW. It’s a region that we were familiar with, having visited different places at various times, however there was still plenty of pockets left to explore.
Our first stop was the historical village of Hill End. This is a former gold rush town, which hit the area during the 1850s and inflated its local population to 8,000. When the easy gold (originally alluvial, found in local water-ways) ran dry, the population declined. By 1945, the population was 700. In 2016, it was 80. I’m not really sure of the population post-Covid as at 2023. I would think there might be a few people who would want to move to such an historic and scenic spot.
This is the northern approach to the town. It’s not the most accessible town in the Central West, accessible by sealed but quiet and twisting, country roads from either Bathurst or Mudgee. But once you’re there you can visit a heritage town. A shout out to the brave people north of Hill End, who valiantly fought a bushfire a fortnight ago. The fire thankfully did not reach the village.
Static and Silence 