[3] An attraction of note is the Gulgong Pioneer Museum, which has a huge collection of thematically-displayed exhibits, ranging from kitchen utensils to complete buildings that have been relocated to a "street" on the site.

Apart from tourism and hospitality, local industries include wine production, wool, wheat growing and coal mining.

The fronts of the shops were covered with large advertisements, the names and praises of traders as is customary now with all new-fangled marts, but the place looked more like a fair than a town ... Everything needful, however, seemed to be at hand.

There was a photographer, and there was a theatre, at which I saw the "Colleen Bawn" acted with a great deal of spirit, and a considerable amount of histrionic talent.

[8] Novelist and bush poet Henry Lawson lived briefly in Gulgong as a child in the early 1870s, while his father sought instant wealth as a miner.

A montage of goldrush-era Gulgong street scenes was used as a backdrop to the portrait of Lawson on the first Australian ten dollar note (which was in use from 1966 until replaced by a polymer banknote in November 1993).

Gulgong is believed to be one of the primary locations in Thomas Alexander Browne's The Miner's Right which he wrote under the pseudonym Rolf Boldrewood[10] .

A nearby area on the state register is known as the Talbragar fossil site, containing sometimes excellently preserved specimens of plants, fishes, invertebrates and a previously unknown spider.

[13] In addition, a site known as McGraths Flat about 25 miles northwest of Gulgong contains a recently discovered cache of Miocene era fossils.