ADVERTISING FEATURE
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
When you go hunting around online for the earliest information available about Bradfordville, you find newspaper articles from the second quarter of the 20th century about the wool mill.
Elsewhere you may come across a few slivers of detail about the railway siding that was built on the former Crookwell branch line to service that wool mill.
In the real world you can still observe evidence of that rail line’s existence, including the disused bridge that still brought trains over the Wollondilly River up until September 1985.
This info is significant to Bradfordville’s history, not just because the Goulburn region is well-known for its wool production, but because of what is revealed in this quote from a Heritage Study Review published in June 2017 (and is available from the council’s website):
“In 1923 the newly established Goulburn Woollen Mills… along Taralga Road in a suburb to be called Bradfordville.”
Note the future tense to that statement (from a 1920s perspective).
The area was being referred to by its own separate name, and people both lived and worked there, but its full development was still being thought of as something that was coming in the future.
As reported later in the same review, Bradfordville, and neighbouring Kenmore, were finally added to the municipality of Goulburn in 1951.
These days Bradfordville features many residential homes and all the other things you’d expect a thriving community to have: schools, a medical centre, many businesses providing all sorts of things and plenty more.
Keith Wood, owner/operator of Argyle Fire and First Aid Services (established nearly 13 years ago, and currently based in the industrial park), is a long-term local who remembers what the area used to be like. He has seen it develop dramatically over the years too.
“I’ve lived in Goulburn all my life” he says. He went to the local high school in the late ’60s, and left at 17 to start a fitter and machinist apprenticeship at the textile factory in the early ’70s (which itself closed down 15 years ago).
He also remembers that wool wasn’t the only reason for trains to stop at Bradfordville either.
At the end of the steam era “When I was at Supertex the coal used to come there, on the railway line. They used to offload the coal trucks there to run the boiler” he recalls.
As for how much the area has developed in the last few decades, he reminisced that “Going back years ago the best thing here was the servo”, which Keith and his mates saw as great at the time.
“All new houses went in out this way over the years”, along with a lot of new local businesses. “It’s been good” he concludes.
This advertising feature was sponsored by the following business:
Argyle Fire and First Aid Services
0418 214 563 or argylefire@bigpond.com
And