The days are getting shorter, it’s been raining since last night, and I’ve been indoors obsessing about achieving straight edges in that bathroom re-paint you’ve heard so much about. So gather round children while I recount to you a short history of Braidwood, the town we now call home. 

If you’re a Government employee based in Canberra and head for the coast along the King’s Highway for a weekend getaway (if there are no bushfires or pandemics to prevent you), you will encounter Braidwood around the time you start to feel peckish and the kids need a wee. That is, about 50 minutes if you stick to the limit. 

The highway passes right through the middle of town, and it’s pretty picturesque – you’ll see nicely-preserved Victorian buildings, the Digger atop his war memorial, and very large, established trees shading the road.

European colonists started checking the area out in 1822 and it was apportioned among settlers soon afterward. The town gets its name from Thomas Braidwood Wilson, a surgeon on the ships bringing convicts to Australia – he received 2,560 acres and established Braidwood farm, although he only put down roots in the area in 1836.

Wilson was bankrupted by drought in 1840 (around the time, coincidentally, cheap convict labour was abolished) and his land was sold to John Coghill, a businessman and magistrate who built a mansion which still sits on a farm now called Mona, just outside town. Coghill’s son-in-law, a doctor, continued the acquisition game, at one time owning 52,000 acres in and around town. 

The town’s grid layout was decreed by Governor Darling with wide streets based on his experience of the hot climate in India. A lot of the distinctive Georgian buildings date to this time – and many more followed the discovery of gold in 1851, which fuelled Braidwood’s growth for the next few decades. 

Our town had the distinction of being subject of Australia’s first Royal Commission, looking into police corruption in 1867 – the local bushrangers seemed to be able to operate with a little too much freedom, and the Commission duly found that the local cops had been too lax in their duty. 

Canberra was founded as the nation’s capital city in 1913, making Braidwood a stop on the road to the beach. It spent most of the 20th Century in quiet stagnation – not great for the economy, but beneficial for the Victorian architecture, much of which survives. 

The whole town was heritage listed in 2006 and it’s become a vivid mix of agricultural country town and bohemian artsy-craftsy centre. There’s an entrepreneurial whiff in the air, with that passing trade from Canberra providing sustenance for some interesting little shops and cafés – the current-day equivalent of a 19th-Century gold rush. 

Boho, artsy-craftsy you say? Shops and cafés? What will you find to do with yourselves there?  Stay tuned – more on all of this in posts to come!