Walgett is a town in North-West New South Wales

New South Wales

New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 and the seat of Walgett Shire. It is at the junction of the Barwon

Barwon River (New South Wales)

The Barwon River flows through New South Wales, virtually as a continuation of the Macintyre River / Border Rivers system, before joining with the Culgoa River to form the Darling River...

 and Namoi

Namoi River

The Namoi River is a major tributary of the Darling River in inland New South Wales, Australia.- Course :The headwaters of the Namoi, including the Macdonald River, the Peel River, the Cockburn River and the Manilla River, rise on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range on the Northern...

 rivers and near the junction of the Kamilaroi

Kamilaroi Highway

Kamilaroi Highway is a state highway in New South Wales. It has been given the national route number 37. Its status as a highway is fairly new....

 and Castlereagh Highway

Castlereagh Highway

The Castlereagh Highway is a state highway in New South Wales, Australia, also extending some kilometres into Queensland. It has been given the route number 55. The highway was recently extended past Gilgandra to include state route 86...

s. In 2006, it had a population of 1,735 persons, including 822 (47.4%) indigenous persons and 1,457 (84.0%) Australian-born persons.

The current signage at the outskirts of the town indicates a population of 2,300 (December 2008) and an elevation of 130 metres.

It is a regional hub for wool

Wool

Wool is the textile fiber obtained from sheep and certain other animals, including cashmere from goats, mohair from goats, qiviut from muskoxen, vicuña, alpaca, camel from animals in the camel family, and angora from rabbits....

, wheat

Wheat

Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...

 and cotton

Cotton

Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective capsule, around the seeds of cotton plants of the genus Gossypium. The fiber is almost pure cellulose. The botanical purpose of cotton fiber is to aid in seed dispersal....

 industries. It is the gateway to the New South Wales opal

Opal

Opal is an amorphous form of silica related to quartz, a mineraloid form, not a mineral. 3% to 21% of the total weight is water, but the content is usually between 6% to 10%. It is deposited at a relatively low temperature and may occur in the fissures of almost any kind of rock, being most...

 fields. The main crop farmed in the district is wheat, however the drought has caused an increase in the farming of lucerne

Alfalfa

Alfalfa is a flowering plant in the pea family Fabaceae cultivated as an important forage crop in the US, Canada, Argentina, France, Australia, the Middle East, South Africa, and many other countries. It is known as lucerne in the UK, France, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, and known as...

 and other good hay crops.

The town, like many other remote communities, has problems with crime linked to the abuse of drugs and alcohol. As a result, many businesses have metal shutters to protect the premises from the street crime.

History

A post office was gazetted for "Wallgett on the Barwin River" in 1851 and the town sites were surveyed in 1859. The district would have been occupied prior to this by squatters and their livestock.
The town of Walgett was proclaimed on 20 March 1885. The surveyor, Arthur Dewhurst, mapped the town, naming the three main streets after the British Prime Ministers: Pitt, Fox and Peel. Arthur Street was named after another surveyor. Walgett Courthouse was built in 1865.

It was once a port for paddle steamer

Paddle steamer

A paddle steamer is a steamship or riverboat, powered by a steam engine, using paddle wheels to propel it through the water. In antiquity, Paddle wheelers followed the development of poles, oars and sails, where the first uses were wheelers driven by animals or humans...

s in the late 19th century that plied the Murray-Darling river systems. The first steamer reached Walgett in 1861 and travelled to the town regularly until c.1870.

Euroka Station was purchased by Fred Wolseley in 1876 and was the site of the invention of the Wolseley Shearing Machine. The machine was tested at Bourke in 1888 on 184,000 sheep to eventually revolutionise the shearing industry.

Walgett's recent history includes the Freedom Ride

Freedom Ride (Australia)

The Freedom Ride of 1964 and 1965 was a significant event in the history of civil rights for Indigenous Australians.Inspired by the Freedom Riders of the American Civil Rights Movement, students from Sydney University formed a group called the Student Action for Aboriginals, led by Charles Perkins...

s in the mid-1960s. The Freedom Riders arrived in Walgett on 15 February 1965. They protested outside the Walgett RSL Club because they had been told the club was refusing to admit Indigenous ex-servicemen. They also picketed a ladies dress shop, protesting the fact that the proprietor would not allow indigenous women to try on dresses. After their protests their bus was run off the road by a car driven by a farmer. This event led to Walgett, the Freedom Riders and the plight of Indigenous Australians in rural New South Wales getting national and international media attention. http://www.abc.net.au/messageclub/duknow/stories/s888118.htm

Sport

Walgett has a strong rugby league

Rugby league

Rugby league football, usually called rugby league, is a full contact sport played by two teams of thirteen players on a rectangular grass field. One of the two codes of rugby football, it originated in England in 1895 by a split from Rugby Football Union over paying players...

 culture, and St. George Dragons

St. George Dragons

The St George Dragons was an Australian Rugby league football club in St George, Sydney, New South Wales that played in Australia's top-level Rugby league competition from New South Wales Rugby Football League in 1921 until 1998; in 1999 they formed a joint venture with the Illawarra Steelers,...

 player Ricky Walford

Ricky Walford

Ricky Walford is an Australian former professional rugby league footballer of the 1980s and 90s. He played for the Sydney Roosters, North Sydney Bears and the St. George Dragons...

 played in the Walgett junior leagues. Walgett is also the home of the Barwon Brumbies rugby league side. Other notable players such as Peter Nichols, Jason Horan, Gavin Ruttley, Michael Latta and flying winger Tim Barklay have played for the Brumbies.

The Walgett Rams is the local Rugby side and is a leading team in the Western Plains Rugby Union Competition. Donovan Murphy would be the highest calibre player to have played for the Walgett Rams and is now following a career in Europe.

The predominant summer sport of the town is cricket. The local competition is composed of teams from Walgett, Cumborah

Cumborah, New South Wales

Cumborah is a small rural village in north-western New South Wales, Australia, in Walgett Shire, near the opal fields of Lightning Ridge. Cumborah is about 36 km west of the Castlereagh Highway, and is served by the commercial centres of Lightning Ridge and Walgett which is 48 km to the...

, Lightning Ridge

Lightning Ridge, New South Wales

Lightning Ridge is a town in north-western New South Wales, Australia, in Walgett Shire, near the southern border of Queensland. The Lightning Ridge area is a world epicentre of the mining of black opals and other opal gemstones. Lightning Ridge has the largest known deposits of black opals in the...

, Collarenebri

Collarenebri, New South Wales

Collarenebri is a town with a population of 478 people in north western New South Wales, Australia. It is situated in Walgett Shire, on the Barwon River approximately 75 km northeast of Walgett and south west of Mungindi on the Gwydir Highway. It is from Pokataroo which was the nearest...

 and Goodooga

Goodooga, New South Wales

Goodooga is a village in the Australian state of New South Wales in Brewarrina Shire on the eastern bank of the Bokhara River. It is near Brewarrina and Lightning Ridge, its closest neighbour. The town lies 20 kilometres south of the Queensland border. Goodooga is an Aboriginal word meaning,...

.

The Walgett and District Sporting Club provides facilities for tennis, golf and lawn bowls.

The local College hosts two major football carnivals each year. The Ricky Walford Shield and the Neville Thorne Shield are both knockout Rugby League competitions held in August by the Primary School and the High School respectively.

Education

The pre-school, primary school and high school were re-structured in 2003, into the Walgett Community College. The College is a unique educational institute, and gave birth to the successful Yaama Maliyaa group who won several national awards in the Young Achiever's Australia in 2005.

External links

• Walgett Shire Council official site
• Been There Before - etext