Avoca real estate

Early European settlement

Thomas Mitchell, an explorer and surveyor, was the first European recorded to travel through the Avoca district. He found the area's climate milder and its water supply better than inland New South Wales, and he urged settlers to take up land in the district, which he described as "Australia Felix".

The Blood Hole massacre took place at Middle Creek, close to Glengower, either late in 1839 or early in 1840. An unknown number of Dja Dja Wurrung people were killed. By 1850 several large sheep runs had been taken up, and pastoral settlement was well established.

Gold in the Pyrenees

The first gold found in Victoria, in 1849, came from the Pyrenees Ranges near Avoca, though the first discovery of any importance followed two years later. In 1851 a shepherd named James Esmond found gold at Clunes, 40 kilometres from present-day Avoca, and a rush to the region began.

In 1853, gold turned up at Four Mile Flat, close to Avoca, and the main lead at Avoca itself opened a few months afterwards. The population rose from 100 to 2,200 by the start of December 1853. By June 1854 the number had reached 16,000, and the town was counted among the more important gold rush districts in Victoria.

A court, a police station, a post office (opened on 1 September 1854), gold wardens, churches and schools made Avoca an administrative centre. When miners left Avoca for the new Dunolly rush in 1856, the town remained the region's commercial and administrative centre.

Homebush and the later mines

With the Lamplough rush of 1859 miners came back to the Avoca district, and rich deposits were opened at Homebush that year, on ground first worked at Four Mile Flat in 1853. About ten kilometres from Avoca, Homebush rested almost entirely on company mines and did well for several decades before they became uneconomical.

Mining stayed a large employer, though in the final decades of the 1800s most diggers worked neither alone nor in small groups; only a few larger companies still worked the deep leads. Bare paddocks a few miles to the north east mark where Homebush stood, once a flourishing mining village.

Between 1859 and 1870, Avoca sent £2,500,000 worth of gold to Melbourne. That sum may be only a third of the gold actually won, as private sales went unrecorded. On 16 April 1889 the Golden Stream Company mine closed, and mining in Avoca ceased. What is left of the mine is a set of large mullock heaps, mostly white pipeclay, west of the Sunraysia Highway, lying between the railway crossing and Avoca's cemetery.

From mining to farming and vines

Avoca's economic base moved quickly from gold mining to farming. Many who had come to the diggings in the 1850s and early 1860s stayed and took up land, while the large pastoral holdings from before the rushes were divided for closer settlement. From the late 1850s, several vineyards were also established.

The depression and drought of the 1890s fell hard on rural Victoria. The district's larger mines shut from 1895, and few companies were still working when World War I broke out. Agriculture suffered too, and the last vineyard stopped work in 1929.

Rural productivity was rising across Australia, helped by machinery from implement makers, among them Mackay and Shearer. By 1901 some rural districts were taking five times the harvest they had in the 1890s, at a fraction of the cost. Avoca's roads improved in the first decade of the 1900s, the Shire Engineer putting bad surfaces down to heavier traffic and more produce going to market. The Sugarloaf reservoir opened in 1911, the year the district gained a telephone link to the rest of the state. Avoca's Magistrates' Court closed in April 1979; no magistrate had visited it since 1971.