Cowra

About Cowra

Cowra is a town on the banks of the Lachlan River in the Central West of New South Wales, at the intersection of the Mid-Western Highway, Olympic Highway and Lachlan Valley Way, about 310 km west of Sydney. The district was explored by George William Evans in 1815, and the town was proclaimed a village in 1849. Cowra is known for the World War II prisoner-of-war camp, the site of a 1944 breakout in which 231 Japanese prisoners died, and for the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery and the Japanese Garden, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. Vineyards have grown in the district since the 1970s.