Every year at about this time, due to the bushfires, I think of an old abandoned town I visited one July over forty years ago. Dalmorton was a gold mining settlement established beside the Boyd River in the mountains behind Grafton when they were still remote and unexplored. When I visited only the one building remained, an old solid, timber courthouse standing by the narrow road that came from the coast and led back up into the high ranges. Other than an occasional timber truck, traffic was virtually non-existent.
It was cold in the mountains at night, so we bedded down in the old courtroom before the fire and listened to the wind through the gums and pushing up under the eaves. Years later a bushfire swept through and everything was burnt to the ground. Now other than a camping ground that bears the name of the town, nothing remains but the bush and the ghosts of those who once lived and labored there. All else has been lost.
Still, I think of it on winter nights when the wind is up and the stars clear in the black sky. I go to sleep thinking of the place, hoping that it will become part of my dreams. I remember the mountains that enclosed the valley, the cleared slopes below the tree line and the shallow river turning away beyond the bend. I recall the afternoon we walked to the top of the mountain behind the courthouse and looked over into remote and empty valleys and ranges disappearing into the distance. When I wake before dawn, the sadness of the empty and abandoned town lingers. I was there just once, years ago and will not be going back.
Lost and abandoned towns like Dalmorton are scattered across the State, in the foothills of mountain ranges, on the remotest plains and at the edge of river valleys. You come across them by accident. Some are on the main highway; but most wait up side roads at river crossings or by rusted rail sidings.
Towns like Silverton, on the edge of the western desert or Joadja in the southern highlands with its abandoned and rusting shale oil refinery. Nerrigundah still stands at the head of the Turros River Valley in the mountains behind the far south coast of NSW but the miners and bushrangers have left and few travel that way any longer. The unlikely named Bongongolong north from Gundagai off the Burra Road.
Some of the towns still have life but they are on their last legs, just keeping their heads above water because of a pub or service station at the cross-roads. Occasionally there is a church that still holds a service once a month.
Once these were places with a purpose, to service a mine or mark a rail junction. Once they were places full of life and hope.
On the map they retain the appearance of substance, with names that demand recording. Midway dots on west-running highways, they have names that sound faintly familiar, these desolate villages that couldn’t keep up.
Now they have outlived their usefulness and are just fading away. Villages betrayed by progress. Towns that have just given up on life. Everyone who lived there once has moved away and there is no one left who can remember the way things used to be.
Some seem to stand ready, just waiting for owners to return, as if they were away on holiday. The shops are neat and tidy and look as if they are still stocked but the doors are locked and the blinds drawn, closed up against the weather. In windows there are directions on yellowing paper stuck to the inside of the glass. At the post office a sign gives details of the nearest service station in the next town.
Other places have given up entirely and are just shadows on the landscape, almost resentful of being reminded of their earlier life. All they have left are occasional rusting street signs, and remnants of burnt out, brick chimneys. The fruit trees that stood in their yards now grow wild.
These are places that have disappeared into history but have power to haunt us still; an empty public school with a date over its door, rotting rail sleepers and the boarded-up School of Arts building. The only residents now lie in the churchyard and will never leave. The gold that started the town has been worked out, the branch line has been closed, the shale oil processing no longer economic.
Towns without purpose, their life evaporating into the morning air.
Image credit: images care of Visit NSW website.
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