Avoca - Culture and History

Thomas Mitchell was the first European to pass through the area. He reached it in 1836 and, as rumour has it, named the local river 'Avoca' after a river or vale in County Wicklow, Ireland. A decade later there were a number of squatters in the area but the real change to the district's fortunes occurred in 1852 when gold was discovered only 3 km east of the town. By 1854 the town had a population of 2577 and there were a total of around 6000 diggers operating in the 6 km of riverbed south of the confluence of Glenlogie Creek and Avoca River.

It was around this time that Avoca grew dramatically. A police camp of some 50 troopers was established in 1853 and a lock-up built the following year, an impressive Bank of Victoria was built in 1854 to capitalise the new-found wealth, a series of businesses set up shop, the Avoca Hotel opened its doors in 1854, the Union Hotel in 1855, a Wesleyan Church was built in 1856, a National School in 1857 and the courthouse in 1859.

A description of the diggings in the early 1860s: 'Shanties, public houses and shops sprang up rapidly and the place was a veritable beehive of industry ‹ the whirring of the windlass, the clank-clank of the buckets, the rumble of the 'cradle' and the puddling machine, the tents, the lights innumerable at night, the singing oft bacchanalian the laughter and the brawls made a medley of sound incidental to the bush mining camp.'

The town's population had dropped back to 768 by 1871. The railway line from Maryborough was opened in 1876. But by this time the gold rush was all but over. Men were still making a reasonable living at Amphitheatre as late as the 1890s but the gold was now difficult to get. Slowly the farmers began to reassert themselves. By the 1870s grapes were being grown in the area and over the next twenty years mixed farming - sheep, cattle, orchards - started to dominate in the area. There were various attempts to use dredges to extract the gold and these continued intermittently throughout this century with the last dredge only stopping operations in 1957.

Today Avoca is a pleasant rural service centre characterised by its wide main street and the nearby Pyrenees Ranges. There are three race meetings each year.