Escort Rock is the site of Australia’s biggest and most famous gold robbery when Frank Gardiner’s gang held up the gold escort coach, travelling from the Lachlan goldfields at Forbes to Orange on 15 June 1862.

The site sits in the lee of Nangar National Park which today protects the escarpment caves and valleys where the bushrangers would have sheltered when planning their attacks.

Escort Rock is located 4.5km north east of Eugowra (towards Orange) on the Escort Way. It is an eerily quiet spot with the imposing rocky outcrops giving visitors a good idea of why it might have been chosen as the robbery site. A deep gully (today under the existing road) meant the gold coach needed to divert close to the rocks, thus providing plenty of cover for the bushrangers.

The site has extensive interpretive signage and an historic plaque (the rock itself is on private property but easily visible from the viewing area). A parking area, picnic tables and toilets are nearby. The adjacent town of Eugowra has a museum and street murals which form an integral part of the overall Escort Rock experience.

Below: Stage coach holdup, Eugowra Rocks. Patrick Marony, 1894. Reproduced courtesy National Library of Australia. nla.pic-an2292684.

The coach carried a driver, the police escort of four and a large amount of gold, cash and other mail. Frank Gardiner’s gang of bushrangers – Ben Hall among them – lay in wait behind large granite boulders after they had blocked the road with commandeered bullock wagons. This forced the coach to slow, as it passed between a gully and the rocky outcrop.

The gang fired on the coach as it passed, wounding two of the police. The bushrangers ransacked the coach and made off with 2,719 ounces of gold and £3,700 in cash (a haul worth more than $5m in today’s values).

So just what is so special about the Eugowra Rocks escort robbery?

Didn’t this kind of thing happen all the time in the early 1860s when the likes of Frank Gardiner, Ben Hall and Johnny Gilbert were in full flight?

Below: Street murals and historical museum, Eugowra.

Well not so much actually, and definitely not on this scale. Certainly highway robbery was an everyday ocurrence – always had been even before the discovery of gold thanks often to the number of experienced criminals originally brought out as convicts and later released on ‘tickets of leave’.

Even then however, the gold escort had always been considered out of reach – a safe haven that no one would dare to attack. This had given the escorts a prestige that no one before Frank Gardiner had cared to challenge.

Prior to the attack, Gardiner was firmly established as a well known highway identity whose cavalier approach challenged the very validity of the then newly established NSW Police Service.

This brazen attack just months after the new department’s formation was as much a terrorist act as it was a grab for gold. It ushered in the begining of a traumatic three years for the region as even when Gardiner opted for temporary retirement in Queensland the following year, his proteges – Gilbert, O’Meally and Hall – took up where he left off in a campaign that seriously challenged the very validity of government authority across the goldfields.