Goulburn Hotels

Goulburn New South Wales, Australia is a quiet, unassuming provincial city characterised by a particularly long main street. Located 190 km south west of Sydney via the Hume Highway and 690 metres above sea-level it has some 25,000 residents. The town was originally situated on a well-used route across flat, southern New South Wales between Mittagong and both Yass and Canberra. George Johnson purchased the first land in the area between 1839 and 1842 and became a central figure in the town's development. He established a branch store with a liquor license in 1848. At that stage the store and a bark hut constituted the town. The Royal Victorian Hotel came into existence by 1851 and a Post Office opened in 1853. The town's name probably came from Johnson who named it after Sir Walter Stevenson's novel Goulburn. Johnson was Irish and there were a number of Irish in the area. They looked to their country of origin (and its most famous novelist) for other local place names – Towrang, Collector, Taralga and Crookwell . Alternatively, the town was named after Henry Goulburn, a prominent British politician at the time the area was settled by Europeans, and whose brother Frederick was the Colonial Secretary of New South Wales at the time. A telegraph station opened in 1862, by which time there were about 500 residents, a blacksmith's shop, two hotels, two stores, the telegraph office and a few cottages. The town was a change station (where coach horses were changed) for Cobb & Co. by 1865. A police station opened the following year and a school in 1868. Goulburn was proclaimed a town in 1872. The arrival of the railway in 1886, and the completion of the line from Sydney to Albury in 1893, was a definite boost to the town.