Red Range, New South Wales

Red Range is a village on the Northern Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia in Glen Innes Severn Shire. It is in the Parish of Rusden and Gough County. The village is located on the Red Range Road 23 km south-east of Glen Innes. At the 2006 census, Red Range had a population of 254 people.

Red Range was established in 1854. Four years earlier, George Kempton and his wife Harriet had come to Australia from Ely in Cambridgeshire, England to make a new home for themselves. In 1854 he made his first selection, "Rocky Valley", on the (now) Red Range Road along the Mann River. A few years later, he made a second choice, a block of land he called "Splitters Home" at the site later to become Red Range. Within a few years the village grew to consist of a church, a few houses, a general store and a school, surrounded by peppermint bushes.

The little slab cottage next to the shop was built around this time and was later used to store produce for the shop. The cottage-like appearance is more recent and had resembled a barn for most of its life. It was built of pit-sawn vertical slabs and given a snow roof, typical of the buildings of that time and altitude.

The first school began in 1879 and a weather-board school building was built in 1886. The present school building was opened around 1996 and the old building moved (in two sections) to another part of Red Range for conversion into a residence. Water tanks from the old school building are still in use, having been relocated at the store.

Names associated with Red Range in those early days included (in alphabetical order) Austin, Butcher, Cameron, Chapple, Cheney, Drew, Edwards, Enrights,Fenn, Goodwin, Hagen, Hall, Hawker, Hollis, Hottes, Kraemer, Lane, Lowe, McCabe, McDonald, Madgwick, Mahoney, Mitchell, Morley, Penson, Perkins, Peters, Pogson. Potter, Rainbow, Rogers, Ross, Ruming, Rush, Ryall, Rudd, Scott, Smith, Ted Sargeant, Taylor, Thompson, Tronier, Waimsley, Wells, Whan, Williams, Willis, Wilson, and Winn.

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