Forbes sits out on the Lachlan in the Central West, about 380 kilometres west of Sydney, on the Newell Highway between Parkes and West Wyalong. It's one of those country towns where the history is right there on the main street. You've got the old gold rush buildings, the post office clock tower, and Ben Hall in bronze outside the railway station. Down the road at the cemetery, Ben Hall and Kate Kelly, Ned Kelly's sister, are buried in the same ground. And every few years the river comes up and has its say. I've pulled together as much as I could find on the place, from Wiradjuri country and John Oxley's grumpy first visit through to the floods of the last few years.
Wiradjuri Country and the Kalari
Long before anyone dug for gold here, this was Wiradjuri country. Wikipedia's Forbes article says plainly that the area was home to the Wiradjuri people before non-Indigenous settlement. Its Wiradjuri article calls them the largest Aboriginal group in New South Wales, and says their country was known as "the land of the three rivers": the Wambuul (Macquarie), the Kalare, later called the Lachlan, and the Murrumbidgee. It puts the Murray River as their southern boundary.
The river itself has more than one Wiradjuri name depending on the source. The Lachlan River article gives Kalari, Galari and Galiyarr, while the Wiradjuri article spells it Kalare. The same Wiradjuri article lists Forbes among the towns that still have Wiradjuri communities today, alongside Condobolin, Peak Hill, Parkes, Cowra and others. The 2021 census figures quoted in the Forbes article put Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at 13.3 per cent of the town's population.
John Oxley Comes Through – 1817
The first Europeans to see the river were Acting Surveyor George William Evans in 1815, who named it after Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and then John Oxley, who explored it properly in 1817. That's according to the Lachlan River article. Oxley passed the spot where Forbes now stands on that 1817 trip, one of the first inland expeditions, and named it Camp Hill.
He wasn't impressed. He didn't like the clay soil, the poor timber or the swamps, and he summed it up with a line the Forbes article still quotes: "it is impossible to imagine a worse country." Not exactly a tourism slogan. The first settlers moved into the district anyway, in 1834.
The Gold Rush of 1861
German Harry and the Black Ridge diggings
Everything changed in June 1861, when Harry Stephan, better known as "German Harry", found gold. The Forbes article says the first gold was found at a spot called Halpin's Flat and the field was first known as Black Ridge. People poured in. That article puts the first rush at about 30,000 people, falling to around 3,500 by 1863 because the mining was so hard going.
The heritage history of the Forbes Post Office gives a slightly different picture. It says there were about 1,500 miners on the diggings when a mail service started at Black Ridge in 1861, run out of rented premises belonging to a J. H. Burchart, and that the population swelled to upwards of 28,000 miners by 1862.
How Forbes got its name
The usual answer is that the town was named after Sir Francis Forbes, the first Chief Justice of New South Wales. The Forbes article says "probably", and the old railway station names list I've posted before says the same. But there's a better yarn. The Forbes article also says the name may have come out of a government mix-up in Sydney, and that the name was supposedly meant for the goldfield now called Hill End, between Orange and Mudgee, where gold turned up around the same time. Whether that's true or just a good pub story, I couldn't pin down.
Post, telegraph and the Albion Hotel
The diggers needed mail. The Forbes article says a post office opened on 1 December 1861 under the name Black Ridge, though that name was changed before it opened. Hayward Atkyns was appointed the first official postmaster on 17 April 1862, on £200 a year, according to the Post Office history. The telegraph line came through from Orange and the Forbes Telegraph Office opened on 27 October 1862. On that very first day, the results of three days of racing on the Lachlan Gold Fields were wired through to Bathurst.
Then there's the Albion Hotel, once a Cobb and Co. coach stop. The Forbes article says it had tunnels underneath that were used during the rush to move gold and money to and from the banks, to cut the chance of a hold-up. The Albion burnt down on 10 February 2009, and a lot of history and memorabilia went with it.
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Ben Hall and the Bushrangers
From Sandy Creek to the roads
Ben Hall is the name everyone connects with Forbes. Wikipedia's Ben Hall article says he was born on 9 May 1837 at Maitland, the son of two former convicts, and came down to the Lachlan as a boy around 1850. He married Bridget Walsh at Bathurst in 1856, and he and John Maguire leased the 10,000-acre Sandy Creek run about 50 kilometres south of Forbes. Over the summer of 1861–62 his wife left him for a young policeman, James Taylor, and took their son Henry with her. Around then Hall fell in with Frank Gardiner.
In April 1862 Inspector Sir Frederick Pottinger arrested Hall over the armed robbery of Bill Bacon's drays near Forbes. The charge was dropped when a Crown witness changed his story.
The Eugowra gold escort robbery – 15 June 1862
A couple of months later came the big one. On 15 June 1862 Gardiner led a gang of eight, Hall among them, in holding up the gold escort coach near Eugowra, at the place now called Escort Rock. The Ben Hall article says they got 2,700 ounces of gold and banknotes worth more than £14,000 all up. The Commons description of the Escort Rock photo calls it the only big gold-escort robbery ever carried out in New South Wales.
Hall was arrested again in July but let go for want of evidence. With the legal bills piling up, the Sandy Creek lease went to John Wilson, a Forbes publican. After Pottinger burnt down Hall's hut, Hall slid fully into bushranging with men like John O'Meally, Johnny Gilbert and John Vane. The gang famously took over Robinson's Hotel at Canowindra, locked the local copper in his own cell, fed and entertained the townspeople, and then paid the publican on the way out. The Ben Hall article says they were trying to show they could do as they pleased and make the police look silly, and it worked.
It didn't last. Micky Burke was killed at Dunns Plains, Vane gave himself up, and O'Meally was shot dead attacking Goimbla station near Eugowra. In November 1864 Gilbert shot Sergeant Parry during a mail coach robbery near Jugiong. In January 1865 John Dunn shot Constable Samuel Nelson at Collector. Parliament rushed through the Felons Apprehension Act, which let a named outlaw be shot by anyone, at any time, without warning. The Ben Hall article says more than 100 robberies between 1863 and 1865 were put down to Hall and his mates, and also notes that Hall himself wasn't directly responsible for anyone's death. My earlier post on the hangings at Darlinghurst Gaol mentions the man hanged in 1863 for his part in the Eugowra robbery, and John Dunn's shooting of Constable Nelson at Collector.
The ambush at Billabong Creek – 5 May 1865
The end came just out of Forbes. The State Heritage Register story, as given in the Ben Hall's Death Site article, goes like this. In late April 1865 Hall, Gilbert and Dunn were stealing horses around Forbes. Mick Coneley, once a friend, had turned informer for the £1,000 reward. On 29 April Sub-Inspector James Davidson left the Forbes barracks with five police and two Aboriginal trackers, and they camped in thick scrub near where the gang was meant to meet. The party was Davidson, Sergeant James Condell, troopers Thomas Hipkiss, John Boyan, John Caban and Edward Buckley, and the trackers William (Billy) Dargin and Charley (Goolagong).
Gilbert and Dunn got spooked by some stockmen and cleared out. Hall turned up on the afternoon of 4 May. At six the next morning he walked out towards his two hobbled horses and was shot many times. The heritage listing doesn't soften it: he was shot "numerous times and then many more times after he was dead". The Felons Apprehension Act wasn't legally in force until a few days later, which is why the legality of the killing has been argued about ever since.
His body was strapped over one of his horses and brought into the Forbes police station. Davidson had hoped to keep the death quiet to trap Gilbert and Dunn, but there was too much excitement, and somewhere between 400 and 500 people came to see the body.
The grave in Forbes Cemetery
Hall was buried in Forbes Cemetery on Sunday 7 May 1865. About 50 people and three buggies followed the hearse, some family and some just curious locals. The Grave of Ben Hall article says the grave was probably unmarked at first and had a picket fence around it sometime before 1900. Around 1957 the author Edgar Penzig and a local put up the headstone you see today. It reads "IN Memory Of BEN HALL SHOT 5th MAY 1865 AGED 27 YEARS".
The same cemetery has the unmarked graves of gang members John O'Meally and Warrigal Walsh, and of Billy Dargin, the tracker who was there at Hall's death. Both the grave and the death site were added to the State Heritage Register on 8 October 2010, as part of the Ben Hall Sites.
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Kate Kelly – Ned's Sister in Forbes
The other famous name in Forbes Cemetery is Kate Kelly. She was born Catherine Ada Kelly at Beveridge in Victoria on 12 July 1863, the younger sister of Ned Kelly, according to Wikipedia's Kate Kelly article. After Ned was hanged in November 1880, she and her brother Jim toured with what the papers called an exhibition of relics until the police stopped them. She later performed in Sydney and Adelaide under other names, then went into domestic service.
On 25 November 1888 she married William Henry Foster, a horse-tailer, and they settled at Forbes. They had six children, but three died as babies. The marriage doesn't sound like a happy one. On 20 May 1898 Foster was fined for using indecent language at his wife in public, and they seem to have lived apart for the next few months. Her sixth child, Catherine, was born on 7 September 1898.
Her death in October 1898
Here the stories split. The Kate Kelly article says that on 5 October 1898 she visited a neighbour, asked her to write a message for her and to look after the children, and was reported missing the next day. Her body was found eight days later in a lagoon on Condobolin Road near Forbes. The doctor couldn't tell the cause of death or find marks of violence after so long in the water, and the magistrate found she had drowned. The article says there's some evidence she had postnatal depression and had started drinking during the day.
The Forbes article tells it more kindly. It says she drowned in Lake Forbes while saving an Aboriginal child during a flood in 1898, and was found in a lagoon of the Lachlan just outside town. I've put both versions in the section on where the sources disagree further down.
Either way, she was buried in Forbes Cemetery as Kate Foster. Her baby daughter died a few weeks later, and her mother Ellen and brother Jim brought up the other children. A former employer paid for her headstone around 1910. There's also a revolver that was found in a wall cavity of her old Forbes house and sold at auction on 13 November 2007 for $72,870. It was said to be the one taken off Constable Fitzpatrick at the Kelly house in 1878, though firearms collectors have since questioned that.
The Lachlan River and Its Floods
The Lachlan is a strange river. It rises east of Gunning, near Goulburn, and wanders about 1,440 kilometres north-west, west and south-west through Cowra, Forbes, Condobolin and Hillston before petering out in the Great Cumbung swamp. The Lachlan River article says it's the only river in New South Wales with big wetlands all along its length. Its flow is wildly up and down: it stopped altogether from April 1944 to April 1945, something the Murray and Murrumbidgee have never done since European settlement.
Forbes sits right on it, 245 metres above sea level, and the town floods. The Forbes article says that since 1887 there's been a major flood about once every seven years. Its list of the big ones, by peak height, runs like this:
- June 1952: 10.8 metres
- September 2016: 10.67 metres
- August 1990: 10.65 metres
- October 1955: 10.62 metres
- March 2012: 10.55 metres
- August 1998: 10.35 metres
In 2016 the upper Lachlan had a very wet autumn and winter, and Wyangala Dam went from 38 per cent to 90 per cent full. Water NSW started releasing up to 10,000 megalitres a day in late August. The river peaked at Forbes at 10.67 metres in late September, about 1,000 people were evacuated, and the Newell Highway was cut north and south of town. Forbes was declared a natural disaster zone, and the SES and the Defence Force were called in.
Then November 2021. The European Space Agency's write-up attached to a Copernicus satellite photo, taken on 18 November 2021, says the water reached 10.52 metres, more than 1,500 people had to be evacuated, businesses shut, and farmers likely lost what was shaping up as a very strong harvest. The Forbes article also lists 2022 as a flood year.
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The Railway
The railway came up from Parkes and opened at Forbes on 18 December 1893. The line was pushed on south to Stockinbingal in 1918, making what's now the Stockinbingal–Parkes line, sometimes just called the Forbes line. These days it's an important freight route, because goods trains to and from the west can use it and skip the steep Blue Mountains grades.
Passenger trains are long gone, though the sources don't agree on exactly when they finished. I've sorted that out under where the sources disagree. The station building was the Forbes Railway Visitor Information Centre from about 1990 to 2023. It's a Type 4 brick roadside station from 1893, with a brick and concrete-faced platform, and it went on the State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999. The listing calls it one of the best surviving standard roadside stations and notes that its garden won a lot of railway garden competitions. In 2026 the Inland Rail project trimmed the station awning and moved the track so 6.5-metre-high double-stacked freight trains can get through.
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Heritage Buildings
Forbes Post Office
The post office at 118 Lachlan Street is the grand old building in town. It was designed in the Colonial Architect's Office under James Barnet and built between 1879 and 1881 by P. M. Vaughan. The first official Post and Telegraph Office opened on the same site in October 1863. By 1877 the town had outgrown it.
There was a long row over the clock tower. With the tower in, the cost went up to £4,500, and the Postmaster-General's people said that if the town wanted one added later, the council would have to pay for it. In the end the tower went up with the main building, and staff moved in on 8 September 1881. The telephone exchange opened in 1900, a new automatic exchange in 1962, and the clock was electrified in November 1982 so nobody had to wind it any more. That same year it was the New South Wales post office picked for a stamp series showing one post office from each state. It's on both the State Heritage Register (22 December 2000) and the Commonwealth Heritage List (22 June 2004).
Town Hall, court house and the government buildings
Around the post office there's a whole group of old civic buildings: the Town Hall, the Court House, the old Police Quarters and lock-up, the timber Lands Office and the Literary Institute. A photo note on Commons dates the timber Federation-style Lands Office to 1898.
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Victoria Park and the memorials
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The museum and the church
Forbes Today
Forbes is the centre of a big cropping district, mostly wheat and similar grains. The census population depends on which line of the Forbes article you read (more on that below). It sits where the Newell Highway, the Lachlan Valley Way and the Henry Lawson Way meet. The Forbes Camel Races have been run every Good Friday at the racecourse since 2001. The town has the Forbes Advocate and the free weekly Forbes Phoenix, a TAFE campus, Forbes High, and the Catholic secondary school, Red Bend Catholic College, out on the river.
A fair few well-known people came out of Forbes. Among them are Eve Langley, born there in 1904, the tobacco man and newspaper owner Sir Hugh Denison, born there in 1865, the cricketer Cec Pepper, former Deputy Premier Carmel Tebbutt, the singer Celia Pavey (Vera Blue), born in 1994, and the ultramarathon runner Nedd Brockmann.
Timeline
- Before 1815 – Wiradjuri country, along the river they called Kalari (or Kalare, Galari or Galiyarr).
- 1815 – George William Evans reaches the river and names it after Governor Lachlan Macquarie.
- 1817 – John Oxley passes the site of Forbes and names it Camp Hill.
- 1834 – The first settlers move into the district.
- 9 May 1837 – Ben Hall is born, at Maitland according to most accounts.
- June 1861 – Gold is found by "German Harry" Stephan at what becomes the Black Ridge field.
- 1 December 1861 – A post office opens to serve the diggings.
- 17 April 1862 – Hayward Atkyns is appointed the first official postmaster.
- 15 June 1862 – The gold escort is robbed at Eugowra Rocks.
- 27 October 1862 – The Forbes Telegraph Office opens.
- 12 July 1863 – Kate Kelly is born at Beveridge, Victoria.
- October 1863 – The first Post and Telegraph Office opens. The £4,000 reward notice for Gilbert, O'Meally, Hall and Vane is issued on 26 October.
- 5 May 1865 – Ben Hall is shot dead by police near Billabong Creek.
- 7 May 1865 – Ben Hall is buried in Forbes Cemetery.
- 1 January 1870 – The post and telegraph offices are merged.
- 8 September 1881 – The new Post Office, with its clock tower, is occupied.
- 1887 – The start of the flood record: a major flood roughly every seven years since.
- 25 November 1888 – Kate Kelly marries William Foster and settles in Forbes.
- 18 December 1893 – The railway opens from Parkes.
- October 1898 – Kate Kelly (Foster) dies and is buried in Forbes Cemetery.
- 1918 – The line is extended to Stockinbingal.
- 1926 – Marist education begins in Forbes in Johnson Street.
- 1952 – The biggest recorded flood, at 10.8 metres.
- 1957 – Ben Hall's death site is marked, and his present headstone goes up.
- 1974 and 1983 – Passenger trains end, first south to Stockinbingal and then north to Parkes.
- 2 April 1999 – Forbes railway station goes on the State Heritage Register.
- 10 February 2009 – The Albion Hotel burns down.
- 8 October 2010 – The Ben Hall Sites are listed on the State Heritage Register.
- September 2016 – The Lachlan peaks at 10.67 metres, and about 1,000 people are evacuated.
- November 2021 – The flood reaches 10.52 metres, and more than 1,500 people are evacuated.
- 2026 – Inland Rail works at the station, and 100 years of Marist education in Forbes.
Where the Sources Disagree
- Where the name came from. The Forbes article on Wikipedia says the town was "probably" named after Sir Francis Forbes, first Chief Justice of New South Wales, and the old railway station names list says the same. The same Forbes article also says the name may have been a government mix-up, and was supposedly meant for the field now called Hill End.
- How many came for gold. Wikipedia's Forbes article says about 30,000 people came at first, dropping to about 3,500 by 1863. The Forbes Post Office heritage history says there were 1,500 miners when the mail service started in 1861, and upwards of 28,000 by 1862.
- The first post office. The Forbes article says the post office opened on 1 December 1861 under the name Black Ridge, though that name was changed before it opened. The Post Office history says the 1861 mail service ran out of J. H. Burchart's rented premises, and that the first official postmaster wasn't appointed until 17 April 1862.
- The Eugowra haul. Wikipedia's Forbes article puts it at 77 kilograms of gold and £3,700. The Ben Hall article says 2,700 ounces of gold and banknotes worth more than £14,000 in all. The Escort Rock photo description on Commons says gold dust and notes to the value of about £14,000.
- Where Hall was shot. The Ben Hall article says Goobang Creek. The State Heritage Register story (Ben Hall's Death Site) says Billabong Creek, on the old Blowclear run, now Nelungaloo Station. The Forbes article puts it about 20 kilometres north-west of town, and the heritage listing says about 19 kilometres.
- Hall's age and birthplace. The headstone says he was 27. The Grave of Ben Hall article notes that some people say he was 28, while the Australian Dictionary of Biography's date of 9 May 1837 makes him 27. The Ben Hall article gives Maitland as his birthplace, but mentions an 1865 newspaper report, possibly wrong, that named Breeza Station.
- How Kate Kelly died. Wikipedia's Forbes article says she drowned in Lake Forbes saving an Aboriginal child during a flood in 1898. Wikipedia's Kate Kelly article doesn't mention a rescue. It says she went missing on 6 October 1898 and was found eight days later in a lagoon on Condobolin Road, that the doctor couldn't tell the cause of death, and that there's some evidence of postnatal depression and drinking.
- When the passenger trains stopped. The Forbes railway station article says the last passenger service ran on 15 October 1974 and the station formally closed in 1990. Wikipedia's Forbes article says passenger trains ran until 1983. The Stockinbingal–Parkes line article explains the gap: services south to Stockinbingal stopped in October 1974, while Parkes to Forbes kept a mail train and a rail motor until 1983.
- Population. The same Wikipedia Forbes article gives the 2021 census figure as 6,319 in its opening paragraph and as 9,319 in its demographics section.
My Earlier Posts
- Hangings at Darlinghurst Gaol – The Executions and Famous Prisoners (including the Eugowra robbery and the Collector shooting)
- Names Of Railway Stations In New South Wales – Including Aboriginal Names & Meanings (Forbes is in there)
- History Of Dubbo – New South Wales (more on Oxley's inland expeditions)
Sources
- Wikipedia, Forbes, New South Wales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes,_New_South_Wales
- Wikipedia, Ben Hall (bushranger): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hall_(bushranger)
- Wikipedia, Ben Hall's Death Site (based on the NSW State Heritage Register listing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hall%27s_Death_Site
- Wikipedia, Grave of Ben Hall (based on the NSW State Heritage Register listing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_of_Ben_Hall
- Wikipedia, Kate Kelly (outlaw): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Kelly_(outlaw)
- Wikipedia, Forbes Post Office (based on the NSW State Heritage Register listing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_Post_Office
- Wikipedia, Forbes railway station (based on the NSW State Heritage Register listing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_railway_station
- Wikipedia, Stockinbingal–Parkes railway line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockinbingal%E2%80%93Parkes_railway_line
- Wikipedia, Lachlan River: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lachlan_River
- Wikipedia, Wiradjuri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiradjuri
- Wikimedia Commons file descriptions for Escort Rock, the 1863 reward notice (National Museum of Australia), the 2021 Copernicus flood image and the Forbes Lands Office, as linked under each picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Forbes,_New_South_Wales
- Forbes Phoenix, 100 Years Of Marist Education In Forbes (2026): https://www.forbesphoenix.com.au/100-years-of-marist-education-in-forbes/
- My Australian History Journey, Hangings at Darlinghurst Gaol: https://myozhistoryjourney.blogspot.com/2026/10/hangings-at-darlinghurst-gaol.html
- My Australian History Journey, Names Of Railway Stations In New South Wales: https://myozhistoryjourney.blogspot.com/2026/09/aborignal-names-of-places-in-nsw.html