VICTORIA'S
GREATEST DRIVING TOURS AND HERITAGE TOWNS
Historic...
DUNOLLY
The heart of Victoria’s “Golden Triangle”, beyond Ballarat and Bendigo, is a scenic web of rural backroads linking scores of historic goldfields towns. Gone are the rough bush tracks that once thronged with thousands of hopeful miners; in their place are smooth, sealed, peaceful roads custom-made for weekend exploring.
Gold Rush hamlets such as Kingower, Rheola, Tarnagulla and Moliagul are just a few fascinating places almost lost on today’s road maps; if a ghost town is a pub with no beer and a few lonely buildings, then many out here qualify.
Dunolly, however, has survived without forfeiting much of its heritage to the ravages of time. On the main street an eclectic mix of antiquated shops is shaded by broad iron verandahs: the Welcome Stranger Café, a prospecting supply shop, two pubs, country bakery, derelict coach office and billiard parlour, and a little museum with a blacksmith’s anvil at the front. Even today, a palpable connection with gold is obvious.
Like many other towns which sprang up overnight in the 1850s, Dunolly was originally a pastoral run, owned by a Scotsman who named it after his home town. Gold was discovered: the first rush swamped the region and tented camps studded the gullies, sheltering up to 30,000 prospectors. At this time in Victoria’s history, there was an itinerant population of 100,000 who were ready to hit the road whenever the word of a new strike was whispered.
Dunolly’s second, smaller rush brought a more permanent town with the appearance of wooden buildings. This period, the 1860s, saw some handsome brick buildings erected and many of these survive today. It’s worth calling in to the Welcome Stranger café or the museum to get a walking map of Dunolly heritage buildings.
The licensed grocery, circa 1859, on Broadway has the oldest operating liquor licence in Victoria. Owner James Bell was Dunolly mayor five times, a mining company director and elected as a member of the Victorian Parliament. The London Chartered Bank, also on Broadway, was built in 1867 to replace a wooden and corrugated iron building. The Welcome Stranger nugget was sold to the bank for 9,534 pounds.
Information maps and leaflets are available at the prospectors supply shop - be sure to see the display of smaller nuggets found by prospectors with the new-age pick and shovel - metal detectors. You can hire a detector from Shirley and Ken Roberts at Finders, and maybe find a nugget to take home, but remember Eureka and get a prospector’s licence. The Hand of Faith nugget, worth a million dollars, was found in the region in the 1980s.
The Welcome Stranger, world’s largest nugget was a 66 kilogram lump of solid gleaming metal found at Moliagul in 1869. It was cut up on the deeply scored and beaten blacksmith’s anvil which now rests outside Dunolly’s little museum.
Some shops, such as the Cockatoo Café and the museum, are only open at weekends and holidays, but the bakery invariably has pastries and bread fresh from the oven. In the pubs, the talk is still about gold.
Dunolly is on the “Golden Way” touring route, 174 km north-west of Melbourne via the Calder Highway to Maryborough or Bendigo. About two and a half hours drive from the city.
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