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One of the earliest names attached to a Mudgee street belonged to William Lawson, who in 1821 was the first European to reach the site of Mudgee.
He was followed by other pioneering families including the Coxes and the Blackmans, each of them now immortalised in local street names and with descendants still in the area.
Lawson was an explorer and lieutenant, and with Gregory Blaxland and William Charles Wentworth, he made the first European crossing of the Blue Mountains, a trip which this year celebrates its bicentenary.
The crossing made it possible to establish Bathurst as the first settlement west of the range, and Lawson became a major landowner and commandant in the new town.
In November, 1821, Lawson retraced the route James Blackman had discovered earlier in the year, from Bathurst to the Cudgegong River.
Blackman was one of 10 Bathurst settlers granted 50 acres on the river flats and a two-acre town allotment, and from Bathurst he explored not only the route to the Burrundulla swamps on the Cudgegong, but also the areas that would become Orange and Wellington.
His brother William Blackman built a slab hut on the site of Bleak House that was his home and shop, and was reportedly the first building constructed in the area that would become the town of Mudgee.
In 1840, James Blackman settled at Cooyal, remaining in the area until his death in Mudgee in 1868.
Lawson pushed 10 miles further along the river than Blackman had done, becoming the first white man to reach the site of Mudgee.
Returning to Bathurst, he urged George and Henry Cox, the sons of William Cox, to settle the fertile new district.
William Cox had built on Lawson’s work in the mountains by constructing the first road across the range in 1814, reaching 101 miles from Emu Plains to Bathurst.
His son George was then in Bathurst, while Henry managed the family property in the Mulgoa Valley south of Penrith, where George Cox had built the homestead Winbourne and Henry Cox built Glenmore.
Cox’s sons came to Mudgee in 1822, camping under the gum that has been preserved on Wilbetree Road as ‘The Camping Tree’, and establishing Mudgee’s first settlement at Munna, later known as Menah.
The name came from the Wiradjuri word mannara, meaning a level piece of country, and Menah persists as the name of the property, the surrounding locality, and Mudgee’s Menah Avenue.
George Cox moved from Menah to the Burrundulla swamps, which he drained to create fertile pastures and built the Burrundulla homestead, named after the ballandalla badin reed.
Several streets in east Mudgee, which were originally part of George Cox’s Burrundulla property, bear names associated with the Cox family, including Burrundulla Avenue and Burrundulla Road, Clarendon Place named after William Cox’s Clarendon homestead at Richmond, Mulgoa Way named for the Mulgoa Valley and Glenmore Street and Winbourne Street named for the family’s Mulgoa homesteads.
Lawson returned to Mudgee to take up large tracts of land north of the river, including Putta Bucca, from the Wiradjuri name for a nearby hill, puttaba, and bugga, meaning tainted meat; and Bumberra (later Bombira), from bunbambirra, to cause to run.
The properties’ names remain in use at Putta Bucca Road, Bombira Road and Bumberra Close.
At his death in 1850, Lawson is said to have been the country’s largest landowner, with large acreages at Prospect, Bathurst, Mudgee and elsewhere.
Sources:
Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1 (1966, and online at adb.anu.edu.au)
Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 2 (1967, and online at adb.anu.edu.au)
A History of Mudgee, by George Henry Frederick Cox.
John Broadley’s essential Historic Houses of Mudgee (2011)