Clunes - Culture and History

Once occupied by the Wemba-Wemba people, the first European settler was Donald Cameron, an overlander from Sydney who took up a pastoral run in 1839, naming it Clunes after his birthplace in Scotland. Gold traces were first found on this property by a friend, William Campbell, in March 1850, although news of the find was concealed.

James Esmond was later shown the site of the find. Like Edward Hargreaves, who was involved in NSW's first gold strike, he was one of the few men in Australia who had some experience of gold-bearing quartz reefs as he, like Hargreaves, had been on the Californian goldfields. Esmond's tests verified the existence of the reefs and his findings were announced in the Geelong Advertiser on 7 July 1851, thereby initiating Victoria's first goldrush.

Individual prospectors found the reefs too deep, so major production only proceeded under the auspices of large companies using the latest equipment and skilled Cornish miners. The first was the Port Phillip and Colonial Gold Mining Company which, in 1857, struck a deal which gave them the exclusive right to mine some of Cameron's privately-owned land. The company in turn employed a syndicate of local miners to work in the underground mine. However, others began burrowing down into Port Phillip territory from outside the perimeter; a practice which led to some major subterranean fisticuffs.

Another major disturbance occurred in 1873 when the employees of the Lothair Mine went on strike over the mine owners' refusal to permit a cessation of mining at midday on Saturday. The company tried to use Chinese diggers from Ballarat as strikebreakers but they were pelted with debris when they arrived under police protection and were persuaded to depart. The strike was soon settled.

Whereas, with the success of the deep-lead mining, the population had increased from 1800 to 6000 in the 1860s, it started to decline when the mining slowed down in the 1880s . By 1900, when it had virtually ceased, 50 metric tonnes of gold had been extracted from 3 000 000 tonnes of quartz ore.

Interestingly, Peter Lalor, the leader of the Eureka Rebellion, became a resident of Clunes and the chairman of its water commission.

Notable portraitist John Langstaff was also born here in 1862. He won the Archibald Prize on five occasions and was the first Australian artist to receive a knighthood (1928).