Mudgee – Gulgong - Scone

Got a good sleep since the weather cooled down. Heated up very quickly in the morning so had a quick walk around town and headed off in air-conditioned comfort. We continued on along the back roads as much as we could. The road was pretty quiet and really enjoyable. The ground was dry but very pretty. It was obviously drought affected as we saw a lot of soil erosion along the way (pretty much from Parkes onwards) but a local Landcare group in every region that was doing a lot of tree planting. And by the look of it, had been doing so for 10 or more years. It was good to see so many mature replanted trees. It was shocking though, how many farm houses we saw out on the top of a bare and barron hill with not a scrap of tree for shelter or shade. I don’t know how they do it. I’m sure it got to 40o today. I didn’t hear the exact forecast for any town we passed through by they were predicting 40o for several spots we’d been through over the last few days.

We arrived in Gulgong, pretty much in the middle of no where, but where Henry Lawson spent his formative years. There is quite a lot of Henry Lawson memorabilia around the town, including a museum dedicated to him and his time there. There is also a local history museum there occupying over 1 acre of rooms.

It looks like every old item the community had, had been donated at some time or other, including a house and a blacksmith’s shop! The most interesting thing we saw in the town, apart from the Museum, was the fact that Coles occupied the main block of the town, and the townsfolk made them keep the 6 original shop fronts fully intact, including all the floors behind and they had to install their shop without destroying the streetscape (as they appear to have done in every other town they and Woolies move to).

It was a pleasant change, and it was nice to shop there.
Merriwa hoping to stop there for the night, but it was still to hot, and we struggled to find a coffee at 4pm in the afternoon, so we moved on to Scone.

Gulgong's claim to fame is that its pictured on the back of the old original $10 note along with Henry Lawson, hence the name of the hotel, being the $10 Town Motel. Prior to that it was the original pub, but when the mining manager lost his funding from his english consortium to continue mining in the town, he entered the pub one night and blew himself up.