Central Victoria is classic Victoria: a rich pastoral district, chilly and green in winter and parched a brownish yellow in summer, with two grand provincial cities, Ballarat and Bendigo, whose fine buildings were funded by gold. Nowadays both are major tourist centres on the gold trail. The many surrounding country centres such as Marysborough and Castlemaine, once prosperous gold towns in their own right, now seem too lowly for their extravagant architecture.

There’s fairly good transport in this direction, with regular V/Line trains and buses to Bendigo, Ballarat and the other major centres, and local buses filling most gaps. If you’re driving, the best way to tour the area is to follow the Goldfields Tourist Route, whose chocolate-brown signs are marked by a distinctive circled capital G. The route links the major cities and towns – Bendigo, Castlemaine, Ballarat, Ararat and Stawell – with many smaller places in between.

Though you could take the Western Freeway or the train directly to Ballarat, the route towards Bendigo, 150km northwest of Melbourne along the Calder Highway, is much more interesting. The railway to Bendigo, which continues to Swan Hill, follows the same route, calling at the main towns. At Diggers Rest, 22km from Melbourne, a short detour to the east will take you to tiny Organ Pipes National Park, so designated for its outstanding geological interest. 

The rock formations here are a series of basalt columns, formed by lava cooling in an ancient riverbed, and rising up to 20m above Jacksons Creek. The park (during daylight saving time daily 8.30am–6pm, rest of the year 8.30am–4.30pm) can be explored along walking tracks and has picnic areas with tables. Back on the highway you’ll come to Gisborne, 50km from Melbourne, developed as a coaching town for travellers on their way to the Bendigo and Castlemaine goldfields; it’s dominated by Mount Macedon, an extinct thousand-metre volcano.

The Goldrush 

In the golden decade of the 1850s Victoria’s population increased from eighty thousand to half a million, half of whom remained permanently in the state. The British and Irish made up a large proportion of the new population but over forty thousand Chinese came to make their fortune, too, along with experienced American gold-seekers and other nationalities such as Russians, Finns and Filipinos. Ex-convicts and native-born Australians also poured into Victoria, leaving other colonies short of workers; even respectable policemen deserted their posts to become “diggers”, and doctors, lawyers and prostitutes crowded into the haphazard new towns in their wake. The goldfields were a great equalizer; all you needed was a shovel and perseverance, and a fortune was as likely yours as the next man’s.

In the beginning, the fortune-seekers panned the creeks and rivers searching for alluvial gold, constantly moving on at the news of another find. But gold was also deep within the earth, where ancient riverbeds had been buried by volcanoes; in Ballarat in 1852 the first shafts were dug, and because the work was unsafe and arduous, the men joined in bands of eight or ten, usually grouped by nationality, working a common claim. For deep mining, diggers stayed in one place for months or years, and the major workings rapidly became stable communities with banks, shops, hotels, churches and theatres, evolving more gradually, on the back of income from gold, into grandiose towns.

Climate

For more regional information on the Goldfields region, go to:

• Ballarat
• Bendigo
• Castlemaine
• Chewton
• Clunes & Talbot
• Daylesford
• Donolly
• Harcort
• Hepburnsprings
• Kyneton
• Maldon
• Marysborough
• Moliagul
• Tarnagulla
• Woodend

Maps