About

It exists for one purpose only - to provide the public with information about the past - particularly as it relates to the south-westerly expansion of the Colony of NSW.

The philosophy behind the site is to publish original material and to have limited interpretation from those creating the site. This will create a website that is like a jig saw puzzle from which visitors can make their own picture of the past.

Although it may seem strange to include news and events from before 1824, the idea is to show what life was like if one lived at that time and the excitement and puzzlement of the people who lived then.

I also want to hint at what was going on in the world (and therefore in the newspapers that people read) at the time (such as the first time these early settlers could light a fire by simply striking a match).

I also want to show the lives and relationships of some key people - such as Hamilton Hume and William Hovell (one of whom tried to prove that bunyips existed).

The web site has a free search and indexing service. At the moment it is set up to index every word that appears on the entire site each Friday. This is a fantastic service which means a visitor can find every occurrence of a place name, an ancestors name, an event, or a date. Using the index feature even allows people to find variations in spelling (such as Tumut and Tumat or Shelley and Shelly).

The newspaper articles have been selected to show events in the lead up to the discovery of Tumut by Europeans, and events thereafter. It tries to show what happened during the expansion of settlement towards the south/west of the colony. Mixed with this are other events to help give context - e.g. the invention of the steam land carriage In England in 1823. The articles have been transcribed from the Australian National Library newspaper service -Trove.

The vast majority of the text shown here is as it was printed however, some printer's errors and spelling mistakes have been corrected to make for easier reading through modern eyes. In particular, the printer's practice of the day of printing capital letters at the beginning of (what appear to be randomly selected) words has been done away with.

Readers should also be aware that it was a common practice in early newspapers to not give stories a headline. Consequently, many of the headlines seen here were written by tumuthistory.com.

If a reader wants to quote a passage from a newspaper please go to the original on Trove to check its accuracy. The use and membership of Trove is free, and the best way to find any particular article on Trove is to select a phrase from the article on this website then use it to do a phase search on Trove.

Kevin Swann, (owner and editor)