DID you know that the very first township on the Southern Highlands wasn't Mittagong, Bowral or Moss Vale, but the settlement of Bong Bong beside the Wingecarribee River?

In fact on an old 1832 map of Australia, Bong Bong and Bargo were the only two towns marked between what is now Goulburn and Campbelltown.

So it wasn't surprising that a young bloke writing for the Sydney Gazette in 1832, made a journey on foot, from Bathurst to Bong Bong, to see what was there.

And it is worth reflecting on this pedestrian journey as we approach the two hundredth anniversary of the very first township established on the Southern Highlands.

IT WAS beside the cobbled river crossing, on the Old Argyle Road, across Wingecarribee River, where Governor Macquarie selected the site for our first township, when he visited here in 1820.

Charles Throsby, who had settled at Throsby Park three years earlier, suggested to the governor that this fast developing farming district needed some law and order, so the first building to appear in the new Bong Bong township was a police station.

Other buildings followed - a gaol, commissariat store, accommodation for the soldiers, police and prisoners, as well as a post office and a pub - the Argyle Inn.

Sadly Bong Bong quickly faded within a decade, when Surveyor Mitchell commenced construction of a new line of road from Mittagong to the south in 1831, diverting the horses, carts and wanderers away from Bong Bong, through the new go-to town of Berrima.

BUT let's get back to this lonely walk from Bathurst to Bong Bong in 1832, where our enthusiastic young "peregrinator" set out with a spring in his step, however soon lurched into a "feeling of loneliness when the first sound of the bell-bird's note," caused him to pause and reflect on his solitary situation.

Yep, it was just him, the bell-birds, a rough track and miles of bush.

He talks of "banditti" and "insurgents," which one assumes were the early bushrangers in the area, as he headed off across the Abercrombie River bound for Goulburn, where the Wollondilly River was "little more than a chain of lagoons."

AFTER a bit of exploring and no doubt a pub stop, he left Goulburn for Bong Bong, encountering desolate country with "neither house nor habitation" and where "very rarely a Christian face is met". 

Apart from the loneliness, "you are ever and anon in peril of being engulfed in oceans of mud," he wrote despondently, reporting that the road was littered with "broken drays, heart-broken oxen, lamed horses and fatigued-beyond-measure pedestrians".

EVENTUALLY our journeyman arrived in Sutton Forest, where he found the only church between Goulburn and Campbelltown.

He talks glowingly about the Englishness of the countryside with "neat cottages, a snug church, the light timber with its umbrageous foliage and refreshing lagoons."

Five miles further on he reached the Bong Bong settlement on the Wingecarribee River, "one side of which forms the beautiful estate of the explorer of this portion of the territory," which was Throsby Park. But, apart from the pub, he doesn't paint a pretty picture of our very first township.

"Bong Bong is very ineligibly situated; the flat on which it is built is depressed considerably below the level of the surrounding country, and continually subject to inundation," he writes, saying that there were, "a few miserable huts, a cottage or two occupied by government dependents, an apology for a soldiers' barrack, a new commissariat store, and a gaol, of course, constitute the town, which has only one redeeming feature - a first rate house of entertainment, the Argyle Inn, kept by Mr.W.Bowman.

This rest for the weary is conducted on a most respectable scale, and with its dashing hostess, forms an agreeable insipidity of the dullest of dull settlements."

YES, it sounds like he had a cracking evening at the Argyle Inn, doesn't it? I guess we will never know what he and the "dashing hostess" got up to that night, but I have the impression he was leaving our very first settlement at Bong Bong - or at least the Argyle Inn - with a spring in his step, way back in 1832.