Tarcutta

Tarcutta is a town in south-western New South Wales, Australia.

Tarcutta is a town in south-western New South Wales, Australia. The town is 438 kilometres (272 mi) south-west of Sydney, 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) east of the Hume Highway, It was proclaimed as a village on 28 October 1890. As of 2016, the town had a population of 446.It serves a local farming community relying for its prosperity mainly on sheep and cattle, and the interstate truckies who use the town as a halfway change-over point in the trade between the state capital cities of Sydney and Melbourne.

The Tarcutta area was first visited by the European explorers Hume and Hovell as they passed through on their way from Sydney to Port Phillip in the Colony of Victoria. On 7 January 1825, near the present site of Tarcutta, they met a group of Wiradjuri aborigines.

A decade after this first European contact around 1835-37, "Hambledon", a U-shaped slab house was built at Tarcutta. It was the first inn and post office to be built between Gundagai and Albury. Tarcutta Post Office opened on 1 January 1849.Among the earliest settlers was Thomas Hodges Mate. Mate was Tarcutta's earliest innkeeper, as well as its first post-master. Mate's daughter Annie claimed that 'tarcutta' was a Wiradjuri word meaning 'a food prepared by grinding grass seed'. Gold was mined in the area round Tarcutta, with limited success.By the 1880s Tarcutta locals were actively lobbying for a rail branch line from Wagga Wagga to Tumbarumba via Tarcutta, and in 1917 the Tumbarumba branch line became a reality. A section of the line sustained major flood damage in 1974, and the remainder of the line was closed in 1987.

The Tarcutta bypass is west of the village, linking-up to the freeway 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) to the north of the village and 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) south of the village. It was opened to traffic on 15 November 2011.