Pioneers

After Mount Canobolas we drove north-east from Orange towards Ophir, which is where Australia’s first goldfields were found in 1851, leading to one of the first gold-rushes on the continent. It’s a bit of a rough road across the countryside and typically, there’s no real warning of this because folk out here do it tough, and that includes the driving.

On reaching Ophir we found an old pioneers’ cemetery up on a hill, which still had three or four graves we could make out. Travelling priests had accompanied the prospectors out to the gold fields and they’d even built wooden churches, though there’s nothing remaining of them now.

Historians are unclear how many people are buried here, but one thing they’re sure about is that some of them met quite violent deaths because they were always squabbling between themselves. Charles Corse here, for example, was shot following a dispute over the ownership of a saddle.

Anyway, it’s petty dusty work getting up here to Ophir and I don’t reckon we can put off washing the car much longer, though it’s given us a whole new way of saying hello to the folks back home. You’ll be glad to know that people all across the central west of NSW are now wondering Where the bloody hell’s Warrington?