‘Turn right there,’ the publican at Jugiong’s Sir George Hotel directed, pointing at a distant line of poplar trees. ‘You won’t go past The Dog on the Tuckerbox, but it’s the best bit of real Australia you’ll ever see.’

You never know where a wrong road leads, but this track winds back past a parade of distractions – rock, ‘roo, sheep, crow. Then it thwacks smack-bang into an Australian landscape so hauntingly familiar in Jack O’Hagan’s famous 1920s folk song – ‘Along the Road to Gundagai’- popularised later by country legend Slim Dusty.

Seasonal rains have freshened the scene so, yes, ‘the blue gums are growin’, the Murrumbidgee’s flowin’, beneath the sunny sky’.

Ultimately, the dirt becomes bitumen leading into Gundagai, past a line of historic buildings painted in heritage colours on Sheridan Street. This is the archetypal Australian country town: fine curtilage on wide streets, the courthouse, the Criterion Hotel, the handsome 1929 theatre.

The renowned Art Deco style diner Niagara Café is currently closed but sold recently to new owners, and there are plans to get back to business closer to Christmas this year. It’s a gem of the golden era that appears today much as it was when the Australian Prime Minister John Curtin arrived unannounced for a late-night platter of steak and eggs while on a wartime fund-raising mission. It would have been an extraordinary amalgamation of politics and pans in the kitchen that night, with two other future Prime Ministers, Ben Chifley and Arthur Fadden, in the party.

On the opposite side of the street, in the window, there’s a vintage shopper’s delight. It’s an enticing coral-coloured frock with an impossibly tight-nipped waistline. The doors at Junque and Disorderly are shut, but there’s a phone number displayed on the antique dresser inside. A man called John Glascott answers my call.

‘John, I have fallen in love,’ I confess. ‘What am I to do if your shop remains closed?’

‘I’ll send Debbie up for you,’ he responds.

By now, a mist is rolling up from the river flats, and the moon is rising over rolling hills. There’s a high-heel clattering at a brisk pace along the pavement. Debbie materialises under a street light in blond mop and red lips.

‘This way,’ she says, jangling a bunch of keys and heading down an alleyway. She unlocks a wooden door and swipes at a switch.

The light flickers on, then off, then ‘boom!’ It’s a glittering Aladdin’s Cave. Vintage furs are lined on racks as the eye can see. Clear plastic covers are draped over pert-breasted mannequins in pretty florals and admirable dress/coat combos. I’m going to need an excellent hairdo for the clingy black and gold lame with the ostrich feather collar. How long have we got?

Debbie Clarke is a trooper. She flings her couturier collection of just-so-perfect outfits over a hook in a dimly lit back room where a slip of mirror is propped against the wall. ‘This one is from Paris,’ she says, offering one of a number of box-ticking European designs that look never worn.

‘I’ll have to charge full price for that one – $80 – because I wore it 40 years ago, and I’m a bit sentimental.’

Gundagai is sentimental too. The town heaves with tales of bush balladeers, drovers, shearers, ne’er-do-wells n’ do-gooders. There are bushrangers aplenty: the irrepressibly good-humoured John Gilbert (‘always polite to women’ but shot after killing a police constable at Jugiong in 1865). And Captain Moonlite (hanged in Sydney in 1880 but reinterred in 1995 under a Gundagai gum so that his last wishes to lie beside his love – bushranger James Nesbitt – could be granted).

Photos tacked on street-side signs celebrate the remarkable high points in a place that’s always been an overnight stopping point for pioneers. They were heading into the interior by bullock cart in olden times, but amid COVID-19, they’re rushing to cross the NSW/Victorian border before it closes.

Some of these travellers are propped against the bar of The Criterion Hotel. They are distracted from their pint of beer by the eerie wall murals (traded for board by artist Arnold St Claire in the 1960s), depicting the deadliest flood in Australia’s recorded history. Tormented victims float as green-tinged apparitions on the pub wall; their names recorded in golden letters on a memorial board.

Gundagai was a frontier town when the early European settlers, confounded by the ebb and flow of Australian rivers systems, failed to take the advice of the local Wiradjuri people not to settle on the alluvial flats of the Murrumbidgee River.

About midnight, on 24 June 1852, heavy rains created a raging torrent, a mile wide and 20 feet deep. The flood swept away buildings and left people clinging in trees to preserve life. Around 100 people drowned, but two Indigenous men – Yarri and Jacky Jacky – rescued a third of the town in a bark canoe.

The people of Gundagai celebrated this heroic feat in 2017 with a permanent memorial. There is pride here: what was endured, how they survived. The dramatic sculpture on Sheridan Street reminds us that the iconic Dog on the Tuckerbox – about five miles out of town on the Hume Highway – is not the only reason to visit Gundagai.

Flash Jacks is another reason. It’s ‘an old-fashioned shack’ that’s actually an immaculately sleek boutique hotel commanding fine district views. It’s named after one of Banjo Paterson’s Gundagai shearers – remember the rousing chorus ‘All among the wool, boys, all among the wool; Keep your wide blades full, boys, keep your wide blades full …’ – but the building is way more lavish than a shearing shed.

Flash Jacks opened quietly last April and turns out to be pandemic perfect. There are separate entrances for each of nine guestrooms with reception via digital concierge.

It was built in 1888 as a Catholic convent, then became a school for many years before being bought and renovated by David Ferguson and his wife, Emelia. They together run the nearby historic events venue Kimo Estate (with hilltop off-grid eco-huts that are now #instafamous and booked a year in advance).

Ferguson is a local farmer and entrepreneur who has always been captivated by history. ‘Gundagai has seen it all,’ he reflects. ‘Boom and bust, drought and flood, cart and rail, racehorses, bushrangers, presidents and poets. It lived through its history when so many other Australian country towns have just fallen, by the way.’

And a high-ceilinged room – with a soft-cushioned window seat – is just the reward for every road-weary traveller at the end of the road to Gundagai.

Along the Road to Gundagai
The Gobarralong Darbalara Road from Jugiong to Gundagai loosely follows the south side of Murrumbidgee River and, closer to Gundagai, the Tumut River. The journey by car takes about an hour as it winds along the river flats and softly undulating terrain. It’s one of Australia’s best short drives.

Landscape & Bridges

The landscape of Gundagai is dominated by the historic Prince Alfred bridge (one of the grandest in the colony when opened in 1867) and the Railway Viaduct. They’re over 800 metres long, and the latticework of wooden trusses are an excellent example of early engineering solutions to crossing a major flood plain. All they need is the money for restoration and preservation.

Dog on the Tucker Box

The Dog on the Tuckerbox sculptor, Frank Rusconi, left another impressive legacy, and it’s on permanent display at the Visitor Information Centre (open daily). Rusconi’s Marble Masterpiece is a miniature cathedral showcasing the diversity of NSW marble with 20,948 individually cut and polished pieces. Incredibly, no plans or drawings have ever been found, and it appears Rusconi created the statue by sight alone over 28 years.

Eat 

The Coffee Pedler has stepped into the breach. This good food café on the same street is a regular haunt for tradies in fluoro vests and farmers in flannies tucking into Shepherd’s pie or, depending upon the time of day, the best smoky bacon and eggs on brioche at breakfast time.

Flash Jacks
14 Homer Street, Gundagai, NSW
Tel 1300 61 84 61
flashjacks.com.au

The Coffee Pedler
136 Sheridan Street, Gundagai, NSW
Tel 02 6903 8186
pedaler.coffee

Junque Disorderly
177 Sheridan Street, Gundagai
instagram.com/junque_disorderly_gundagai

‘Zest me a lemon?’ she asks. ‘Peel me a potato?’ ‘Roll out the dough?’

We are sitting at a kitchen counter waiting for Tamara Howorth to make lunch, but the artisan chef who runs The Little Cooking School in Mudgee is not just here to share her culinary expertise, she is making us work. In the nicest possible way.

There’s not a wine glass in sight, there’s an apron, and nine classmates are springing to prepare a feast that will soon garnish the long table under a budding wisteria in the courtyard.

The family from Sydney are old hands: ‘We’ve done paella in Spain,’ says the woman. Her husband is looking into his coffee cup. It’s empty. ‘What about the wine?’ he asks, nodding at bottles of red provocatively out of reach on the sideboard.

‘Shortbread biscuit?’ suggests Tamara.

We get back to our tasks, strangers united by an epicurean adventure that will reveal the secrets of three-ways gnocchi and lemony ricotta cake, kept simple. ‘A recipe that’s got nine billion steps or 20 million ingredients is not my favourite thing,’ Tamara declares, cracking eggs with one hand into a bowl.

Our creation is to be an alchemy of potatoes, cheese and butter melded with garlic, prosciutto, hazelnuts, pumpkin, mushroom, spinach, nutmeg and sage. Did I mention cream? We will stay warm for a long time with calories wrapped stealthily around waists after eating so many small dumplings.

It’s only 11 degrees outside but the therapy of a dining table suits every season. ‘Good food changes dynamics among people,’ expounds Tamara. ‘It fills my cup doing this for a living.’

The man with the empty cup too, apparently, since he is now inhaling the intoxicant of chopped sage. ‘Don’t forget this bit,’ he says to the woman slopping cream over a jigsaw of sliced pumpkin.’

Meanwhile, Tamara whisks around the kitchen, dolloping and dicing, firing up pots on the Ferrari of stoves – a 20 year old Zanussi – that has, in fact, turned out to be a lemon. ‘It’s a beast,’ she complains. ‘A jalopy with hard to control temperature ad it’s as if I’m cooking over an open fire. I’m a pioneer every time.’

It’s a good analogy for an entrepreneur living in a central western NSW town settled by pioneers in the 1820s. Mudgee has always been an extraordinary place: the centre for goldfields that peaked at Gulgong and Hill End in the 1870s and, when the precious metal ran out in them ther’ hills, it prospered as a wine and wool producer of the finest quality.

A pinch of this, a touch of that. Beef, wheat, fruit, honey. A kilo of wagyu will always do better with a recipe picked up somewhere along the way. ‘It’s a recipe for life,’ says Tamara.

Born in another country town, Tamara started learning the food trade at the age of 16, progressed through hospitality management and commercial catering in Sydney, before opening The Muse Brasserie in Gulgong. She was the chef who hated working nights and, with a growing family, soon recognised that ‘I wasn’t being a very good Mum and I wasn’t being a good restauranteur’. So, she and her husband Richard – an electrician who works in the mines – found a red brick bungalow on the outskirts of Mudgee.

‘The early 1900s building had good bones, perfect for a cooking school, once Richard had put his renovation skills to work. He’s a good tiler,’ Tamara laughs, ‘and we used quite a lot of white paint.’

Business is brisk and guests book months in advance for accommodation in the four-bedroom house while signing up for the cooking school out back.

‘It was a fluke of good timing,’ Tamara concludes. ‘A bit like making a Yorkshire pudding. Everything must be just right – hot oil and cold batter – and then it’s just magic.’

Everyone makes hay when the sun shines and, on a chilly morning, Mudgee cafés are full of latte-sipping cosmopolitans chowing down on smashed avocado sourdough, in what can only be described as a Covid-19 boom. The food and wine hub has struck it rich again.

There’s a socially-distanced crowed of pandemic escapees waiting for the only tour guide in town to emerge from the mist under the clock tower.

Ned Dickson is a teenage pied piper who leads visitors through 199 years of history on the Mudgee Heritage Walking Tours that he founded in 2018. He’s taking a break from secondary school studies to retell stories unearthed from years of reading books in the local library.

Enchantingly, Ned neglects to mention that he was awarded the Young Citizen of the Year Award on Australia Day this year, preferring to get straight to the point about the town that’s been home – on and off – to five generations of his family.

‘Back in the day, it took three and a half weeks to come from Sydney to Mudgee, as opposed to three and a half hours today,’ he begins, leading his flock along a line of picturesque shops on Market Street. ‘This is one of the oldest, most intact, completely heritage-listed streetscape in Australia,’ he says, stopping to point to the spot where his ancestors opened the first department store.

‘It went broke around 1900. And that’s pretty annoying.’

Not nearly as annoying as the local council decision to modernise Mudgee in the 1960s by removing the gorgeous iron lacework verandas along the main street. Thirty years later, council officers decided to reinstate the original features, and drove to a property outside Mudgee. ‘Do you have the verandah from the Post Office Hotel?’ they asked. They walked into a far paddock and found the original cream-coloured Lyrebird lacework from 1852 had been repurposed in the cattle yards.

The verandahs are now back where they belong on buildings that line Mudgee’s bustling main street. Ned’s dad says it’s a far cry from the 1970s when ‘you were lucky to see 10 cars’. Now, every weekend, there’s a tussle to find a car park or a restaurant table but, hang on, I’ve got lost in wistful reverie. Where is Ned?

He’s walked on to 1840s shoe shop that still ‘to this day’ sells shoes.

‘You could have your shoes made out of your cow here,’ he says. ‘You’d have it slaughtered out back, the hide treated in the little tannery, then fashioned into leather.’ Ned knows this because the ol’ shoemaker Mr Thomas was a hoarder who buried every receipt in a lead lined box in the courtyard.

It was nearly 100 years after Mudgee was established before people figured out they needed to look after their teeth. ‘I interviewed a woman who remembers sprinting around this corner in the 1940s because she used to hear the screams of people upstairs having their teeth ripped out of their skulls,’ Ned recalls.

And so it goes, glinting gold nuggets reclaimed all the way to the banks of the Cudgegong River, where our escapade with Ned draws to an end.

He leaves us standing beside Jamie Sargeant’s sculpture – Seed Memory – at the edge of the superb Lawson Park Sculpture Walk. It looks exactly like a slice of lemon. Skewered on a toothpick.

Discover Glass Plate Photographs of the Gold Rush Era

In the spring of 1872, photographer Beaufoy Merlin and his assistant Charles Bayliss followed the rush to Gulgong, but not for the gold. They wanted to capture life in a gold rush town. So, they compiled roughly 500 images on glass plate negatives and, in the process, caught the eye of Hill End’s famous goldminer, Bernard Otto Holtermann, who commissioned a photographic assignment to document Hill End and other towns all over New South Wales.

Holtermann purchased all the plates from Merlin’s widow and thus saved them as a record like no other town in the world at that time. The vast glass plate collection that was a complete snapshot of life (in the 1870s) disappeared until it was discovered perfectly preserved in the garden shed of Holtermann’s daughter-in-law in Chatswood, Sydney, in 1951.

Late last year, just before the pandemic hit, The Holtermann Collection was given a permanent home in the historic Greatest Wonder of the World building in Gulgong (about half an hour’s drive from Mudgee). Don’t miss it.

Anabel Dean is a freelance journalist formerly with The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, The Bulletin and Medical Observer magazine. anabeldean.com

Photo credits: Destination NSW.

Gulgong Holtermann Museum
123 Mayne Street, Gulgong, NSW
Tel 02 5858 4002
holtermann.museum

The Little Cooking School
6 Henry Lawson Drive, Mudgee, NSW
Tel 0400 417 711
littlecookingschoolmudgee.com.au

Mudgee Heritage Walking Tours
Church Street, Mudgee, NSW
Tel 0467 506 273
visitmudgeeregion.com.au/whats-on/mudgee-heritage-walking-tours

Lawson Park Sculpture Walk

The Lawson Park Sculpture Walk is a lively showcase of winning artworks from the largest regional outdoor sculpture exhibition in NSW.

Sculptures in the Garden
Sculptures in the Garden is held every year (for the last decade) in the gardens at Rosby Wines. It will take place again this year within the Rosby vineyard surrounds.
Opening weekend: Saturday October 10 and Sunday October 11, 2020
Exhibition extended dates: Monday October 12 to Sunday October 25, 2020
122 Strikes Lane, Eurunderee, Mudgee, NSW
Tel 02 63733856 or 0419 429 918
sculpturesinthegarden.com.au

The warmth inside is palpable even through the window. There’s a wall papered with newspaper clippings: local celebrities and feats of heroism. Shelves are filled with cutesy-kitsch teapots and homemade biscuits in big glass jars. An open fire flickers in the book corner. There are postcards picturing children in green meadows under homespun slogans: ‘Wingello – Where summer walks are a short step away’ and ‘Wingello – Where the grass is greener’.

The grass is only just green again. This was ground zero in the apocalyptic ‘Black Summer’ bushfire season which – through a combination of record-breaking drought; the hottest year on record; dry winds and fuel on the ground – incinerated vast swathes of Australia.

Nothing was going to stop the Currowan Fire. It roared like a freight train through the dense bushland of Moreton National Park. Then, on January 4, the sky went black, and red, like hell. The fire split, one flank hit nearby Bundanoon and Exeter, the other cracked into Wingello, where the inferno burned down nearly a dozen houses, sheds, cars, everything in its path, until the Wingello Fire Brigade bolstered resources to defend the cornerstone of the community.

‘Not on my watch,’ the captain had declared, and the Wingello Village Store (circa 1883) was saved.

This little curiosity shop – the only business in town – is the heart of a small community half way between Sydney and Canberra. And it’s the closest thing to civilization from Wildernest T1 tiny house, where I’ve retreated for a few days of city isolation, with a friend.

Our tiny house lies at the end of a red dirt road in a clearing, past a few well-fed cattle, on the edge of Wingello State Forest at Tallong. The forest is so abundant here that it accentuates the smallness of Tiny House One (T1), the itsy-bitsy housing equivalent of a swiss-army knife, all folded up in pocket-sized practicality and almost harmless to the earth.

A Lilliputian experience like this fits neatly into today’s world, where vast book collections can now be stored on hand-held devices and yet, there’s something that harks back to frontier times. It’s the modern-day counterpart of the bark hut – a simple life – without all the clutter.

A tour around the micro-cube takes less than 20 seconds. A large window peers into a stand of towering gums and a field pockmarked with kangaroos. There’s a kitchen and living area with a sleeping loft above. The ceiling is within arms-length of the mattress so no sitting up suddenly, unless it is to pop a head out of the skylight, which opens to a crescent of moon by night and birdsong by day.

We are alone. Close to nature. It would feel like camping in a tent were it not a whole lot more comfortable – linen sheets, designer crockery, house-made lemongrass-scented soap, hot shower – but this gem comes at a price. Addiction. Immediate. Irrevocable.

I may never camp in a tent again.

A sort-of breakfast nook can be ingeniously created, let’s see, by moving a stool. It might be necessary to flatten against a doorway to get to the fridge at the same time but the house is an off-grid energy sipper, not a guzzler, with reliance upon tank water and solar power. There’s an oven, cooktop, BBQ and fire-pit for cosy star-spangled chit-chat.

Escaping the city affords a nice opportunity to explore the daisy chain of Southern Highland towns that I have known, but not really known, all my life. This is tweed and knit territory, an elevated place for the horsey set, children in boarding schools and movie stars on acreage, pine-scented breezes and fire-side brews. Dig beneath the surface though, and the villages that line up like red gallahs on a tin roof – Mittagong, Bowral, Moss Vale, Burrawang, Exeter, Bundanoon and Wingello – are vastly different in character.

Every town, of course, has its share of good butchers, bakers, grocers, providores and farmers. Bundanoon, about 10 minutes’ drive from Wingello, is well-known for the annual Brigadoon highland gathering that triples the town population in one day. Nature lovers have long been drawn to the stringybark gullies of Morton National Park while foodies shuffle in and out of nice cafes on the main street (Delilicious, Jumping Rock, Potter’s Pantry). The Village Grocer is a plain brick building with a plentiful supply of cheeses, charcuterie and condiments for the obligatory picnic.

Further along the road, morning lights up a forest of ghostly gums, eerie white sentinels on the outskirts of Exeter. This English-pretty village had been fortified by a social distancing buffer from Sydney during the first wave of coronavirus restrictions but, when these eased in June, the demands of welcoming hordes of out-of-towners proved challenging for some operators. Further challenges are likely ahead if there are renewed lockdown restrictions.

Exeter General Store is a busy post office collection point for locals who order coffee while collecting mail and return daily, if not hourly for best-baked, just-picked produce for fridge and pantry. ‘I love cooking: it’s my therapy,’ offers store owner Lauren Johnson. ‘Mine too’, I say, stuffing her notoriously scrumptious, whisky, herbed, honeyed porridge into my mouth, while insolently jotting down the recipe. It would be easy to while away the hours in this renovated 1900s outpost of gourmet and homemade foods, with a whole wall of books, but there’s no time.

Ten kilometres further on, Moss Vale has transformed itself into a sort of lifestyle store destination (Mossy Store, Made by Others, Suzie Anderson Home), and now with a super-cool tap-house bar/bistro with renovated historic interior. Bernie’s Diner has been here forever. Well, three generations in present ownership anyway, making sure the hot, house-made pastrami is a staple. Along with the onion rings. And the milkshakes.

The core of the highlands, of course, is typically thought to be Bowral. Some businesses are still takeaway-only or in the stages of a reopening. It’s a proud pastry town with celebrated bakeries and patisseries and dolloped in the midst of an excellent bunch, South Hill Kitchen is a rustic foodie favourite, fruit and veg harvested daily from owner Tory Bevan’s farm. The Sydney girl bought the place in April 2019, got it just right by November, then the fires hit. Her life enriching carrot, candied apricot and walnut muffins – with generously rich globules of butter cream frosting – are worth a road trip from anywhere.

With hunger satisfied, it’s essential to visit the funky mix of creativity that is Mittagong. Sturt Craft and Design Centre at Frensham school has been a Southern Highlands destination since the 1940s. It’s a centre for excellence in design-influenced art where visitors can sign up for a multitude of workshops or just select a treasure from a mix of hand-made artistry.The same goes for Twisting Vintage – an authentically eclectic vintage clothing store on the Bowral Road – famous among the film-making crowd for quality curation of the mid-century.

The constantly evolving capacity for creativity is inescapable in Robertson too, a not-too-far-away town spectacularly perched on the top of craggy Illawarra Escarpment. The SHAC – a new artist and designer creative space with exhibitions that display and sell work – and The Moonacres Kitchen – which comprises an organic farm café and, soon, a cooking school – are two important new reasons to stop. The Robertson Cheese Factory, an obvious third.

An escape to the country has always brought a heightened awareness of surrounds and, these days, the incidental conversations with strangers seem to count for a lot.

It’s icy again when I return to Wingello Village Store before it closes on my last day to devour an egg and bacon roll by the open fire.

‘Yes it’s cold,’ agrees Aerial, one of six Bruggeman children who run the store. ‘The daffodils and tulips bloom two weeks earlier in Bundanoon yet it’s only 10 minutes away.’ She hesitates. ‘… but it’s always a lovely day in Wingello.’ And the grass is greener again.

Anabel Dean is a freelance journalist formerly with The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, The Bulletin and Medical Observer magazine. anabeldean.com

For further  information visit:
Wildernest T1 (Tiny House): https://airbnb.com/h/wildernest-t1
Destination Southern Highlands: visitsouthernhighlands.com.au