The Nyngan Museum Support Group has shaken up the history books as we know it, ringing in 140 years of the Nyngan railway and township with a recipe book that takes you right back to the very beginning, when it was pig’s head soup being put on the dinner table. 

This year the museum is marking 140 years since the opening of the Nyngan Railway Station, a technology that allowed it to grow from a settlement into a township. 

Nyngan Museum Coordinator Leonie Montgomery said the recipe book ‘Dining through the Decades: 1883 to 2023’, while maybe not always appetising, has been an exciting way to explore the history of Nyngan.

“Each decade has something new coming…it follows when TV dinners started, then microwaves and of course Thermomixes,” Ms Montgomery said. 

While an 1880s family sat down to a dinner of German soup, pea pudding and roast wallaby, plates quickly changed to include things made in air fryers and Caramilk danishes. 

“It’s 144 pages and it’s a magnificent tribute to 100 years of Nyngan life,” Ms Montgomery said. 

Utilising all that the museum has archived through the years, photos depicting what a typical ‘smoko’ looked like date all the way back to 1890. 

The railway station - now a museum - stopped taking passengers west from 1974, and continued to remain open for parcels.

In the 1990s, the Bourke floods washed away the railway line, which was never restored. During the crisis the Nyngan Railway Station played a key role as an evacuation point.

Today, while trains continue to come through Nyngan for crops and coal, the passenger coach service still uses the Nyngan Railway Station as their bus stop. 

140 years on, the railway station serves as one of the oldest reminders of the town’s history. 

“We do have a couple of houses that are still going from that era, but most of those types of things burned down and have been rebuilt again,” Ms Montgomery said. 

“The museum has a wonderful collection of things relating right back from the beginning of Nyngan town that people have cherished and looked after and now donated here, so it’s a real journey through time coming into our museum as well.”