Goulburn

Goulburn is a city in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, on the road between Sydney and Canberra. Its streets keep many sandstone and brick buildings from the wool boom of the 19th century. It became a city by letters patent from Queen Victoria in 1863, the first inland city of Australia.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie named the plains after Henry Goulburn, the British under-secretary for the colonies, and the town was surveyed on the Wollondilly River in the 1830s. Sheep stations on the tablelands made it a center of the wool trade, and the railway from Sydney arrived in the late 1860s. The Goulburn Brewery, built in the 1830s for the brewer Thomas Bradley, still stands above the river and brews beer again. The Anglican Saint Saviour's Cathedral was designed by Edmund Blacket in the Gothic Revival style and finished in the late 19th century.

Fine merino wool from the farms of the Southern Tablelands is sold through the wool stores of Goulburn. The Big Merino, a concrete ram on the edge of the city, holds a wool shop and a lookout in its head. The Goulburn Historic Waterworks keeps a steam beam engine from the 1880s that pumped water from the river to the town, and it is still run on steam days.

Riversdale, a coaching inn of the 1840s on the old Great South Road, is kept as a house museum by the National Trust, with its stables and garden. The countryside around the city has small wineries and farms that grow cool-climate grapes, and the Wollondilly River runs north through the town toward Sydney's water supply at Warragamba.