In 1829, fifteen-year-old Edward Botfield arrived in the colony of NSW as a convict. Some forty years later he settled his family on the Bogan River, named his property ‘Botfield’ and opened his house as a coach stopover. Such were Gongolgon’s simple beginnings.
In the winter of 1872, a coach-traveller from the city left some colourful word pictures of Gongolgon, the halfway coach-stop-over on the western bank of the Bogan River between Byrock and Bourke. He described it as “a great crossing place for stock travelling from Queensland to the southern or western markets or to stations.” Its overshot dam held the water back five miles and from his description, the meticulously laid out village would have won a Tidy Town award!
The adult population of fifty souls was served by two stores, one with the witty name ‘The Little Wonder’ and the other more predictably, ‘The Gongolgon’. It seemed like a town waiting for a future. The visitor noted, “something more is required to give it stability and prosperity… In short, the place only requires business and a population. At present there is little doing. Many families have recently left, even the school mistress. There are no signs of industry, no forge, no butcher, no baker, shoemaker nor tailor.”
But there were two tidy hotels. Mr J. Hawthorn, former police-trooper-turned-publican of the Royal Hotel, had won fame by being part of the posse who captured violent 19-year-old Johnny Dunn of the Ben Hall gang, in a desperate shootout at nearby Coonamble. The bushranger’s bullet that narrowly missed him and pierced his hat, may have persuaded him to leave police work for the hotel trade. His pub doubled as a post office and a Cobb & Co booking office.
The oddly titled Lame Horse Hotel tried to explain itself with poem on a sign picturing a brown horse with a lifted forefoot, “This horse is old, broken down and turned out of the stud. He’s both wind-gall’d and spavin’d, but he still has the blood.’“A third pub, The Nag’s Head, opened in 1885 and closed inside 12 months.
Gongolgon’s two mounted troopers were kept busy building stables, sheds and fences in their spare hours. It seems they had a fair bit of local police work too. The correspondent noted the curious fact that, at the time of his visit, the town was mostly occupied by women, with the male population all having gone to the court session in Bourke either as witnesses, defendants or plaintiffs. You would assume the two pubs had a dry spell!
Two years later another traveller waxed lyrical about the fruit and vegetables grown by the Chinese gardener in “the pretty little town” and about the kindly host of the pub he called “the lame quadruped”, who kindly loaned him a horse for the next leg of his journey to the mines at Cobar. Presumably it was not the hotel’s namesake!
Old-timer Harvey Barnett recalled the departure of the mail coach. “I remember quite well how the horses would rear and go off at a gallop when put in fresh and as soon as the driver would take the reins and the groom would let go the heads of the leaders. My, how those drivers would revel behind a team of fresh horses as they raced up the street in Gongolgon from the Royal Hotel, down past the Commercial Hotel and out along the Bourke road and for Tarcoon for another change of horses.”