Muswellbrook

Muswellbrook is a town on the Hunter River in the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales, Australia. Its name recalls the mussels an early survey party found in a stream beside its camp, now Muscle Creek, though some historians tie the spelling to Muswell Hill in London, where Amelia Forbes, wife of Chief Justice Francis Forbes, went to school. Coal mining and horse breeding are the two trades the district has long been known for.

The Wonnarua and Gamilaroi peoples held this country before Chief Constable John Howe explored the valley in the late 1810s, the first European to do so. Farms spread along the river through the following decade, and the township was gazetted in 1833 under the spelling Musclebrook. To the south, the sons of Francis Forbes laid out Forbestown in the 1840s; it was renamed South Muswellbrook so that it would not be mixed up with the town of Forbes. The railway made Muswellbrook a junction, where the Merriwa line branches off the Main Northern line toward Gulgong.

The Muswellbrook Coal Mine worked the seams beside the town from 1907 until the early 2020s, and its old site has been set aside for a solar farm with a grid battery. Bayswater Power Station, a coal-fired plant commissioned in the mid-1980s, stands south of the town next to the site of the closed Liddell station. Horse studs and vineyards share the river flats of the Upper Hunter, and the district has also built a name for wine and gourmet food.

Donald Horne, the writer of The Lucky Country, grew up in Muswellbrook as a small boy, and his memoir The Education of Young Donald, the first of a series, recalls the town of the 1920s. Steely Dan put its name into the song Black Friday on the album Katy Lied; Donald Fagen later said the band had picked the spot on a map as the place farthest from New York. Thomas Keneally mentions the town in his novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. St Alban's Anglican Church on Hunter Terrace and Loxton House on Bridge Street are on the heritage list, and the Blue Heeler Film Festival is held in Muswellbrook each year.