Towns in Australia

Exploring Australia, town by town

Cuballing WA

Cuballing

Postcode: 6311

Cuballing is a town located in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, on Great Southern Highway, between Pingelly and Narrogin.

The name is of Aboriginal origin and was first recorded in a lease application in 1868 relating to a pool near the town, and was previously spelt “Cubballing” or “Cooballing”. The townsite was gazetted in 1899 and was one of the original stations on the Great Southern Railway. By 1903, a school and district hall had been appointed and the town had its own Road Board (later to become the Shire Council in 1961), and by 1906, two butcher shops, two banks, a hall, a post office, a coffee house, two blacksmiths, two churches, a boarding house and a hotel served the town’s population. Many of these buildings have been preserved and can still be seen today.

However, the town did not grow after the 1920s, presumably due to the size and economic opportunity in nearby Narrogin, and in 1946 the primary school closed, meaning pupils had to travel to neighbouring towns.

The hotel, the old bank (now closed), the Agricultural Hall (which seems no longer to be used), the Cuballing Roads Board Office (now the town’s CWA Rooms) are all held in time as though nothing has happened in sixty years. The effect is that visiting Cuballing is like visiting a town in the 1920s or 1930s. The explanation for this strange phenomenon is that in the 1880s there was a rumour that Cuballing was going to become the main junction town where the railway lines from the north and the east met. It was a good theory and speculators and investors moved into the town but, unfortunately for Cuballing, the growth occurred in a town14 km away. The town which was chosen as the junction was Narrogin (it had a better water supply) and by 1920 Cuballing was dying and Narrogin was surging ahead.

In recent times things have begun to change as people, looking for a country lifestyle, have been able to pick up parcels of land at very reasonable costs in the district.