The notebook and observations provide a rare glimpse into an almost unrecognisable life carried out among familiar landmarks.

Robert Lasscock said with the upcoming centenary he thought it would be interesting to share the notebook of his grandfather Charles Theodore Lasscock, of Farm 75 Griffith, who came to the area in 1913 and spent the rest of his life here as a valuer-general.

Mr Lasscosk’s notes explain that it was a Mr Gibson of Hay who applied to NSW Parliament in 1903 to authorise that he establish a system of irrigation and water supply to cover land between the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan Rivers and construct a dam on the Murrumbidgee near Barren Hack mountain. “Government investigated and decided the scheme too vast for private enterprise and decided to carry out work themselves,” Mr Lasscock wrote.

“In 1913/14 there was a dance in the grain store, in aid of funds to move the Anglican church to Hanwood from near Binya. In 1913 there was a big bushfire from the Lachlan to Scenic Hill.”

According to Mr Lasscock a flu epidemic hit the area and Hanwood Hall was used as a hospital where two people died. The first building in the new town, an accommodation house, was built in 1916 and Taylor Bros was the first business premises.

Also included in Mr Lasscock’s things was a typed history of ‘Bagtown and the new town’ from 1913 – 1923.

“The first white man to trespass onto the land was John Oxley, Surveyor-General of NSW who came as far south as Mount Binya in June 1817. His pessimistic attitude towards the area as “uninhabitable and useless to civilised man’ proved so wrong,” it reads.

“Charles Sturt also passed through the area in 1829 and he too was unimpressed – ‘the plains are open to the horizon, but here and there are stunted gum trees or a gloomy cypress seems placed by nature as mourners over the surrounding desolation’.

“But this was not the attitude of those potential farmers who migrated to the area in 1913 following a vigorous advertising campaign by the NSW government. They came from as far afield as Sydney, Broken Hill and San Francisco. The village was given the irreverent name of ‘Bagtown’ due to the propensity for using the old cement bags from the canal construction as the main source of building material. These bags were used in every possible way for every sort of dwelling.

According to the notes Walter Burley Griffin had designed Griffith for a population on 30,000 as a seat of administration and education for an important section of the state.  “It was not until late 1919 – early 1920 that shops were allowed to be built on Griffith sites,” The history reads. “Some businessmen were reluctant to leave ‘the old town’ as they felt the ‘new town’ had little future.”