Black Springs, New South Wales is a village on the

Great Dividing Range The Great Dividing Range, also known as the East Australian Cordillera or the Eastern Highlands, is a cordillera system in eastern Australia consisting of an expansive collection of mountain ranges, plateaus and rolling hills, that runs rough ...

at an elevation of and situated 138 km west of

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

as the crow flies. It is located at 33 51.0493 °S, 149 44.41956 °E The

post Code A postal code (also known locally in various English-speaking countries throughout the world as a postcode, post code, PIN or ZIP Code) is a series of letters or digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, included in a postal a ...

of the village is 2787. It is famous for its fossicking. It is midway between

Taralga, New South Wales Taralga is the traditional land of the Gundungurra people. Today it is a small village in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, in Upper Lachlan Shire. It is located at the intersection of the Goulburn-Oberon Road and the Lagga ...

and Oberon, New South Wales. Black Springs, 24 kilometres from Oberon on the Abercrombie Road, is a tidy village with good facilities. The tennis courts, recreation ground and community hall are located opposite the Forestry Reserve camping area, which has toilets and fireplaces. The historic stone Avoca Catholic Church and Shrine is in a lovely setting south of the village. There is also an historic cemetery. Fossicking is popular at Sapphire Bend, off Riverview Road in Vulcan State Forest.

Facilities

The village retains a

public school Public school may refer to: * State school (known as a public school in many countries), a no-fee school, publicly funded and operated by the government * Public school (United Kingdom), certain elite fee-charging independent schools in England an ...

, established in 1881, and

Catholic Church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

but in 2018 the town's

Anglican Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of th ...

church Church may refer to: Religion * Church (building), a building for Christian religious activities * Church (congregation), a local congregation of a Christian denomination * Church service, a formalized period of Christian communal worship * Chris ...

was controversially sold to pay compensation to victims of historic child sexual abuse within the diocese.

History

The original inhabitants of the land around Black Spring river were Australian Aborigines of the Wiradjuri or

Gundungara The Gundungurra people, also spelt Gundungara, Gandangarra, Gandangara and other variations, are an Aboriginal Australian people in south-eastern New South Wales, Australia. Their traditional lands include present day Goulburn, Wollondilly Shire ...

clans. Explorer Charles Throsby reached Black Springs on 25 April 1819.

Lachlan Macquarie Major-general (United Kingdom), Major General Lachlan Macquarie, Companion of the Order of the Bath, CB (; gd, Lachann MacGuaire; 31 January 1762 – 1 July 1824) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator from Scotland. Macquarie se ...

visited the Cookbundoon Range in October 1820 and the first settlement in the area was in 1826.

United Irishmen The Society of United Irishmen was a sworn association in the Kingdom of Ireland formed in the wake of the French Revolution to secure "an equal representation of all the people" in a national government. Despairing of constitutional reform, ...

James Meehan, Edward Redmond and Philip Hogan were the first settlers at Black Spring. The cemetery has the graves of many pioneers of the area including Patrick Hanrahan, a member of Cox's road gang of 1814 and a pioneer of Black Springs, John Foley a

Bushranger Bushrangers were originally escaped convicts in the early years of the British settlement of Australia who used the bush as a refuge to hide from the authorities. By the 1820s, the term had evolved to refer to those who took up "robbery under ...

and Thomas Kessey a convict and pioneer of the area. Mary Hogan, née McMahon, often regarded as the matriarch of the original Black Springs community. Bushranger and ex-convict Edward Lanigan was also active in the area. The road to Black Springs history becomes a lot more accessible
26 October 2017 .

Population

In the 2016 Census, there were 225 people in Black Springs. 77.7% of people were born in Australia and 85.8% of people only spoke English at home.

Climate

On account of its high elevation and windward position about the ranges, Black Springs features a cool

oceanic climate An oceanic climate, also known as a marine climate, is the humid temperate climate sub-type in Köppen classification ''Cfb'', typical of west coasts in higher middle latitudes of continents, generally featuring cool summers and mild winters ( ...

(''Cfb'') with mild, stormy summers and cold, wet winters with moderate to heavy

snowfall Snow comprises individual ice crystals that grow while suspended in the atmosphere—usually within clouds—and then fall, accumulating on the ground where they undergo further changes. It consists of frozen crystalline water throughout ...

from June to September; seldom in other months.

References

{{reflist Localities in New South Wales Oberon Council