An amble through Victoria’s Goldfields region.

Day 5 Sunday 12/10/2025 Newstead to Tarnagulla, 6 – 15

That was a chilly night, and I was kept awake with stomach pains. Woody had been bragging about wanting to be first to the water tap to fill our tanks in the morning, but my moaning and groaning put an end to that. Toothless got to the tap first.

The road takes us through Carisbrook. The paddocks are dotted with the decaying ruins of old sheds and once grand homes are being overtaken by untended gardens. It won’t be long before the only sign that anyone ever lived on these properties will be the pairs of ubiquitous Canary Island date palms. Lake Laancoorie is a little low, but the fields of canola are starting to show their colours and should be a dazzling gold in another week. Carisbrook is a town that we haven’t really taken notice of before, and there are plenty of interesting old buildings.

We stop in Dunolly for a walk and a look around. Being Sunday morning things are very quiet. A few of the empty shops now house artistic pursuits and the town is a little more colourful than when we were last here. The large metal detector shop is still here and there’s no doubt that these things are popular. This area still yields gold for the keenest of prospectors and of course the Welcome Stranger* nugget was found at nearby Moliagul.

Tarnagulla could almost be called a ghost town. This once thriving gold town of canvas tents was then known as Sandy Creek and my great grandparents met here in 1861 and married in Dunolly. A couple of streets back from the main street is the historic reserve. Surrounded by the typical dry and hungry goldfields bushland, there’s an oval, and a restored cricket pavilion and bandstand. Camping is available and it is a popular spot for prospectors searching for alluvial gold. We find ourselves a spacious area with room for 3 vans.

There’s a caretaker on site and he has a chook run housing a flock of friendly brown chookies. One of the campers has a donkey and Shetland ponies that pull a trap. You never know what you’ll find in these places. Silicon and Crafty M arrive and we do a fair bit of yacking before a storm drives us indoors. Thankfully it only yields a few plops and within minutes we’re back outside in the sultry air catching up on the gossip.

Dinner is cautious soup.

Accom: $10.00, (toilets, showers, dump point), Towing Kms: 64Kms

*The Welcome Stranger was the largest alluvial gold nugget ever found and weighed 109.59kgs (Source: Wikipedia). There is a plaque at the site of its discovery at Moliagul which explains the difficulty that the miners Deason and Oates had to first get the thing out of the ground and then get it safely to the bank. One imagines that there would have been no end of grunting and cursing.