Tingha, New South Wales

Tingha is a small town on the Northern Tablelands, New South Wales, Australia in Armidale Regional Council. It is south of Inverell and north-north-east of Sydney. Tingha is an Aboriginal word for "flat or level".HistoryBefore non indigenous settlement the area now known as Tingha was mainly lived upon by people from the Nucoorilma group, which is an associated group of the Murri Aboriginal people. Many of their descendants still live in the surrounding area.Tingha was first settled in 1841 by Sydney Hudson Darby and became a mining town after tin was discovered there in the 1870s. Within a year Australia’s first commercial tin mines were operating at a private settlement known as Armidale Crossing. Over 6,000 people arrived and more than 25% of the miners were Chinese. The Wing Hing Long Museum is a reminder of that heritage. Armidale Crossing Post Office opened on 1 September 1872 and was renamed Tingha the next month.The village was proclaimed a town in 1885. Initially there were enough readily accessible surface deposits to make a good living without using machinery as Chinese people did. The first school was established by the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1890. In the 1890s drought came to the district and the easily obtained deposits of tin were exhausted leading to a loss in population.By the early 1900s the mining boom was over and Tingha's population had dwindled to just a few hundred people. Shortly after this, large companies moved into the area to mine the less accessible tin.