page_title: Mudgee
section_title: 1850 to present
hierarchical_section_title: Mudgee / History / 1850 to present
caption_attribution_description: English: The railway station at Mudgee, New South Wales, Australia.Français&#160;: La gare de Mudgee, Australie
context_page_description: Mudgee is a town in the Central West of New South Wales, Australia. It is in the broad fertile Cudgegong River valley 261 km north-west of Sydney. Mudgee is at the centre of the Mid-Western Regional Council local government area. As at June 2018 Mudgee had a population of 12,410.
  The Mudgee district lies across the edge of the geological structure known as the Sydney Basin.
context_section_description: In 1851, the population of Mudgee was 200. However, the population skyrocketed as the discovery of gold in nearby Hargraves by Edward Hargraves led to a gold rush in New South Wales. While no gold was found in Mudgee itself, the town prospered as gold was discovered in nearby New South Wales towns such as Gulgong, Hill End and Windeyer temporarily reached populations of 20,000. Mudgee was a centre for the local goldfields and grew rapidly as a result.
  Mudgee was declared as a municipality in 1860 making it the second oldest municipality west of the Great Dividing Range with a population of 1500 in 1861. A public school was built in the 1850s together with the present Catholic and Anglican churches and a Methodist and Presbyterian church. A new police station, courthouse, Mechanics' Institute and a town hall were built in the 1860s. There were four coach factories operating in Mudgee to cater for the demand of the nearby goldfields. The National Trust of Australia has a number of these buildings registered including the Mudgee Museum (formerly the Colonial Inn), the Catholic presbytery, the court house, the police station and the Anglican Church. On 1 June 1861 the Electric Telegraph system arrived and was opened for messages to be transmitted and received at the Telegraph office.
  One of the gold miners attracted to the Mudgee district was Niels Peter Larsen who married Louisa Albury in Mudgee in 1866. They had a child, leading Australian poet Henry Lawson in Grenfell in 1867 and changed their names to Peter and Louisa Lawson. By the birth of their third child, they moved to a selection at Pipeclay (now Eurunderee) 8 km north of Mudgee.
  Louisa Lawson's vigorous lobbying led to the establishment of the slab-and-bark Eurunderee Public School in 1876 with Henry Lawson attending the school for the first time aged nine. He would later write about the school in his poem, The Old Bark School. Lawson would later attend St. Matthews Central School, Mudgee before his progressively worsening deafness leading to him leaving school at the age of 14. Lawson would live in the Mudgee district until the age of 15 and many of his stories were written about the district.
  As the gold mines petered out in the latter half of the 19th century, Mudgee was sustained by the strength of its wool industry as well as the nascent wine industry established by a German immigrant, Adam Roth, in the 1850s. The opening of the railway extension from Rylstone to Mudgee occurred on 10 September 1884.
  The railway boosted the town's agricultural industries. The railway between Rylstone and Mudgee closed on 2 March 1992. This same railway section re-opened eight years later, on 2 September 2000. The Wallaby Track Drive Tour visits various sites associated with Lawson including the old Eurundee Public School, the Henry Lawson memorial, the Budgee Budgee Inn, Sapling Gully, Golden Gully and the Albury Pub which was owned by Lawson's grandfather.
  In 1890 a local newspaper was founded with the title the Mudgee Guardian and North-Western Representative. Its title changed in 1963 to the Mudgee Guardian and Gulgong Advertiser and is currently published twice a week.
  Mudgee's Glen Willow Regional Sports Stadium hosted the 2012 City vs Country Origin rugby league match with an attendance of 8,621, and the 2017 match with an attendance of 8,322.
  In the NRL, the St. George Dragons regularly host home matches there, emphasising the importance of the long-term prosperity of Rugby League in country areas.
  Additionally, in the A-League, the Western Sydney based Western Sydney Wanderers have chosen to take their Community Round match to Mudgee's Glen Willow Regional Sports Stadium, as part of their new Regional Strategy,
  In 2014, the local council found itself involved in a statewide corruption investigation when officers of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (New South Wales) raided the local council's offices.
caption: Mudgee Railway Station (1884)
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