Tarcutta, New South Wales
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Tarcutta New South Wales |
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National Truck Driver Memorial at Tarcutta
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 Tarcutta
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| Coordinates | 35°17′0″S 147°43′0″E / 35.28333°S 147.71667°ECoordinates: 35°17′0″S 147°43′0″E / 35.28333°S 147.71667°E | ||||||
| Population | 224 (2011 census) | ||||||
| Postcode(s) | 2652 | ||||||
| • Summer (DST) | AEDT (UTC+11) | ||||||
| Location |
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| LGA(s) | City of Wagga Wagga | ||||||
| County | Wynyard | ||||||
| State electorate(s) | Wagga Wagga | ||||||
| Federal Division(s) | Riverina | ||||||
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Tarcutta is a town in south-western New South Wales, Australia. The town is 438 kilometres (272 mi) south-west of Sydney, 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) east of the Hume Highway, It was proclaimed as a village on 28 October 1890. As of 2011, the town had a population of 224.
It serves a local farming community relying for its prosperity mainly on sheep and cattle, and the interstate truckies who use the town as a change-over point in the trade between the state capital cities of Sydney and Melbourne.
The Tarcutta area was first visited by the European explorers Hume and Hovell as they passed through on their way from Sydney to Port Phillip in the Colony of Victoria. On 7 January 1825, near the present site of Tarcutta, they met a group of Wiradjuri aborigines.
A decade after this first European contact around 1835-37, "Hambledon", a U-shaped slab house was built at Tarcutta. It was the first inn and post office to be built between Gundagai and Albury. Tarcutta Post Office opened on 1 January 1849. By the 1880s Tarcutta locals were actively lobbying for a rail branch line from Wagga Wagga to Tumbarumba via Tarcutta, and in 1917 the Tumbarumba branch line became a reality. A section of the line sustained major flood damage in 1974, and the remainder of the line was closed in 1987.
Tarcutta is halfway between Sydney and Melbourne on the Hume Highway, and has long been popular in the trucking industry as a stopping and changeover point for drivers.
The local park houses the National Truck Drivers' Memorial to the truck drivers who have died on the infamous local stretch of the Hume Highway, as well as around the country. The country singer, Slim Dusty, endorsed the memorial with a plaque.
The local café, which has sustained generations of truckies, has also been the source of inspiration for some of Australia's recent modern poets, Les Murray and Bruce Dawe. Murray wrote "The Burning Truck" while visiting the café in 1961 and Dawe immortalised the eatery in a couple of lines in his poem "Under Way". The poem reads in part: 'there would be days / banging open and shut like the wire door of the cafe in Tarcutta / where the flies sang at the windows'.
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