Clunes Attractions

Clunes (pop. 820) was the first gold-mining settlement in Victoria. Gold was discovered here in 1851, and within three months 8000 hopeful prospectors had flocked to the town. A year after the first finds the number had risen to 30,000, and four years later it had reached 100,000. One result of this was that the population of Melbourne and Geelong fell dramatically. The surface deposits of gold, however, were soon exhausted, and the underground seams could be worked only at the expense of backbreaking labor and heavy investment of machinery and capital. Clunes was the birthplace in 1862 of the painter John Longstaff, whose huge painting of the ill-fated explorers Burke, Wills and King hangs in the National Gallery in Melbourne.

In the broad main street there are a number of fine old buildings dating from gold-mining days (two schools, hotels, banks, the post office, the Town Hall).