Australia's Goldrush Towns

Article by: Kate James, July 2007

A little Central Victorian town grabbed the headlines in Australia recently when Hollywood movie star Eric Bana premiered his latest film there. Romulus, my Father is the true story of a troubled migrant couple bringing up their boy in a tiny dot on the map called Baringhup, just down the road from Castlemaine, in the early 1960s. It had its first screening in Castlemaine (population 6700), in the region's best cinema (the Theatre Royal, built in 1856 to entertain gold miners).

There's a creative (and tourist-oriented) repurposing of gorgeous old buildings going on in Central Victoria.

Visiting the shire, you can see why it made sense to shoot a film set in the past there: things are run down in the most attractive ways. Most of the towns were built with gold-rush money in the mid-1800s, when civic buildings reflected the newfound wealth; but most of the booms turned out to be flash-in-the-pan. A little gold-rush town like Dunolly, with less than a thousand residents, has a magnificent Victorian town hall and post office. Maryborough's huge redbrick-and-stucco train station is the most ornate thing in town (on his 1895 tour of Australia, Mark Twain described Maryborough as 'a railway station with a town attached'). Passenger trains don't use this line anymore, but the building has been converted into an antiques emporium with a cafe in the old waiting room (it serves excellent coffee to poor city folk desperate for a latte after all that rummaging).

It's not the only creative (and tourist-oriented) repurposing of gorgeous old buildings going on in Central Victoria. More than one old church has been turned into a B&B, most stylishly in the goldfields village of Talbot. St Andrews, the old Presbyterian house of worship, is now luxury self-contained accommodation with a spa bath and Chinese artwork. It does make you wonder what the pious farmers of the 19th century would think about the re-fit.

History, and particularly gold-rush history, is everywhere: faded advertising slogans on old general-store facades, cemeteries (Maryborough's has a special 'non-Christian' section with a crumbling incense burner, surrounded by the graves of Chinese gold-miners), quirky little museums. Dunolly's Goldfields Museum has a shabbily appealing collection, all hand-labelled, with old firearms and photographs, gold-nugget replicas and mining equipment. Further along the street you can buy your own mining equipment - amateur prospectors still work the seams around here and it's not difficult to set yourself up to have a go.

You can buy your own mining equipment - amateur prospectors still work the seams around here and it's not difficult to set yourself up to have a go.

Even if you're not searching for gold, it's worth going bush around here. Romulus, my Father is full of sweeping shots of golden fields and gum trees and muddy creeks, and the locations scouts wouldn't have had to look far for them. This is classic Australian bush scenery on a manageable scale, and there are plenty of caravan parks and camping sites - as well as classy B&Bs - where you can park yourself out in the middle of it.

But be warned that when you get out into the bush, away from the antiques and wine tours and museums, you might discover some of the spookier aspects of the region. Ask a local, for instance, about strange lights that sometimes appear at night, especially over the Moolort plain; you might meet someone who's convinced that UFOs are buzzing over the fields.

Then there's the puma. If you're camping, you might want to consider that over the past 100 years dozens of people claim to have seen big cats in the Central Victorian bush. Local newspapers regularly interview farmers whose sheep have been mysteriously slaughtered, and while they know the puma (or panther, or mountain lion) isn't native to Australia, the true believers say the cats are descendants of animals released from private zoos or brought over as mascots by American army units.

There just might be a movie in that.