Young Bradman

7 Bowral notches cut with a tomahawk.’ The blacks, by then, were already living off the newcomers’ charity. Whatever had become of the blacks between then and Bradman’s time, they were not around any more. The main railway line from Sydney to Goulburn, and eventually to Melbourne, went through the Mittagong Gap, west of the hilltop named Gibraltar between Mittagong and Bowral. The highway of Bradman’s day - and the motorway since - follow the railway. The older ‘Great South Road’ passed to the east of Gibraltar and Bowral. Without the railways, Bradman might have become the man he did, but Bowral would not have been there; he might have been the boy from Glenquarry, or Bong Bong. As soon as trains came as far south as Bowral in the summer of 1867/68, land was for sale, and even before Bowral’s station opened, in 1868 the Sydney Morning Herald was advertising lodging at Bong Bong as a ‘change of air’. Another auction in 1869 in Bowral advertised ten acre suburban lots ‘for the accommodation of city gentlemen and others desirous of securing rural sites over 2000 feet above the level of the sea, where A PERFECT CHANGE OF AIR and A COOL BRACING TEMPERATURE can be enjoyed’. By the 1930s, Bradman was describing Bowral as ‘a nice little town of about 3000 people’. The first settlers landed in Sydney because of the harbour, and spread over the miles of plains. To the west were the Blue Mountains; to go south, you either had to follow the coast, or thread your way through hills to 1886 map of Bowral. Only the main streets east of the railway line were laid out; Bradman’s childhood home by the ‘Mittagong Rivulet’ did not yet exist.