Castlemaine ( ,Macquarie Dictionary, Fourth Edition (2005). Melbourne, The Macquarie Library Pty Ltd. . non-locally also ) is a town in west central Victoria, Australia, in the Goldfields region about 123 kilometres (76 miles) northwest by road from Melbourne and about 39 kilometres (24 miles) from the major provincial centre of Bendigo. It is the administrative and economic centre of the Shire of Mount Alexander. Castlemaine was named by the chief goldfield commissioner, Captain W. Wright, in honour of his Irish uncle, Viscount Castlemaine. At the , Castlemaine had a population of 7,506.
Castlemaine began as a gold rush boomtown in 1851 and developed into a major regional centre, being officially proclaimed a city on 4 December 1965, although since declining in population."Castlemaine" in The Age, 15 September 2008
It is home to many cultural institutions including the Theatre Royal, the oldest continuously operating theatre in mainland Australia.
Geology of the district Around 450 million years ago, a shallow sea deposited layers of clay, silt and sand which are now the Ordovician sedimentary sandstone and mudstone rocks underlying Castlemaine. Tectonic pressure from the east then folded and compressed these layers into steep north-south strata. About 370 million years ago, molten rock intruded underground, cooling into granodiorite which is the rock forming Mount Alexander. The intense heat metamorphosed surrounding sediments into hornfels and slate, and silica-rich solutions deposited quartz veins, concentrating gold. Permian age glaciation, Jurassic era volcanic dykes, and Cenozoic basalt flows and river gravels complete the sequence.
Gold Hydrothermal fluids migrated into fractures in the Ordovician sediments during the granodiorite intrusion, depositing gold alongside quartz and iron sulphide. Subsequent erosion liberated alluvial gold into Forest Creek at Chewton and Castlemaine. Almost no gold occurred on the granite of Mount Alexander itself. By 1851, at the beginning of the gold rush, geological principles were well understood and received by the general population through books and newspapers, and taught by local scientists including Thomas Sergeant Hall at the Castlemaine School of Mines who contributed internationally significant palaeontological work on the succession of graptolites in local Ordovician strata.
Alfred Selwyn produced arguably Australia's first government geological map here in 1853, from which geologist Charles Gould, in a government report, noted a: Unity of direction, more especially, is common in many districts, and is strikingly illustrated in sheets 9, 13, 14 of the Maps of the Geological Survey of Victoria, devoted to the Castlemaine Gold Field, where some hundreds of quartz reefs are laid down, all coursing slightly to the west of the north and east of south, without a single instance of any great deviation from that direction.
Geological features within Mount Alexander Shire
Lyttleton Street, Castlemaine, east of Urquhart Street: anticlinal fold in north-side road cutting Kalimna Tourist Road anticline (200m north of Hunter Street, Castlemaine): fold and small fault in road cutting Hard Hill, Chewton (Railway Street railway bridge): near-vertical Ordovician folds; syncline, quartz veins and faulting are visible Specimen Gully Road, Barkers Creek: the granodiorite–Ordovician boundary, with the metamorphic aureole visible stretching toward Mount Tarrengower Slate quarries, Barkers Creek (Specimen Gully Road, opposite Cappers Gully Track): historic quarries that once supplied Melbourne's Collins Street paving Dog Rocks, Liyanganuk/Mount Alexander (off Joseph Young Drive, Harcourt): spectacular granite tors formed by weathering along joint planes The Cascades, Metcalfe (Cascades Road): the Coliban River cascading over granite, with pot-holes worn into bedrock through boulders and gravel trapped in a hollow being swirled by turbulent water in a circular motion, grinding into the bedrock like a drill bit in an action called 'pothole drilling' or evorsion. The resulting cylindrical depressions are sometimes called 'giant's kettles'.
History First Nations Castlemaine colonised the traditional lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung people, also known as the Jaara people. They were regarded by other tribes as being a superior people, not only because of their rich hunting grounds but because from their area came tachylite, a hard glassy volcanic stone valued for weapons and tools Augustus Robinson, appointed Chief Protector of Aborigines for Port Phillip (Victoria) in 1839, traveled to the district and met amicably with them and the local Protector Parker, and reported that the Dja Dja Wurrung were a strong, physically well-developed people and not belligerent. The Djara people have a rich culture and reverence for the land.
The environmental devastation caused by gold mining from the 1850s was widespread and permanent in the entire district. It extinguished many native plant and animal species in the area, and decimated and displaced the Dja Dja Wurrung, for whom quartz was of value but not the soft gold it contained, and who regarded the resulting destruction as having turned their land into 'upside-down country.'
Their vital water sources included non-perennial creeks and associated underground springs. Mining spread contaminants and destroyed the infrastructure the indigenous people created over generations to maximise seasonal drainage patterns; channels and weirs they built out of timber stakes, to slow receding summer flows, were wrecked; water holes where the people gathered in smaller groups during periods of scarce rainfall and from which they transported water in skin bags when moving, were muddied, polluted and drained; the soaks they had dug between banks into sandy sediment to tap into the water table were likewise obliterated. Some of their waterholes in rock platforms of the Creek that they found or enlarged, then covered with slabs to protect them from animals, may still remain, unidentified.
Europeans The first European settlers named it Forest Creek and as the population grew it became known as Mount Alexander. The old name is still present in some place names in Victoria including the Shire of Mount Alexander and the former main road leading to it from Melbourne – Mount Alexander Road. Major Mitchell passed through the region in 1836. Following his discovery, the first squatters arrived in 1837 to establish vast sheep runs.
In 1854, Chief goldfields commissioner, Captain W. Wright, renamed the settlement 'Castlemaine' in honour of his Irish uncle, Viscount Castlemaine.
Discovery of gold On 20 July 1851 gold was discovered near present-day Castlemaine (Mt Alexander Goldfields) at Specimen Gully on Barkers Creek. The gold was discovered by Christopher Thomas Peters, a shepherd and hut-keeper on the Barker's Creek, in the service of Dr William Barker on his Mount Alexander run. When the gold was shown in the men's quarters, Peters was ridiculed for finding fool's gold, and the gold was thrown away. Barker did not want his workmen to abandon his sheep, but in August they did just that. John Worley, George Robinson and Robert Keen, also in the employ of Barker as shepherds and a bullock driver, immediately teamed with Peters in working the deposits by panning in Specimen Gully where the gold had been found, which they did in relative privacy during the next month. When Barker sacked them and ran them off his land for trespass, Worley, on behalf of the party "to prevent them getting in trouble", mailed a letter to The Argus (Melbourne) dated 1 September 1851 announcing this new goldfield with the precise location of their workings. This letter was published on 8 September 1851. "With this obscure notice, rendered still more so by the journalist as 'Western Port', were ushered to the world the inexhaustible treasures of Mount Alexander" also to become known as the Forest Creek diggings. Within a month there were about 8,000 diggers working the alluvial beds of the creeks near the present day town of Castlemaine, and particularly Forest Creek which runs through Chewton where the first small village was established. By the end of the year there were about 25,000 on the field.
Gold rush: a city develops
The first small village developed at Chewton, today in effect a suburb of Mount Alexander Shire, which included the Commissioner's tent, stores, an office for The Argus newspaper, and an office for the Mount Alexander goldfields' own newspaper the Daily Mail.
On 28 January 1852 William Henry Wright was one of nearly 200 men who were assigned or affirmed as territorial magistrates for Victoria. Not long after, he took control of the Mount Alexander diggings and set up a government camp on Forest Street near the junction of Barker and Forest Creeks (today's Camp Reserve). This was to be the new township of Castlemaine. The first reference in a newspaper to the township is found in the Geelong Advertiser of 13 March 1852 with the following notice: "The Lieutenant Governor has appointed John Fletcher, Esq., J.P., to be Police Magistrate at Castlemaine; but where Castlemaine is situate[d] we cannot tell.""New police magistrate" Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer (Vic.) 13 March 1852 Page 2 A court house was established on what is today known as Goldsmith Crescent, Castlemaine near the new government camp. Stores were also established nearby.
The first official post office at Castlemaine, named "Forrest Creek", opened on 1 March 1852. (Renamed the Castlemaine Post Office on 1 January 1854.) The first official Post Office was established after The Argus (Melbourne) correspondent at Forest Creek had an article published in November 1851 that put the case forward for a Post Office to be established somewhere between the Forest Creek goldfield and Kyneton. At the same time (November 1851) he described the Forest Creek diggings as having many businesses such as stores and licensed hawkers and "at least 8000 persons on the two creeks (Forest and Barker)". The need pointed out in The Argus in November 1851 had resulted in an unofficial Post Office being established on the diggings at Chewton (Forest Creek) in December 1851, a Post Office then described as being "on the most central part of the diggings".
On 15 February 1853 town lots were offered for sale. By that time the first Castlemaine District Hospital had been opened, the jail had been built, and Castlemaine was moving from 'tent' town to bricks and mortar. Notable prominent businesswoman Fanny Finch was running a restaurant and lodging house at Forest Creek at this time.
A local government was formed on 23 April 1855 and was later to become the Town of Castlemaine and in 1965 became the City of Castlemaine. Accessed at State Library of Victoria, La Trobe Reading Room. However, with municipal amalgamations in the early 1990s, Castlemaine lost its 'City' status and is now simply the largest town in the Shire.
The Theatre Royal opened in 1856 to provide entertainment for the gold diggers, with a notable performance being provided by the world-renowned Lola Montes and her celebrated Spider Dance. It remains mainland Australia's oldest continuously operating theatre.
In 1859 the historic Castlemaine Football Club was established. Evidence makes it the second oldest football club in Australia and one of the oldest football clubs in the world.
After the gold rush
In 1877–80 the residences numbered over 2000, and there was a population in the township of 7,500, forming an electorate in itself, within the district, the County of Talbot, of 19,000 people. Four trains ran daily to and from Melbourne with fares at 13 shillings (A$80 value in 2021) for First Class, and 8s. 6d. (A$52.70) for Second.