Gulargambone

Place of galahs

The village of Gulargambone (first spelt Galargambone) was surveyed in 1878 and already had an inn and store at that time. It was proclaimed a village in 1885, and the first school was already in operation by this time. The town grew rapidly and by 1923 had a population of 1,800.

The area was quite wild in those days. Box Ridge (later Warrumbungle) had their own bushrangers in 1885. William Thurston, alias White, and Thomas Angel, alias Hobson, shot dead a policeman in Coonamble where they had been in gaol. They made their way out to Box Ridge where, legend has it, Thurston had friends and knew the area. They hid in a part of the mountains still known as Angel’s Gap and the villagers supplied them with food, as well as sending up smoke signals to let the bushrangers know when the police were around.

The bush ranging pair Angel and Thurston were active in the area around the west and south of the Warrumbungle Range in the 1880s. Accounts of their exploits vary, but there is a consensus in Tooraweenah that Thurston, a young man from a local family, was lured into crime by Angel. According to Duke Tritton the pair ‘had been doing a lot of cattle duffing and a little bush ranging on the side’ before being arrested and locked up at Coonamble.

Another account suggests that Thurston, ‘using the alias Billy White was flung into prison in Coonamble for supposedly forging a cheque’. According to this account he came into contact with hardened criminal Thomas Hobson, who used the alias Mark Angel, in the Coonamble lockup.

On the evening of 3 March 1885 Angel and Thurston broke out of the gaol. The plan, apparently hatched by Angel, went awry when the pair were confronted by Constable John Mitchell. Mitchell was shot and died the next day from his wounds. Mrs.Canham, an elderly lady who was nursing Mitchell’s wife, ‘ran into the passage to try to block the two men’. The two apparently told her to get out of the way or they would blow her bloody brains out. She retorted: “You cowardly villains. Shoot and be damned to you!”

Also at this time the Bourbah Hotel, west of Gulargambone, was a very wild place, and known as a “lambing down” pub, where customers were fleeced. It was the hangout of bushrangers, who would check out coach passengers who stopped there and then ride out ahead of the coach and bail it up down the road. From the verandah of the pub young Donohoes and Byrnes were known to have shot the hats off horsemen as they passed by.