Upper Lachlan

Distinguished and Famous people from Upper Lachlan

📖 Dame Mary Gilmore

Mary Gilmore was born at Cotta Walla in the Roslyn district in 1865, before a life that took her into teaching, journalism, poetry and social reform. She even joined the experimental Australian settlement at Cosme in Paraguay before returning home. For many years she edited the women's page of the Australian Worker, using it to campaign on poverty, pensions, women's rights and the treatment of Aboriginal people. Literary success and public recognition followed, including appointment as a dame in 1937. Her Upper Lachlan birthplace belongs to the opening chapter of a much-travelled life whose later work reached a national audience.

🏛️ Terence Aubrey Murray

Terence Aubrey Murray had a direct hand in Collector's early layout. In 1841 he commissioned a survey of the settlement known as Murray Town or Old Collector, with streets named after people in his circle. The shire's heritage study also records his introduction of Murray cod to local waterways, transported in barrels from the Molonglo River near Yarralumla. Hotels, trades and coaching services subsequently developed along the route. Murray's involvement combined landholding, local planning and an intervention in the waterways, leaving a more specific regional story than a passing association with colonial public life.

⚖️ Samuel Nelson

Constable Samuel Nelson forms part of Collector's bushranging history from the other side of the confrontation. On 26 January 1865, Ben Hall's gang held up Kimberley's Commercial Hotel and a neighbouring boot store. Nelson attempted to apprehend the offenders and was shot dead. The incident belongs to a period when the road towards the southern goldfields brought both trade and the threat of robbery into the settlement. Remembering Nelson alongside the more famous bushrangers restores the local policeman to a story too often told only through the reputations of the men he tried to stop.