Tumut is located 423 km from Sydney and 180 km from Canberra via the Hume Highway. The main access to the town is via Gundagai (34 km) with roads going through both Gocup and Brungle. The town itself has an elevation of 280 m above sea level which means that it is located so that it has four distinct seasons. There is some confusion about the origins of the town's name. One popular version is that 'doomut' was an Aboriginal word for 'camping ground' or 'quiet resting place by the river' and that over the years this evolved to 'toomut', 'tumat' and eventually Tumut.
The Wiradjuri Aboriginal people lived in the valley for thousands of years prior to European settlement. A small number still live in the tiny village of Brungle some kilometres from the town.
The first Europeans into the area were the explorers Hume and Hovell who, travelling down the Murrumbidgee River in 1824, came across the Tumut River. They subsequently entered the Tumut Valley.
Four years later settlers arrived in the valley. One of the first settlers was an Irishman, Thomas Boyd, who had travelled with Hume and Hovell (he is buried in the town's historic cemetery on Adelong Road). He settled at 'Rosebank' near Gilmore and is honoured by the region of the town known simply as 'Boyd', it was previously known by the more pedestrian 'Railway End'. Another was a Mr Warby who settled at 'Darbalara' near Brungle. It is known that on 27 November, 1828 the explorer Charles Sturt (on one of his many unsuccessful missions to find Australia's 'inland sea') stopped at Warby's house. It was here that Elizabeth Warby was born on 10 May, 1830 - probably the first European to be born in the valley.
The township grew slowly. Squatters were well established in the valley but by 1856 the town was nothing more than a single school building, a few mud and slab huts and three hotels. The town had been surveyed, and laid out in a classic grid pattern, as early as 1848 but it was only a major flood in 1852 which finally persuaded the locals to form some kind of a town.
By 1860 the town had grown to a point where it a local newspaper which eagerly reported that the local cricket club was holding annual meetings and the cricket played on the town's racecourse was so popular that three publicans' booths were provided (the publicans had to pay a guinea for the priviledge) to quench the thirst of the players and spectators. After the game the players headed for the Woolpack Hotel for more drinking.
The goldrush era saw the rapid development of the town. At one stage in 1860 there was a report of over 1200 men passing through Tumut in the space of four days as they headed to the Kiandra goldfields. With gold came the bushrangers. The town's one bushranger was William Brookman, a carpenter by trade, who joined the infamous 'Blue Cap' gang. But the the most famous bushranger to work in the area was James Kelly (brother of Ned) who, in 1877, stole some horses in Wagga which they later tried to sell in Tumut.
The post-goldrush period, which had seen people moving through the area to the Adelong and Kiandra goldfields, saw a small boom in the town's fortunes. By 1866 the number of pubs had grown to eleven and this had expanded to 18 pubs by 1880. Today the town has only six pubs. It became a municipality in 1887 and the Tumut Shire, including Batlow and Adelong was created in 1928.
Around this time the major activity in the valley was dairy farming on the rich river flats. This was hampered by the lack of good transportation. It wasn't until 1867 that there was a bridge, one of the longest in New South Wales, over the Murrumbidgee River at Gundagai (prior to that a ferry service had operated) and the branch railway line from Gundagai to Tumut was authorised as early as 1884 but wasn't completed until 1903.
In the 1950s the town was operating as a successful service centre for the surrounding district. There was a Butter Factory (now the Tourist Information Office), a millet broom factory, an emerging timber industry, some workers were employed on the Snowy Mountains Scheme (it came to Tumut in a major way with the construction of the Blowering Dam and the Talbingo Power Stations) and the area was noted for sheep and both dairy and beef cattle.
Today the town is remarkably prosperous largely due to the success of the timber industry. Long term planting of softwood pine forest by the NSW Forestry Department - there is now more than 5000 hectares of pinus radiata grown within a radius of 25 km of Tumut - has ensured a regular and reliable source of timber (unencumbered by any environmental problems) and this prosperity has seen the town become one of the most attractive medium-sized settlements in rural New South Wales. It is estimated that nearly 20 per cent of the town's population now work either directly or indirectly in the forestry/timber industry.
Information Courtesy of Sydney Morning Herald