Brewarrina is an outback town situated at the point where the Barwon River becomes the Darling, located 810 km from Sydney and 98 km from Bourke, Brewarrina is 119 meters above sea level. It has a town population of about 1500 people with a further 1500 living on properties around the town.

The first settlers arrived in the district around 1839-40, with the first land owners being the Lawson brothers. In 1859 a riverboat called Gemini skippered by William Randell reached the town. This opened up the possibility of the town developing as a port and by the early 1860s it was recognized as the head of navigation on the Darling River.

The town was formally surveyed and laid out in 1861 and proclaimed on 28 April 1863, the same year Brewarrina had its first newspaper.

In 1866 the Brewarrina Police station opened with one senior constable and one constable until 1904 when there was one sergeant and four constables.  One was a mounted constable who rode his horse to outposts to check if all was well and to hear any charges.   This same year the Gongolgon Police station opened.  This is a small town 28 miles south of Brewarrina and was the depot for Cobb & Co.

The 1870s were something of a boom time for the town. In 1873 the Mechanics Institute was formed. The following year two hotels, two stores and the Commercial Bank all opened and in 1875 a public school was established. All this development was largely due to Cobb & Co. who had a number of coach services passing through the town. There was a service from Byrock, one from Dubbo via Warren and, in 1874, a direct service from Brewarrina to Enngonia north of Bourke.

Brewarrina saw its largest recorded flood in 1890, there have been several floods since but with modern machinery to build levee banks the town is now fairly secure from floods.

In 1901 a railway branch line was opened to Brewarrina from Byrock, on the Nyngan to Bourke line. This closed in 1974.

Brewarrina is the first town in NSW to have two state heritage listings of Aboriginal significance…

The first, known as the Ngunnhu (noon-oo) to the local Ngemba people, are the Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps, which are estimated to be more than 40,000 years old, they lie on the bed of the Darling River just downstream from the weir. The traps consist of a series of stone weirs and ponds arranged to form a ‘net’. These fish traps are pieces of masterful ingenuity designed to trap fish and be sealed off so that the fishermen could catch and kill the fish at their leisure.

In 1901 R. H. Mathews wrote this description of the process:

'During the early spring months of the year, or at any time when there was a fresh in the river, the fish travelled upstream in immense numbers. The stone pens or traps had their open ends towards the direction from which the fish approached...as soon as a sufficient number of the finny tribe had entered the labyrinth of traps, the openings were closed by means of large stones which had been placed alongside ready for use...The natives next entered the pens and splashed the water with their hands or feet, thus frightening the fish into the smaller enclosures, where they were more easily caught.'

For the fishing enthusiasts, Bre ( as the locals call it) is a very popular area for huge Murray Cod, Yellow Belly, Brim and Catfish (and that’s not hard to believe considering the largest officially recorded Cod was caught in the Barwon River near Brewarrina and weighed in at 113kg). The pristine waters and abundance of fish present the angler with unrivalled opportunities at many easy accessible fishing spots along the river, including under the Old Barwon Bridge – famous as being one of only two surviving examples left of the first series of lift span bridges in NSW.

The Brewarrina Aboriginal Mission is also state heritage listed and was the first institution formally established by the Aboriginal Protection Board in 1886. This mission was part of the Aboriginal Protection Board’s policy to segregate Aboriginal people.

In 1882 a census listed 151 Aborigines and 24 half-castes at Brewarrina. In 1885 the Protection Board removed the Aborigines to a reserve 2 miles from town. In 1886 the Aborigines Protection Association established a mission on a reserve of 5,000 acres, 10 miles east of the town on the opposite bank of the Barwon River.

In the early days of the Mission, the structures were limited, containing a Managers House, School, Butchers Shop, Church, hall and a small treatment-room.

Mission schools had only to teach to a Grade three standard. The mission school never had proper teachers; classes were often taught by the clinic sister, the mission manager, mission manager’s wife, or even the bookkeeper.

The mission’s policy and the number of different languages groups within, meant that many people stopped using their language.

In 1936 the NSW Aborigines Protection Board demanded major amendments to the Aborigines Protection Act. These amendments gave the Board the power, for the first time, to confine Aboriginal people against their will. This mission is associated with the removal of many Aboriginal people from their ‘homes’ and the girls dormitory was no exception. It was used by the Aboriginal Protection Board to house young girls who were forcibly removed from their families at the age of 13 or 14 to be educated in domestic work, and then sent out in NSW to work.

The reserve was reduced from 4,638 acres to 638 acres in 1953 and In November 1965 11 small cottages, a hall, a school, a garage, a small treatment room, the manager’s house and office remained.

This mission was the biggest mission in Australia until it was closed in the late sixties and the last burial at the cemetery was in 1971.