There are at least eight ways to coin 175 years and the easiest to pronounce is Dodrabicentennial.
2024 is the City of Dubbo’s Dodrabicentennial.
In 1849, 175 years ago, Dubbo Village was granted a ‘site’ by the Colonial Secretary of the day, Scotsman E. Deas Thomson.
Portrait of Edward Deas Thomson, Colonial Secretary, by William Nicholas, 1847-1848, from Baker, W. (1847). Heads of the People: An Illustrated Journal of Literature, Whims, and Oddities, State Library of New South Wales, Q059
On 21 November Thomson gave notice that a site had been fixed upon for the establishment of the village of Dubbo. The notice would appear two days later in the NSW Government Gazette on 23 November advising that plans for the village could be seen at the Office of the Surveyor General in Sydney or at the Police Office [sic] in Dubbo, on the Macquarie River.
Today, the city commemorates Dubbo’s gazettal each year on 23 November, known as Dubbo Day.
The plan and approval however came much earlier in the year, as the original plans drawn up by Captain George Boyle White suggest.
It says the plan was laid before the executive council on 2 July 1849 and again on 28 August 1849.
Approval was conveyed by the Colonial Secretary in a letter on 20 September 1849, which appeared in the Government Gazette two months later.
Before officiating a Dubbo village, a Dubbo police lock up already existed, and pasturage licences had been issued three years earlier, giving permission to folk like British gentleman R.V. Dulhunty to run his stock Beyond the Limits of Location, the name given to a space outside the New South Wales 19 counties, beyond the very edge of British colonial rule.
A Frenchman set out to change that.
Credit: Archives Collections, Museums of History NSW, Western Sydney Records Centre
King of Dubbo 