This week, with school holidays upon us, many Sydneysiders are heading away from the hustle and bustle of our beautiful city. Australia has many beautiful towns and villages which become popular holiday destinations as Spring approaches. Some, like those in the Southern Highlands are particularly attractive due to their spectacular spring flower display. Mittagong is just one of these towns.

Mittagong is a town with an intriguing history, dating right back to the early 1800s. The first formal European settlement began in 1821 with a large grant made to William Chalker, but most of the earliest buildings in the area were not residences or even farms. Mittagong was, even from the very beginning, the gateway to the south, with some of the only natural routes over a chain of mountains passing through the area. As a result, it was not long before various inns sprang up in the area to serve travellers who were heading south. The town itself was much slower to develop, only really beginning to form after the coming of the railway to the area in 1867.

Before the coming of the railway, the Mittagong area was more a series of private villages than cohesive settlement, and only one of these villages, New Sheffield, was of any real size. New Sheffield was the village belonging to the Fitzroy Iron Works, the first iron works in Australia, and the workers not just at the iron works itself, but at the mines associated with the works lived in the private village. With the coming of the railway though, more people began to come to the area and in the 1880s the area began to be subdivided. In 1889 the municipality of Mittagong was formally created, and the earlier villages were mainly absorbed into the newly created town.