Gunning & District Historical Society

This year marks a momentous occasion for our community – the 150th anniversary of the Gunning Railway Station, a beloved local landmark that has stood as a testament to regional progress and connection since its opening in 1875. Exhibition Details The Gunning & District Historical Society, in partnership with Southern Tablelands Arts and with the support of NSW Transport Asset Management, the Australian Railway Historical Society (ARHS) and Upper Lachlan Shire Council, warmly invites you to a special exhibition at the Gunning Railway Station. This event will celebrate the rich history and continued significance of the railway in our district.  Event Highlights ·        Historical displays featuring photographs, artefacts, documents from its beginnings in1875 to the present showing how it began and its current roles ·        Highlighting some of the workers and their roles at the station ·      ...

Kinder Year 1 - 2 Year 3 - 4 Years 5 - 6 Competition is open to all children Kinder to Year 6 who reside in the Gunning District,  this includes the towns of Gunning, Dalton, Breadalbane, Bevendale, Biala, Blakney Creek, Collector, Cullerin, Gurrundah, Jerrawa, Lade Vale, Merrill and Oolong.

 

 

 

 

 

  A Recitation by Roy Irwin Alchin – Gunning 1907 by Garry Norman Smith The Goulburn Evening Penny Post (Saturday 28 December 1907, 6) reported on the annual Methodist Sunday School service at the Gunning Methodist Church. The newspaper described the church as “nicely decorated with greenery”. Among the names mentioned by the newspaper were Plumb, Wheatley, Alchin, Gazzard, Rudd and Timms. Methodist (Uniting) Church, Gunning   The children’s program on this occasion was well-attended by children and their parents and “afforded a treat to the listener”. Among the children to present an item at the service was Roy Irwin Alchin, grandfather of the author. Eleven-year-old Roy joined his older sister Myra as part of the children’s participation. Myra gave a recitation of an anonymous poem “Papa’s Letter” while Roy recited the lyrics of a song “In the House of Too Much Trouble” (words and music by Will A. Heelan and J. Fred Helf). The words of Roy’s recitation were appropriate...

  Do you know who I am? by Leslie Bush Over ten years ago, Tony Porter owner of Coronation Collectables at Gunning, now located at Grenfell was given a photograph of a stunning young lady that the current owners could not identify. Tony was at the time, the resident Gunning writer for the local newspapers and posted an article about the picture, but sadly she still is unknown. The Donors did not know her identity, only that she was supposedly a local and their names and where they lived in Gunning have also been forgotten now.  The photo is an Opalotype. Unidentified Young Lady - Opalotype Photograph She is wearing a beautiful dress with lots of soft blousy frills on the neckline; maybe she was a Debutante making her first foray into society, or a young bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding, or was she attending a ball? The portrait invokes such romanticism of a bygone era. Item written by Tony Porter for the Goulburn Post Opalotypes or Milk-glass positive The basic Opalotype, or...

Gunning Public School visited Pye Cottage Museum in 2019. Forty students from years 3 and 4 kept their guides busy as they studied the displays and asked questions about family life in a four-roomed, slab-walled house. Before 1867, there were only two rooms - a kitchen/dining room and a bedroom. When the children entered these first rooms, they tried to imagine how the "folk" who lived in this tiny house kept warm and clean, how they cooked their food and how they relaxed at the end of the day. A PYE RETURNS TO PYE COTTAGE Nicholas Pye and Harrison Picker at Pye Cottage Museum Photo G Dickson Nicholas Pye and Harrison Picker started by examining the automobile advertisements in the Gunning Gazette.   Perhaps when Pyes lived in the cottage at Dalton from the mid 1920s through to the 1940s, the adults also read this local paper, mended the clothes or played popular songs or hymns on a portable organ?     Pye Cottage showing the original two rooms. Photo RA Spiller With the ...

The mystery is solved! Five sewing machines were taken out of store in 2020 and displayed in Pye Cottage Museum, Gunning. The blog “A Touch of Old World Charm,” featured two “hand-operated” sewing machines. The small, iron machine seemed to be a “mystery.” The second blog covered two of our treadle machines, an Australian Beale and a Singer model, the Sphinx . (1, 2) In this blog I can correct an earlier error and show off the fifth sewing machine in our collection, a Nirvana “drophead treadle machine.”  It seemed that the mystery was, which “hand-operated” machine had been “Donated by Mrs Offley of Jerrawa?” That label, hand printed by someone from Gunning & District Historical Society, was in one drawer of a very well-kept drophead, treadle machine, the Nirvana. In other drawers, there were two sets of attachments and a detailed manual. The illustrations in the manual clearly match our Nirvana.  This handwritten note was in another drawer of the treadle machine: Donation...