Section 7 Northbound

Marker	Diretions	Distance from previous point
30	Take exit to Coolac Road (Pettit/Adjungbilly exit)	12.5 km
31	Turn right into Muttama Road	4.7 km
32	Turn left onto Hume Highway on-ramp and rejoin highway	0.4 km
33	Take exit ramp to Jugiong	19.1 km
34	Turn right into Jugiong Road	0.5 km
35	Turn left in Jugiong onto Old Hume Highway	0.6 km
36	Turn left at McMahons Reef Road	2.9 km
37	Turn right onto ramp to rejoin Hume Highway	0.6 km
38	Turn right to Bookham (via Childowla Road) then left towards township	26.2 km
39	Turn left after 1 km into Conroy Street then turn right onto Hume Highway	1 km

• Coolac
• Jugiong
• Bookham

Coolac

Beehive Hotel, Coolac

In 1862, the NSW Surveyor-General announced that a site had been fixed upon for a town, to be called Coolac (perhaps from an Aboriginal word for native bear, ie koala) on the Mutta Muttama Creek. This site seems to be the present hamlet of Pettitt, a little to the south, but the folk of Coolac had long before decided to settle either side of the Great Southern Road. Mr John Smith Papps was conducting the Traveller's Inn Arms at ‘Coolooc' by 1840.

Crossing violent Coolac (Muttama) Creek was a well-known travelling hazard. Mail bags had sometimes to be floated across in wash tubs. The creek was bridged in 1860, after a politician got a dunking there. ‘If the bridge be the result of his intervention, it is a pity we have not a legislator half drowned in every creek between this and Albury' wrote a local cynic. Despite a spectacular hold-up and shoot-out at Mr Keane's store in 1866 by one Patrick Lawler, Coolac was bushranger-free. Legend attaches Ben Hall to Coolac's famous Beehive Hotel, but bushrangers attract legends like honey attracts bears.

Chromium mining began near Coolac in 1894, exploiting ores from the Coolac Serpentine Belt. Coolac geology includes an ophiolite, ‘a section of the Earth's oceanic crust and the underlying upper mantle, uplifted and exposed above sea level'.

The school closed in 1980 and the two churches are private residences - St Jude's Anglican was built 1879 and St Peter's Catholic in 1925. The latter now has a collection of railway carriages in its grounds, which intrigues the locals. The Cootamundra-Tumut railway line came through Coolac in 1886, and the district shipped its wool by rail. The line closed in 1984. Coolac Goods Shed is in splendid order, but only an earth bank remains of the platform. Coolac's War Memorial Hall (1959) is locally heritage-listed. Its squat brick façade is a good example of post-war functional design. Australia's rural towns preserve many examples of vernacular architecture, which might long ago have been demolished in a metropolis.

Coolac was the launching place in 1994 of the Bald Archys, a burlesque of the Archibald Prize for Portraiture. Winning the 2012 Archys were caricatures of two Federal politicians, painted inside hospital bedpans.

The Coolac Bypass opened in 2009, but Coolac spirits clearly are undaunted. The town has its own community radio station, which features a ‘Drive Time' show. Scores of stuffed toys are attached to the eucalypts on the forecourt of the Beehive Hotel – mostly bears.

Jugiong

View from Jugiong Hill

The Murrumbidgee River meanders northwest from Burrinjuck Dam, makes a lazy loop, then winds down to Gundagai. On the crest of the loop is Jugiong, named after the Aboriginal word for ‘valley of crows'. The village lies on a river flat surrounded by steep hills, and the waters of the Murrumbidgee regularly well up and weave Jugiong fences with a map of débris. In 1852, the river virtually obliterated the settlement.

Jugiong Creek was a formidable obstacle to traffic on the Great Southern Road. Several Jugiong inns accommodated travellers; among the earliest was Mr Ernest Green's, built in 1839. John P. Sheahan was the most popular innkeeper and his wife was storekeeper and postmistress. Mr Sheahan himself rescued 38 Jugiong citizens during the 1852 flood. The St George Tavern was rebuilt by Sheahan after the flood with stonemasons from Ireland building a structure with sturdy thick walls. The building remains Jugiong's most prominent landmark and is still run by the Sheahan family.

Sheahans continued their tradition of service. In 1954, local MP the Hon. W. F. Sheahan was NSW Attorney General and his son Terry later occupied that position between 1980 and 1988.

Ben Hall's gang blockaded Jugiong in November 1864, bailing up a number of travellers and teamsters just south of the town in hope of sticking up the Gundagai mail coach. The coach was escorted by police, much gunfire ensued, and gallant Sergeant Edmund Parry was shot dead by John Gilbert. A cairn to Parry's memory stands near the spot though Parry's grave is at Gundagai. Gilbert was shot by police the following June; his grave is at Binalong.

Teamsters cursed steep Jugiong Hill, and few would descend it without dragging a couple of young trees behind their wagon as brakes. In June 1884, Mr A. Edward completed the first bicycle ride from Sydney to Melbourne, but he was forced to walk up the ‘almost impassable' Jugiong Hill. The splendid view is still worth the ascent. Halfway up is the 1858 St John The Evangelist's Catholic Church, on land donated by John P. Sheahan. On a nearby rise is the Anglican Christ Church, an Edmund Blacket design, erected in 1872.

Semi-trailer climbing 9% grade on Jugiong Hill, 1952

Since 1933, Jugiong's Pumping Station has delivered Murrumbidgee River water to Cootamundra and other towns to the north and west. The pumps are powered by the hydro-electric station at Burrinjuck Dam. The dam also protects Murrumbidgee settlements from dangerous floods.

Famous Australian cricketer and commentator Richie Benaud started his schooling in Jugiong in 1935.

Around 1940, hoping perhaps to mimic the success of Jack O'Hagan's ‘Along the Road to Gundagai', R. J. Cassidy penned ‘The Road to Jugiong' with music by J. A. Steele.

When the Jugiong bypass was planned, there was no provision for a southern interchange. Locals protested, so an exit was added at the top of Jugiong Hill. ‘A town without a back door is like a pub with no beer' said one disgusted local, ‘Bloody useless.'

The bypass opened in October 1995.

Jugiong Bridge, late 1800s

Bookham

Bookham is located in the district of Bolong, which was first visited by European settlers in the 1820s. According to local folklore, Bookham's name was coined by Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of the Governor of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), who was travelling with her party in 1839 from Jugiong to an inn at Bolong Creek. At this inn Lady Franklin and her daughter entreated the hospitality of the Green family. Mrs Green complained to Lady Franklin that she and her husband wanted a new name for their place, which she believed was tainted by the name of the prisoner who had it before them. Lady Franklin, seeing Mr Green working at his books in a room from the roof of which hung a number of hams, was attracted by the spectacle to suggest the name ‘Bookham'.

St Columba's Catholic Church, Bookham, built c.1910

The more official story of Bookham's name are less amusing – it is believed to be a shortening of ‘Cumbookambookinah', the name initially given to the village.

In 1939 Banjo Paterson mentioned Bookham in his memoirs in The Sydney Morning Herald, describing it as a town with a pub at each end and nothing in between. He recalled how as a boy Bookham was one of the few places where one could still see horse racing in heats. The racetrack, Paterson wrote, was unfenced, with no grandstand, and laid out through gum and stringy bark scrub. One particular day at the races in 1873, in which the boy Paterson (then called Andrew Barton) lent his saddle to the winning horse ‘Pardon', would go on to inspire the racing ballad ‘Old Pardon, the Son of Reprieve'. ‘Pardon' also rated a mention in ‘The Man from Snowy River':

‘There was Harrison, who made his pile when Pardon won the cup,

The old man with his hair as white as snow;

But few could ride beside him when his blood was fairly up –

He would go wherever horse and man could go.'

In 1939 Bookham suffered a devastating bushfire which destroyed half of the area known as the Bogolong district. The fire was started on a hot summer morning by some ladies who threw a burning rug out of a motor car into the dry grasslands adjoining the road. The fire burned through Berramangra and Bookham and on towards Bowning before it was contained. Several weeks later it was relit by dry leaves which blew onto a smouldering stump and this time burned to within a few kilometres of Yass. Over 70,000 acres of pastureland was devastated and some settlers lost everything. The town's regeneration began in 1943 when planning began to create the Bookham Soldier's Memorial Hall, which would become the central community hall for social activities and the meeting place of organisations such as the Australian Red Cross Society.

Marker	Location
S	Burrinjuck Dam