Bargo is a small town of the Macarthur Region, New South Wales, Australia, in the Wollondilly Shire.
Bargo is a small town of the Macarthur Region, New South Wales, Australia, in the Wollondilly Shire. It is approximately 100 km south west of Sydney.
It is situated between the township of Tahmoor (north) and the village of Yanderra (south), and accessible via the Hume Highway that links Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. It was previously known as West Bargo and Cobargo.
History
The name Bargo may be derived from the local Aboriginal language name Barago, meaning cripple, thick scrub, or brushwood.The earliest reference to Barago was noted as by George Caley in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks on 25 September 1807. The aborigines called the Bargo area Narregarang, meaning that the soil was not firm - a shaky place. Early explorers and convicts found getting through the Bargo area a difficult experience due to the thick scrub, explorers dubbing the tricky bush the Bargo Brush. In early Colonial times, 'Bargo Brush' became notorious among travelers for harboring 'bolters', convicts who had escaped from captivity and become bushrangers.Bayley quotes William Riley, who passed through Bargo Brush on horseback in 1830:
"... a miserable, barren scrub, thickly wooded for eight miles; there having been so much rain lately this abominable part of the road was a continuation of bogs for eight miles." Soon the Brush, with its thickets for hideouts, became the lurking place for robbers and caused travel to become fraught with peril. The Sydney Gazette of 17 March 1832 reported the road as ". . . one uninterrupted morass"!
J. H. Heaton, under the heading 'Crimes and Criminals, Remarkable' lists "Desperate conflict between four police and eleven prisoners at Bargo Brush, N.S.W. Constable Raymond shot dead by a prisoner named James Crookwell, 15 April 1866."Bargo is noted as being where the first recorded sightings of the lyrebird, koala and wombat took place by European settlers. Bargo is also the site of an infamous massacre in 1816, when settlers forced local Aborigines to walk off a big cliff and shot them if they refused. Bargo Police Station, now abandoned, is currently used as a doctors' surgery. The lock-ups remain behind the building. The patrol area of the Bargo Police Station included Pheasants Nest, Bargo, parts of Tahmoor and Yanderra.
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