Our story

The shop

Stacks is family-run, and has been for long enough that most of Gulgong has a story about something they found down here. What began as a discount variety store under the IGA has grown into sixteendepartments across one very large floor — homewares and Manchester, kitchen and hardware, camping and cleaning, pets, toys, craft and gifts.

The buying is what makes it what it is. We take end-of-line lots, clearance runs and one-off parcels as they come up, which means the shelves genuinely change from week to week. Some of it is the ordinary business of keeping a town supplied. Some of it is the thing you had no idea you wanted until you turned the corner and there it was.

People call it a treasure trove, and we're not going to argue. It does mean that when something's gone, it's gone — so if you see it, that's the moment.

Needed from the owner. How long the family has been at it, who's behind the counter, and what was in the space before. That detail is what makes a small-town About page worth reading, and it's the one thing town history can't substitute for. See MASTER.md questions 8 and 9.

The Commercial Warehouse

We trade from the lower level of the Commercial Warehouse, a substantial brick building put up in the 1870s and since restored. It was built to do exactly what its name says — hold stock for a town that needed everything at once.

The IGA trades on the level above. We're below it, with our own frontage onto Herbert Street, which is where the name comes from.

There's a pleasing symmetry to it. A building raised to keep a gold-rush town supplied is still keeping the town supplied, just with mop heads and dog collars instead of picks and shovels.

Gulgong

In April 1870 a shepherd turned up gold on Red Hill, and within two years the paddock had become one of the richest alluvial goldfields in New South Wales. The money built the town properly: brick and stone shopfronts along Mayne and Herbert Streets, and in 1871 the Prince of Wales Opera House, still working today.

What makes Gulgong unusual is what happened next, which was very nearly nothing. The gold thinned, the crowd moved on, and the buildings simply stayed. That accident is why the main street still looks much as it did in the 1870s — and why it spent years on the old paper ten dollar note.

The town we trade in

A shop like this only works because the town uses it. We've put a car and a good many vouchers back over the counter to say thanks for that, and we'd rather keep doing it than run a sale.

Needed from the owner. The community side deserves more than a paragraph — the Picanto giveaway, the voucher draws, and whatever local sponsorship runs each year. Dates and details, and it becomes one of the strongest sections on the site.

Dates and details of Gulgong's gold rush should be checked against the Holtermann Museum or the local historical society before launch.