It’s the kind of contention trivia buffs love. As anyone who was paying even minimal attention in primary school history class will attest, Edward Hargraves found Australia’s first gold just west of Bathurst in 1851, thus starting the inaugural gold rush and changing the course of the country’s history. Or did he? If you ask the residents of the present-day district of Byng, they’ll give you a very different answer.
But to get to the bottom of the conundrum, we need to go back to the completion of the road over the Blue surnames including Glasson, Hawke, Lane, Grenfell, Pearse, Thomas, Oates and Paull. Unsurprisingly, the district became known as Cornish Settlement.
