THINGS TO SEE AND DO

Eugowra is situated in the Central Western region of NSW, and attracts increasing numbers of visitors because of her beauty, bushranger history, central location & unique shopping. Throw a line into the Lachlan River, explore Nangar National Park & visit Escort Rock, where bushrangers robbed the gold escort coach in 1862. Tuck into fresh baked bread, prize-winning sausages and bushranger fare. Stay and make Eugowra your base for wineries, "The Dish", caves, fossils, museums, art galleries, bookshops, ballooning or pampering. Roll along a country lane as the hills catch the last rays of a golden sunset. And at night, behold the glory of the everlasting stars.

1. SHOPPING

All Sorts & Old Wares – Broad St 6859 2895

Furniture, gifts, jewellery, lollies, pre-loved items, books. Fri–Sun.

Jazzas - Pye St Jewellery, incense, oils, trendy gear. Wed 10-5

Kev’s Kelpies – "Karana" Nanami La.6859 2311

Remember Babe? Let Kev show you what his clever kelpie dogs can do with stubborn sheep! Great entertainment for everyone.

The Lady Bushranger - Nanima St 6859 2900

Furniture, gifts, coffee, in the beautiful old Lees store. Wed – Sun.

Lavender & Lace - Broad St 6859 2264 Wed – Sun.

Beautiful patchwork quilts & appliqué for sale, or made to order by Lorraine and Noeline. Baby wear, antiques, fabrics and jewellery.

Mandagery Art Studio – Broad St 6859 2554

Silk scarves, paintings, framing, and Donny’s great coffee.

Museum and Bushranger Centre – Pye Street. Curator: 6859 2820 Wed-Sun

Souvenirs, crafts, preserves, bushranger cards, plants, home cooking. Look out for the ghost of Johnny Gilbert.

Post Shop - Nanima Street 6859 2421 Mon - Fri

Cards, stationery, lollies, in the original old Post Office building.

Pubs (main street) & Bowling Club (up near hospital)

Sink a coldy with the locals! Refreshments, pokies, entertainment, local wines, tee shirts, singlets, caps, stubby & bottle holders.

Somerset Lane – Nanima St. 6859 2231 Wed - Sun

A must visit for every modern girl – Ann stocks the hottest night & day clothing and accessories at very cool prices.

Wobble In - Pye St 6859 2210 10-3 daily except Tues.

Brighten up Mick’s day – wobble in for books & treasure pleasure

 

2. EATING

Bowling Club, Hill Street, 6859 2315

Friday & Sat nights. Australian tucker - three mains – fish, chicken or steak.

Central Hotel, Pye Street 6859 2300

Trudy & Joan cook great counter lunches weekdays. Popular Moonlight Restaurant Friday nights.

Eat Your Greens, Escort Way 6859 2386

Neil & Jayne’s Function Centre caters for weddings & all occasions, serving modern Australian fare & local Australian wines in a private, tranquil, setting amongst the gum trees beside Mandagery Creek. 2 km north of town along the Escort Way. www.eatyourgreens.com.au

Escort Rock Café 6859 2727 VISITOR INFO

Obviously the bushrangers Ben Hall & Frank Gardiner would have eaten here! Dine in or take away bushranger tucker. A great place to hide out and they won’t hold you up!

Eugowra Quality Meats Nanima St. 6859 2372

Meet Bill the famous Snag King! Cooked chooks, deli meat, drinks, groceries, taste-tempting local pork & lamb cutlets.

The Fat Lamb Hotel Broad St. 6859 2253

Counter lunches 12 – 2pm. Meals Thurs, Fri, & Sun nights.

The Lady Bushranger Nanima St 6859 2900

Light lunches, coffee, tea. Open Wednesdays to Sundays

Pistachio Orchard Gooloogong Rd 6859 2548

Let Andrew tell you the whole pistachio story. Freshly roasted pistachio nuts for sale direct from the orchard 1.2 km south of the village on the Gooloogong Road.

Slippery’s Super Centre – Broad St. 6859 2420

In the old & charming Imperial Cinema Building, Slippery & Trish run a Supermarket, News agency, Chemists’ & dry-cleaning agency, Internet Café, photo-copying & laminating service. David’s Cobb & Dough Bakery makes a trip to Slippery’s a must! - smell that freshly baked bread! YUM

3. PAMPERING

Lynette Crowe – Clinic at Rural Transaction Centre – corner Broad and North Streets 68975373 Let Lynette look into your eyes and see what’s really worrying you! Lynette is a Naturopath and offers naturopathy, acupuncture, iridology, reflexology, reiki, lymphatic drainage, health foods, bach flower essences.

Head On In - Old Bank of NSW building, Nanima St. 6859 2566

Let Amanda and Marianne style, colour & cut your hair. Upstyles, bodywaves, lash & brow tinting & facial waxing Monday to Saturday & evenings Thursdays.

Di Healey – Next to the creek just as you leave the village - 4 Broad Street 6859 2800

Spoil yourself! Beauty therapy: hair removal, manicures, pedicures, facials, and nails. By appointment weekdays.

The New Ewe – Next to the creek at the bridge - 59 Broad St. 0427 774 174

Everybody deserves a massage! Make an appointment with Barb, Nurse & Massage Therapist. Also available are homemade gifts & gourmet eggs from free-range birds. By appointment only.

4. CRUISING

All roads lead to Eugowra, so there are lots of highways and byways, tracks and trails, to cruise along in your car, or on your motorbike, pushbike or horse.

The scenery is spectacular with hills and valleys, bush and farmland, and old and new buildings to discover.

We also have lots of creeks and river reserves for camping, fishing, a quiet picnic or a swim or paddle.

And Canowindra, in 2004 voted the most popular rural place to visit by our city cousins, is only 29km away!

 

The red line shows the route for your Bushranging tour (see below)

5. BUSHRANGING

  1. Start your bushranger getaway at Escort Rock – site of the Gold Escort Robbery, where old bullets from the robbery have been found. The wheel ruts, worn into the granite from the old coaches are still visible today

  2. Head toward Orange, along The Escort Way, and on your right are the Goimbla Mountains a favorite haunt of bushrangers. Turn right at the windmill and explore the wild and beautiful Nangar National Park. Test the stamina of your four-wheel drive vehicle with a climb to the bluff of Mt Nangar for a spectacular and breathtaking view across the Central West of NSW.

  3. Back on the Escort Way, pass by old Goimbla Station, where all that remains is the chimney – the place where Mrs Campbell and her husband defended their homestead against an attack by bushrangers Ben Hall, John Gilbert & John O’Meally, and during which John O’Meally was shot dead.

  4. Continue along The Escort Way, which follows the old coach road to Murga, from where you look up the valley to the bluff of Mt Nangar. Turn south down Longs Corner Road, and follow it to Canowindra. Wander down crooked Gaskill Street, and imagine being in the town when it was held up by bushrangers for 3 days of drinking and cavorting in 1863.

  5. Take the road to Eugowra, and turn left at Nyrang toward Gooloogong. Cross the old wooden bridge, blink and you’ve passed the town, then head south east down the Kangarooby Road to Croote Cottage. Built in 1837, it has original loop holes, furnishings and a secret cellar, and was visited by bushranger Ben Hall, who took pity on the occupant, Mr. John Dowd, at the time sick in bed, and offered him money for a Doctor. Mr. Dowd refused the money, and urged Ben to give up his life of crime.

  6. Now head back through Gooloogong toward Forbes. After a couple of kms, turn at the sign to the Old Gooloogong Anglican Cemetery, located on the south bank of the Lachlan River. Here, on the opposite bank to where his family had settled, bushranger John O’Meally was finally laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

  7. Continue heading northwest but stop and explore the many travelling stock & camping reserves along the Lachlan – sites of old coach crossings and bushranger camps, great places to picnic or pitch a tent and kick up old bottles, hand forged horseshoes, and china fragments from the old days.

  8. Turn at the sign, and cross the single lane heritage listed Paytens Bridge, heading toward Eugowra.

  9. Head back to town and turn left down a track just after you enter the 50km zone. This leads to the Low Level Bridge, a stock crossing south of the town of Eugowra. Paddle in the cool water of Mandagery Creek where Frank Gardiner’s gang of bushrangers crossed the night of the Gold Escort Robbery – but be careful, the creek can be very cold, has lots of snags and can flow very swiftly!

  10. Visit the Eugowra Historical Museum & Bushranger Centre to bone up on all the local bushrangers, and take a look at Johnny Gilbert’s pistol, ploughed up by a farmer in a paddock near Escort Rock. Also in the Museum are fantastic scenes of the Goimbla attack and Gold Escort Robbery, and other treasures relating to bushranger history.

  11. Feeling peckish? Idle into The Escort Rock Café in Eugowra – a great place to hide out (and they won’t hold you up)

  12. Or have a coldie and a counter meal at the Fat Lamb Hotel – famous for its name, and for being on the site of the first hotel in Eugowra, which was built by Hanbury Clements, the pastoralist who rode to Forbes to alert the authorities to the Gold Escort robbery.

  13. Finish a perfect bushranging getaway with a drop of Bushranger Country Wine – Escort Gold, The Darkie’s Red or Old Eugowra Port - while you soak up magnificent views from the verandah of BnBs BnB. (Featured in SMH, Travel, Saturday 28th February, 2004). And as night falls, and you’re feeling a bit heady at the end of a perfect day, don’t be surprised if you see stars - more stars than you’ve ever seen before!

 

 

6. PLOUGHING & HORSING AROUND

To make your Bushranger Getaway extra special, join in the fun of The Golden Plough & Bushranger Festival, with old time farming, draught horses, ploughing, trick horses, bush yarns and bushranger activities. The Golden Plough is held in autumn at the showground.

 

 

7. ORIENTEERING

You can really get into the bushranging experience by participating in Orienteering Events held in the hills around Eugowra over the long weekend in June each year.

8. RELAXING

Whatever you need to do to relax, you can do it in Eugowra. Sleep in, party all night, bushwalk, sightsee, go on a winery tour, eat out in style, dangle your legs into a cool creek, sit and read a book, paint, draw, take photos, fish, browse, daydream, stargaze. Whatever!

 

9. STUDYING

If you are interested in studying earthquakes, rivers and streams, modern farming, granite milling, saw-milling, chaff-milling, growing pistachios, feedlot beef, bushrangers, pioneer history, old buildings, geology, draft horses at work, old-time farming, native vegetation, floods, aboriginal history – we’ve got it all!

10. EXPLORING

Because Eugowra is so central to everywhere, you can stay in Eugowra, and use it as your base to explore the Central West of NSW.

Here are some places to visit and things to see on trips from Eugowra: -

Eugowra Area

Mandagery Creek/ low bridge

Escort Rock – gold robbery site

Nangar National Park/ Mount Nangar

Payton’s Bridge

Lachlan River

Pise Church ruin (first Seventh Day Adventist church over Blue Mountains)

Straw Bale Winery (Wallington’s)

Kevin’s Karana Kelpies

Stairway to heaven (Gilgies church ruin)

Travelling stock and camping reserves

 

Gooloogong – half an hour’s drive south

Lachlan River Bridge

Gooloogong Hotel

Gooloogong log cabin hall

Croote Cottage

Kangarooby valley

Conimbla National Park

 

Grenfell- one hour’s drive south west

Craft Shop & Visitor Info

O’Brien’s Hill (old mine site)

Weddin Mountain National park

-Ben Hall’s Cave

-Seaton’s Farm (relic home-made buildings)

-Holy Camp

Bushranger interest

  1. The Pinnacle – a spectacular bluff, nearby Pinnacle Station provided work for prospective bushrangers including Dan Charters, who managed it for his sister, Mary Feehily.
  2. Ben Hall’s Homestead – site
  3. Ben Hall’s stockyards - site
  4. Wheogo Homestead – ruins of the Walsh family’s home. Biddy Walsh married Ben Hall, Ellen Walsh married John McGuire, and Kitty Walsh married John Brown, but eloped to Queensland with Frank Gardiner. "Warrigal" Walsh was a telegraph (look out) for Gardiner’s Gang.
  5. Mt Wheogo – site of Frank Gardiner’s camp & alleged buried booty dug up by visiting Americans.

Canowindra - half an hour’s drive south east

Age of Fishes Museum/Visitor Info 63441008

Historical Museum

Ballooning

Belubula River

Swinging Bridge

Blue Jacket Hill lookout

Wineries

Trading Post, Antique shops, coffee shops

The Bush Jeweller (Nangar Gems)

Virginia Cullane bookshop

 

Cowra – one hour’s drive south east

Visitor Centre/ POW breakout displays 63424333

Wineries, wineries, wineries

Japanese Garden

Wyangla Dam

Darby’s Falls Observatory

Lachlan Valley Railway

Railway & Military Museum

Foodies restaurants

 

 

Parkes – half an hour north west

Visitors Information Centre 68624365

Bushman’s Dam

Vintage Car Museum

Radio Telescope (The Dish)

North Parkes Gold Mine

Peak Hill Gold Mine

Goobang National Park

Elvis Festival (January each year)

 

 

Forbes – half an hour west

Railway Visitor Info Centre 68524155

Lake Forbes

Bird Hide

Bundaburra Range

Jemalong Weir

Manna Mountain, Burcher & Womboyne

Bushranger interests: -

  1. Albion Hotel – Coach look out, catacombs where opium was smoked, gold weighed and robberies planned
  2. Historical Museum – coach, Ben Hall memorabilia, carved red gum bench from Yamma Station
  3. Ben Hall’s grave - cemetery
  4. Billabong Creek – where Ben Hall was shot
  5. Old Racecourse – where Ben Hall & other bushrangers checked out prospective mounts

 

Cudal – half an hour north east

Cabonne Wine & Food Centre/Visitor Info

Manildra – 45 minutes north east

Craft Cottage/Library & Visitor Info

Flour Mill

Amusu Picture Theatre

Borenore – 45 minutes north east

Hillside Orchard & Information Centre

Borenore Caves

Berry Farm & Orchards

Wineries

 

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