Creswick to Blampied Road
11 December 2020, low-mid 20s and clear, a beautiful day. 19.01 kms
What a day! So many good ones, but this might have been one of the very best.
A very comfortable night at the Creswick Motel (highly recommended for those, like us, with unslaked addictions to country motels) before heading off just a little south of east, not necessarily the most obvious direction. Daylesford, the end of this stage is to the north, but we were going east to Mollongghip to make the most of the Creswick Regional Park before heading north into the Wombat Forest at Barkstead towards Rocklyn and Korweinguboora.
I’ve written all that just so I could type Mollongghip and Korweinguboora. My father used to occasionally say Korweinguboora (Ka-winjee-borer, he said; I wouldn’t know) simply for the pleasure of it. Very occasionally it would turn up on the news for its rainfall or degree of chill. But when via Google I investigate ‘How popular is the baby name Korweinguboora?’, I find not so much at the present time. But I do find that it is an Aboriginal word probably meaning ‘where the crane eats frogs’, and that would make perfect sense. We might even have seen that happening. On this walk we’ve walked through let’s say 15 places I’d heard of but had no idea where they were and 40 or 50 that I had never heard of. It has been a wonderful education in so many ways.
But we weren’t walking to Korweinguboora this day. Our destination was the corner of two roads … you can’t say in the middle of nowhere. People live there. There are two houses nearby, but let’s just say not much else. We were counting on the ever reliable Lord Rowland to find us, pick us up and bring us back for another night at the Creswick. To allay any distracting anxiety that was just what happened.
For the sake of interest we varied our route out of Creswick leaving via St George’s Lake Rd instead of along the creek as usual and the first thing we ran into was the heartland of Melbourne Uni’s Forestry School or, if you prefer, the School of Ecosystems and Forest Sciences of The University of Melbourne. This was established at Creswick, according to its long term Principal Bob Orr, because of ‘the damage done to this landscape during the gold rush era – with the land being dug up – that alerted people to the importance of managing the land and its resources in a responsible way.’ Excellent. Unstinting approval.
It turned out to be a hospital anyway.
1863. The Creswick Goldfields Hospital. Three wings surrounding a courtyard. A serious building set now, as you might imagine, in rather sumptuous arboreal surrounds. The Forestry School converted the 30-bed hospital into the School’s library in 1912 so the hospital idea is from the long rather than the short form of yesterday.
But one of its medical practitioners was Dr Robert Lindsay who arrived from Londonderry just one year after it opened. He and his wife Jane Williams, daughter of a Wesleyan missionary, had 10 children, half of whom became significant figures in Australia’s cultural topography: Percy, Lionel, Norman, Ruby and Daryl — artists and/ or writers. (I can only count eight children in this family photo. That would be often be considered enough. And you may have already noted the relative placement of man and woman.)
Norman (top right in the photo I’d say) — self-described ‘artist, etcher, sculptor, writer, art critic, novelist, cartoonist and amateur boxer’ — is probably the best known, and for The Magic Pudding as much as his intoxication with female flesh.
He wrote of his father: ‘He wears a tussore [stylishly coarse] silk coat and grey bell topper with a flowing puggaree [a thin muslin scarf of Sikh heritage worn for sun protection]. If I select a key word to describe his personality it would be the word ‘aplomb’. All his life he got into complicated situations, social, professional and domestic, and strolled out of them without ruffling a feather.’
Moving on to another version of culture, I wish to insert this photo here to recognise the critical importance played by the rider mower in the life of homo rusticus, and the number of times we saw this practice playing out. This was a special case because as he drove he was talking to a mate who couldn’t hear him. Plus there was a particular sort of tenacity about his style, a determination to get The Lot.
But we’re not out of Creswick yet.
Our first real destination was St George’s Lake which I’ve mentioned already. It has recently had its wall renewed and this is the result. We have rarely seen anyone anywhere on The Track, but in this case there was a dog walker nicely placed at the end of the concrete finger. We walked around the northern side of the lake which is always pleasant, and then we were off into the bush. Great walking this.
Four kms out of Creswick you come to this, a stile and bits of what has been quite a complex fence built by students from the Forestry School for a koala reserve. There’s another one of these near the top of Leanganook/ Mt Alexander which was just as successful. As a commentator says, after a week or so (of stocking the reserve) you could find plenty of koalas around here but anywhere except in the reserve. Anyone who has seen koalas climb would probably understand this.
This is an old track and carefully calibrated. I see diggers with wheelbarrows full of stuff just around the next corner on tracks like this. And I do. Their barrows have a small open metal wheel, no tyre of course, the pan is a worn wooden box which was once well made. They have an intent look on their face largely unconscious of their immediate surroundings, and they are going much faster than we do. These tracks wander because they are careful about staying close to the contour. Here’s an example. The track on the left is the track on the right negotiating its way round a gully. The Lerderderg Forest is full of tracks like this.
There actually hadn’t been much sign of diggings to this point, but then the country opens up a bit, the vegetation changes, you start crunching quartz under foot and the earthworks start appearing.
Down to the left from here are the cobbles and mullock heaps indicative of a busy field which pretty much stop as you get to Jackass Road. You have a choice now for a side trip to Eaton’s dam. There and back is not far, and it’s interesting and represents a formidable exertion of energy. I read somewhere that it had never held water — that would be a gold story too, and you can imagine it being the case with the sort of soil around here and the hand construction issues. You can’t always make a dam hold water; it takes a great deal of skill and knowledge. Anyway other sources say not only did it hold water …
but when it was breached (see above) in the 1930s, the consequential flow flooded Creswick.
It is also a good place for the first cup of tea.
A steady haul up the Wallaby Track which at this point is a heavily rutted dirt road, one of the very many in these forests. To the left are pine plantations and off to the right is Jackass Gully with a tributary of the Creswick Creek occasionally running through its crease.
And you come to a surprise. You’re not in the middle of nowhere, you’re scarcely out of town; but it doesn’t feel like that. So when you see this plaque tucked away under an elderly fruit tree, you can only wonder what could have been going on here.
And it is a surprise.
It is the site of the home of W. G. Spence who grew up here as a child, but seen here — in a rural version of the man in question — standing in the doorway. The plaque refers to his role as the Superintendent of the Creswick Presbyterian Sunday School but it is not for that that he is generally known.
He was aged eight at the time of of the Eureka Rebellion (1854), but it is claimed that it influenced him so significantly he made it his mission to organise mine workers into a union. Thus in 1874 Spence was among the mine-workers who formed the Amalgamated Miners’ Association of Victoria, an organisation which became the springboard for the real foundations of Australian unionism. After leading the merger with similar unions in the other Australian colonies to form the Amalgamated Miners’ Association of Australasia, he became the first president of the national Shearers’ Union which established 85 per cent of Australian shearing sheds as ‘closed shops’, accessible only to members.
He led the amalgamation of the miners, shearers and rural workers unions which produced the Australian Workers’ Union in 1894, remaining a senior office bearer until 1917 (as well as a federal parliamentarian from Federation until 1917). This was in the context of a collapse of the Australian (and world) economies in 1891 coupled with a massive attack on organised labour using the weapons of law and imprisonment. Charges laid included sedition, ‘unlawful conspiracy and inciting riots’. He must have had a backbone of steel and a (Presbyterian?) sense of purpose. None of which has answered the question, what were he and his family doing just here? Answer: he had a family that was looking for gold, and just a few hundred metres from the cottage.
From Spence’s cottage we turned right instead of left as we often do. New country for us, which opens into regrowth stringy bark forest with longer views north to pasture and in time a grand design: enormous dam with island, ducks, swans, a range of sitteries with differing vantage points mainly east, painted wooden fence (for the horses, very expensive and a lot of upkeep), stables. Almost certainly fabulous, but what do you do when you go there? A glass of first quality white wine at each sittery perhaps? But that’s in the evenings. Endless work perhaps, in the garden/ orchard/ vineyard/ olive grove? Or maybe inside on the computer wishing you had a better internet connection.
We saw quite a few of the these, including a whole long road’s worth which we will come to … but when the project is complete, when the dog has caught the car, what then? Try the beach?
We on the other hand were free as the breeze wandering down … country lanes we could say, but dirt roads assuming at least equivalent charm, between banks of everlastings and phalaris that had seeded from the pasture on the margins of the forest, herds of Angus to our left, hosts of crimson rosellas and carolling maggies to our right.
This House in the Bush (below) was a special case. You don’t often see such high order tree houses, actually constructed round the trees rather than by or in them. As well as somewhere to stick the kids this one might be for the evening glass of white wine. Might be. Probably not. Among other things I’m thinking of the mossies.
And then looking north over towards Newlyn and Scrub Hill a massive paddock of … what?
Cut flowers? No. Another sort of cash crop. Something to stop the mossies. These are Pyrethrum daisies.
‘The flowers are pulverized and the active components, called pyrethrins, contained in the seed cases, are extracted. This is applied as a suspension in water or oil, or as a powder. Pyrethrins attack the nervous systems of all insects, and inhibit female mosquitoes from biting. When present in amounts less than those fatal to insects, they still appear to have an insect repellent effect. They are harmful to fish [and cats], but are far less toxic to mammals and birds than many synthetic insecticides. They are not persistent, being biodegradable and decompose easily on exposure to light. They are considered to be among the safest insecticides for use around food.’
All news to me. There were a dozen or more fields of this scale.
This was one sign that we had moved from the sedimentary gold country to the startlingly rich volcanic soils of Dean and surrounds — spuds just here — and also that we were on a patch of 10-12 kms walking between paddocks, something I’d expected a great deal more of.
And pretty pleasant walking …
On our right heading north up the Dean-Newlyn Road were crowds of ibis and what I think were herons working over a swampy field (more correctly, I discover, a swamp), probably eating frogs! To the left hundreds, maybe a thousand choughs foraging in a crop. Myers Road offered an exhibition of the range of options for damming dry country, and we arrived at our destination, unexpectedly denoted thus.
Blampied Road to Sailors Falls
12 December 2020, another beautiful day. 24.76 kms
Next morning our hostess from the Creswick Motel drove us back to the exact spot we’d left the night before. When we say doing it properly that is what we mean. 200m down the road was this study in symmetry and pattern, a most beautiful thing.
Quite soon the Track veers off onto a dirt 4WD track full of steep angles. Off to each side Houses in The Bush began to appear through the trees. At the very modest township of Mollongghip, where ‘it snows most years’, it finally turns north beginning the long stages through the Wombat Forest.
It’s a strange stretch of landscape, apparently lacking in complexity but sometimes striking if not beautiful.
This is looking towards the sun mid-morning: absolutely motionless grey pool (it had rained a few days before, I’m glad to say there were several large pools full of tadpoles), silver flicker from the swaying of the bracken intersected by the black verticals of the young trees, almost but not regular. You turn around and the gingerbread and caramel browns and sprinkles of green re-appear. But the tree growth is still comparatively regular, and the understorey sparse. For kilometres burning off, seemingly so unnecessary, had left all the trunks blackened to a metre or two.
People keep tidying up the Wombat Forest. Or cutting it down. The reason it looks like this is because it is almost all regrowth.
This stretch of The Track is known as the Andersons’ Tramway Walk.
John, James and William Anderson left Scotland in June 1851 taking advantage of assisted passages for agricultural labourers and country tradesmen. While they landed at Adelaide they quite soon joined the rush for gold in Victoria. They dug at Castlemaine, Mt Korong and Bendigo and, it seems, made a good deal of money. With this capital they retired to Collingwood, a suburb of Melbourne, and set up as building contractors.
Their mother Sarah arrived in 1856 with her three younger sons Thomas, Robert and David. The older brothers had moved to Dean (through which in this story we have just walked) abandoning gold digging for timber milling, a new enterprise to supply the mining and building industries of Ballarat. Within 10 years the Andersons became the biggest saw millers in the Wombat/ Bullarook Forest with mills at Dean, Barkstead and Adekate Creek (just three of the 38 timber mills in the Wombat Forest in the late 1860s). By 1866 they had constructed 12 km of timber tramway with numerous bridges, cuttings and culverts at a cost of £9 000 and employed 60 men building tramways and felling timber in the forest and at the mill.
They built the tramway because they had stripped all the timber from Dean and its surrounds. The tramway itself was no small thing: the rails were laid on sleepers, deep cuttings, bridges. It was wide enough for two horses abreast to pull the wagons laden with logs. These horses were eventually supplanted by steam locomotives. At its furthest extent it ran from Musk Vale to Barkstead, 23 km. Below, a bit of what is left that we followed for a time.
Gib Wettenhall takes up the story:
All good things come to an end. No sooner had [the Anderson brothers] secured the two specially commissioned steam locomotives from a Ballarat foundry, pulling 3-4 train trips of logs into the Barkstead mill, day in, day out, than – surprise, surprise – the trees within their license area ran out, a mere 15 years since their start-up sawpit at Dean.
So what did the Andersons do? They brought on a bush war, encroaching on the licensed territory of two other powerful sawmillers, Thomas Crowley and Patrick Fitzpatrick. This was to prove a fatal mistake. Crowley and Fitzpatrick had mates in the Victorian Parliament and they complained that the Andersons were ‘ravaging’ their forest. So, in 1879, the Andersons lost both their sawmill and tramway licenses and were forced to abandon Barkstead.
Or more correctly to shift their operations to Smeaton where they had established an equally ambitious flour mill still very much in evidence today.
In the interests of full disclosure, it is noted that one of these environmental vandals, probably David, is the great-great grandfather of my children.
But we were slow walking through here because the blood descendant of the Andersons kept finding things to look at on the ground: often tiny, various, remarkable.
This bloke and his dog get a run because he is one of the five people we saw on or near the track in more than 200 km. You probably can’t see him, but he’s over on the edge of Mullens Dam at what he called Barkstead and what the map calls Rocklyn with a yabby net cleaning out his traps. He also has a bucket half full of yabbies which he is ‘going to go straight through’.
Wombat Station, and a cup of tea. You can get here by driving along Rocklyn Road; I can’t imagine traffic would be heavy. The only sign of the town that used to be here (more than a thousand people at its peak), Wombat, is a culvert and a flat patch of land where a railway station once was. This — along with Broomfield, Allendale, Newlyn, Rocklyn, (Wombat), Leonard, Sailors Falls and Woodburn — was once a station on the Ballarat to Daylesford line. Now no more; now looking like this a short distance from the rotunda (an initiative of the Goldfields Track Association).
We follow the empty line for 5 or 6 km marveling at the feat of construction. Consider how many shovels full of earth and how many blows of a pickaxe to break rock it would have taken to make this. This is just one of the cuttings and not the deepest; one is 80m deep. And for every cutting there is a fill.
It might have been the time of day but I had quite a strong sense (confirmed later by a closer look at the map) that we were climbing, if only gently, most of the way to White Point Track where we got off the old rail line. But that was offset by a flurry of eight Monarch butterflies that we raised at the very beginning of this section of the track and which accompanied us for several kilometres, stopping when we did, getting going again when we did. Engrossing.
I was ready to get to our destination that night: Sailors Falls Winery, which makes fine wine — and should be patronised — but also has very pleasant accommodation.
I had spoken to Margaret McDonald, our host, about some dinner (yes, excellent wood-fired pizza) and breakfast (yes, brilliant range of exactly what we might want). We slept soundly in our neo-Tuscan villa.
Sailors Falls Winery to Daylesford
13 December 2020, same weather again. 11.23 kms
One reason Margaret and her husband Rob had been so good to us was that they were enthusiastic walkers themselves. They had walked in all sorts of parts of the world — Nepal and Peru suggested they had good legs — as well as having done the Goldfields Track themselves. ‘Over a year. A bit at a time. In a group. Mainly to enjoy the lunches.’ They’re the bits I remember. But after slightly baffling me with directions about how to get to the Falls and back onto the Track from here, she very generously offered to come with us and show us the way. We discovered without thinking too much about it that we had friends in common.
Somewhere tucked away under this foliage are the Sailors Falls, perhaps Fall this day. Later when we walking along the creek that feeds the falls I checked the flow in at about a litre a minute and I would say it was about that which was coming over the rocks.
But at the base of the falls area was this (at left) — the very first mineral spring we encountered. That was significant because we would come across plenty more. This area of Victoria has 80 percent of all Australia’s mineral springs. I like to check, and the water tasted as rusty as it looks. Strong on iron this one.
Sailors Creek valley was an infestation of weeds. Bad bad bad bad bad.
Blackberries mainly, but broom, some gorse, Scotch thistles plus plus plus. Blackberries can grow a centimetre a day and besides their ferocious thorns, they often establish a net or a web of branches which makes it impossible for native animals to follow their tracks. We saw a Landcare attack on them along Forest Creek outside Castlemaine which had been most successful so something can be done about them. But here, no good I’m afraid. In fact, bad.
It wasn’t all like that. There was just as much stringybark forest with very little ground cover. We walked along rutted 4WD tracks and near Musk Vale one surprise popped out. Her grin suggested that she hadn’t seen anyone else on the track that day either.
Then an interregnum.
We just stopped in the middle of the path and … ah … there was … ah, a dance class. Thursday. 11 o’clock. It’s a rule. Stop what you’re doing and dance. I think this might be the first time a participant in an African dance class has actually been on The Goldfields Track or, rather, that anyone on The Goldfields Track has participated in an African dance class. I mean, on the actual track. On the … Certainly the first time Melbourne Djembe has had a participant actually on the track.
I was, of course, full of admiration demonstrating this by finding a place under a shady tree to lie down. As I did so my phone rang. Don’t worry. I’m in it. I’m part of the digital world too. But it was our host from the Winery, Margaret’s husband Rob, and as soon as he said his name it all flooded back. We had been close colleagues once 35 years ago. And he had 30 minutes of fascinating stories to tell me and, in time I hope, much much more. The thrill of the unexpected. I thought it was great. And then the dance class finished.
The last few kilometres into Daylesford are not the best part of the walk, not till you get out of the blackberries anyway which is about when you get to Sutton Spring. You’re out of the woods there, onto the slate pavement, and the tamed world.
Two boys named Sutton sluicing for gold (you can’t escape this round here, there’s always a connection) found this spring in 1890. The info board says, ‘In 1900 a trench was dug into the sandstone’ — we are most certainly back in gold country — ‘and steps cut. A horizontal pipe was driven into the “eye” of the spring which remains in use today.’ I’ve often wondered how they do that. It mightn’t always work.
Anyway Sutton Spring, a) quite sulphuric, and b) the location of a long and very pleasant conversation with a young-middle-aged-ish European-Australian couple who looked incredibly fit and happy but who couldn’t quite figure out what we’d been up to and why.
Daylesford was just up a long hill. There we could get a vanilla thick shake, a cup of English Breakfast and a taxi back to Creswick where we would find our car. Just a bit short of half way.
Next time: a walk we’ve done quite a few times, but it felt different. The circumambulation of Daylesford and Hepburn Springs following Sailors Creek. Always good. Always better than you think it’s going to be. And then the glories of finding the way to the Mount Alexander diggings and Castlemaine. A strong and fascinating section.
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