Tamworth is a city in the
New England region of
New South Wales, Australia. Straddling the
Peel River, Tamworth with an urban population of 42,501 people is the major regional centre for southern New England and in the local government area of
Tamworth Regional Council. The city provides services for an area population of 55,063.
[2] The city is located midway between
Brisbane and
Sydney the two largest cities on the Australian east coast.
Tamworth is nationally famous as the "Country Music Capital of Australia", annually hosting the Tamworth Country Music Festival in late January; the second biggest country music festival in the world. The city is recognised as the "National Equine Capital of Australia"[3] because of the high volume of equine events held in the city and the construction of the world class Australian Equine and Livestock Events Centre, the biggest of its kind in the southern hemisphere. The city additionally is known as the "First City of Lights", being the first place in the Southern Hemisphere to utilise electric street lights.[4][5]
The Kamilaroi people, from whose language comes the word "budgerigar", inhabited the area before European contact. John Oxley passed through the Peel Valley in 1818 and described it as "it would be impossible to find a finer or more luxuriant country than its waters...No place in this world can afford more advantages to the industrious settler than this extensive vale".[6] In 1831, the first sheep stations and cattle stations were formed, and in the same year the Australian Agricultural Company (AAC) was granted a lease of 127,000 hectares of land at Goonoo Goonoo, south of the present location of Tamworth, extending to present-day Calala.[7]
In the 1830s a company town began to develop on the Peel's southwest bank, the present site of West Tamworth. In 1850 A public town was gazetted on the opposite side of the river from the existing settlement. This town became the main town, called Tamworth after Tamworth, Staffordshire, represented at the time in parliament by Robert Peel. The town prospered, and was reached by the railway in 1878.[6]
