Following in the footsteps of Australia's gold rush, Great Walks discovers the beauty of the Victorian wilderness.
The 58km Leanganook Track between Castlemaine and Bendigo is one of three tracks collectively re-launched on May 17 2011, following a federally funded upgrade, and known as the Goldfields Track. Incorporating the 92km Wallaby Track (Buninyong/Ballarat-Daylesford), 57km Dry Diggings Track (Daylesford-Castlemaine) and Leanganook Track, the 210km Goldfields Track is part of the Great Dividing Trail, centred on Daylesford. It commemorates the rush of people to central Victoria in the mid 19th century, a mass migration that in the 10 years to 1861 upped Victoria’s population from 76,000 to 540,000, an extraordinary 45 per cent of Australia’s then population.
Day 1
Having parked near Castlemaine station, we buy maps at the Visitors Information Centre, in the circa 1862 Market Building (the Goldfields Track committee is working on a detailed track-specific map). Then we head east, Simon carrying our main pack and me a daypack. The distinctive, yellow-topped Goldfields Track markers lead us off the Pyrenees Highway and along Forest Creek.
Now green and tranquil, this broad valley once buzzed with mining activity. The first diggers arrived after a letter to The Argus newspaper told of gold found hereabouts, and their success turned the trickle of people into a human tsunami, with farmhands, servants, sailors, policemen and others from around Australia and the world inundating the Mount Alexander diggings.
These were the world’s richest shallow alluvial fields, but wealth eluded many and death through accident, murder, suicide and illness found others, children being the most vulnerable to the lack of clean drinking water. In March 1852, an Argus correspondent wrote of “dysentery... now stalking abroad through the Diggings,” and about 2km out of Castlemaine we detour off the track to Pennyweight Cemetery. People who died on the flats below were buried here until 1857, and with its few headstones rising from rocky ground that allowed only shallow burials, it is a poignant place even on a sunny day.
Back on the track, we enter the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park and find ourselves in quartz-littered country transformed by mining. With luck we will stub a toe on a nugget! But the only gold we see is flowering wattles. At Manchester Reef, which gave up the gleaming metal for many years, we enter a tunnel cut into the cliff, and looked back out at stone-framed eucalypts and acacias.
We continue through forest pockmarked with holes, each step underlining how much harder it was to mine here than it is to walk, and putting Simon’s pack-sore shoulders in perspective. (From tonight our hosts will transfer our main bag so we can carry only essentials.) About 5.5km from Castlemaine is the Garfield Waterwheel. Erected in 1887 to power a multi-head battery for crushing reef quartz, this 21.5m diameter wheel could be seen for kilometres, and the crushers heard 24 hours a day, except on Sundays.
Beyond here the track makes two moderate ascents, crossing another trail atop the second ridge. This is the only place on the walk where, briefly, we are unsure which trail to take, but a few metres along the stone-lined option we sight a yellow-topped post. Crimson rosellas, kookaburras and smaller birds keep us company. Down beside the Old Calder Highway we rendezvous with our host for the night, Chris Limm from Celestine House in Guildford.
Day 2
The Leanganook Track is divided into four sections but time constraints have prompted us to combine the last three legs into two longer days. Jackets zipped and hoods up, we set out from the Old Calder Highway in rain, walking about a kilometre up an unsealed road before turning towards Mount Alexander, a significant site for local Aborigines, who called it Leanganook. The track runs up a stone-walled and barbed wire-strung easement into Mount Alexander Regional Park.
It is cold and water beads our jackets, and there are no views from the lookouts on the summit (744m), yet the walk is still beautiful. Manna gums and messmates become many armed creatures that loom out of the mist as we zigzag higher. Moss cloaks the fabulous granite boulders like royal velvet.
The rain stops in time for us to eat sandwiches on a rock at the foot of the two television towers up top and the cloud cover clears as we head down Alexander’s east flank, treading a broad track eroded by early 2011 rains. Farmland and mobs of kangaroos show between towering trees and sculptural lumps of granite.
The sun is bright by the time we reach the Coliban Main Channel and it warms us as we walk a kilometre to Harcourt-Sutton Grange Road. This is the official end of the 11.5km 'Leanganook Summit Walk' section of the Goldfields Track and is a common meeting point for accommodated walkers and parking area for independent car shufflers.
Continuing for another hour along the channel, we pass a 623m-long tunnel, massed wildflowers, a pair of whistling kites, one clutching a mouse, and a rainbow that arches over the paddocks and hills to our right. A fairly flat tramp with one longish climb puts us on North Harcourt Road 16km and six hours after setting out.
Home that night is 1840s Plaistow Homestead, outside Castlemaine. A working farm owned by Goldfields Track project management committee chairman Peter Skilbeck and his wife Lilian, Plaistow is a popular overnight spot for people walking between Daylesford and Castlemaine; it also attracts Chinese tourists wanting farmstay experiences. The front door opens into a world of antiques, wallpaper, open fires and mosquito-netted beds. Lilian cooks us sweet potato soup, osso buco and upside-down apricot cake which we eat together at the kitchen table and wash down with local Harcourt shiraz.
Day 3
We spend most of our third and last day on the Goldfields Track paralleling the Coliban Channel’s descent from plateau to plain, stopping often to look at bluestone falls, steep chutes and the semi-circular dissipators that slow the water.
Beyond Sandhurst Reservoir, in Greater Bendigo NP, one of several parks established in 2002 to protect Victoria’s remaining box-ironbark forests and woodlands, the track changes course slightly and returns us to heavily mined country in Bendigo Regional Park.
We are both now feeling the effects of walking 27km in one go and are tempted to call a taxi when the track crosses a sealed road, but having come so far we are determined to reach Bendigo Railway Station, the official finish, under our own steam. For this is a pilgrimage of sorts, honouring the people who scoured this back-breaking – and often heart-breaking – country in search of life-changing gold. Peering into a shaft several metres across and deep, Simon says: “You’d want to find something having dug that big a hole!”
Words and photos_Melanie Ball