Young, NSW

Tue 31 Mar 1998

From Wagga Wagga to Junee and on to Cootamundra.

Don Bradman was born in Cootamundra.

Cootamundra has a beautiful, old, refurbished, working, railway station. It has five trains a day, two XPTs each from Sydney and Melbourne and one ordinary train from Griffith. Buses meet these trains and take people to all sorts of other places including Dubbo, which is as far from Cootamundra as it is from Sydney!.

On to Young, which at first sight has no outstanding features until we found Chinaman's Dam Recreation Area.

This is a gem of a place with some artificial lakes with lots of birds including Yellow Spoonbill, Great Egret, White-faced Heron, Pied Cormorant, Little Pied Cormorant, Black Swan, Pacific Black Duck, Hardhead, Dusky Moorhen, Purple Swamphen, Galah, Magpie-lark, Australian Magpie, and Willy Wagtail.

Under construction is a chinese water garden. A pagoda is set on top of a small hill and surrounded by garden beds and sandstone lined paths which are interrupted by ponds and waterfalls. When it is complete, it will be quite magnificent. All this several kilometres out of the town in a truly rural setting. We plan to return to Young in a year or two to see its fulfillment.

At the Lambing Flat Museum, we discovered that during the gold rush there was a celebrated riot by white diggers against a group of Chinese recently arrived in Australia. The Chinese camps were attacked, the Chinese had their pigtails cut off and their belongings destroyed. The Chinese Immigration and Regulation Act, the beginning of the White Australia Policy, was enacted soon after and the town seems to take the credit for this

Presumably, modern day Young feels some regret for this piece of history and the Chinese garden at Chinaman's Dam, which has among its many sponsors the Chinese Embassy, is intended to signify an apology