GHOST ROADS

VICTORIA has a number of ghost towns. What about Victoria's ghost roads? For an interesting drive, ride, or in some cases, walk, there are some intriguing routes of yesteryear around our state, and nothing spooky about any of them.

To find out why Victoria has a network of ghost roads, take a peek back into history. In the 1860s, two locations in the colony of Victoria were of paramount importance. The first locale was the seaports. Through these poured gold-seekers from the Mother Country, and essential supplies for the diggings.

The other locale was the goldfields. Gold was the very foundation of Victoria's prosperity. Sleepy, formerly rustic areas boomed overnight as the lustrous yellow metal was discovered, at first in rivers and streams, later in the deeps of the earth. It was essential that this wealth be maintained and extracted.

But how exactly were people and supplies to reach one from the other? Today, we take rapid and efficient transport for granted. But in the 1860s, it was a different story. True, there were railways to Ballarat and Bendigo. But to the Buckland Valley? Bet Bet? Enochs Point? There were only three ways to get anything there: on foot, by horse (if you could afford one), or plodding bullock dray.

It was primarily for the benefit of bullock drays, slow but reliable, that the heroic, unsung roads engineers of the 1860s accepted a mighty challenge. They undertook to link, by the most direct routes, the essential ports with the inland goldfields, and in some cases other centres.

Some of these became the ghost roads of Victoria. They were direct, but often badly graded, and were only in regular use, in many cases, for a short time. Events unforeseen in the 1860s overtook many of them. First the railways spread, moving people and freight faster and more cheaply. In more recent times, better graded and surfaced highways, and finally freeways, consigned many of them to obscurity. But they're still there.

Some, of course, aren't the least ghostly. Mount Alexander Road is alive and well, on or near its original route, as the Calder Highway. The Ovens Valley Highway, from Wangaratta to Bright, follows much the same route today as it did a century ago.

But here's a little exercise. Take a ruler. Place it on a map of Victoria, with one end at the city of Geelong. Now rotate the ruler, first to Hamilton, hub of the western district, and then to Mount William, highest peak in the Grampians.

What do you see in both cases? The faint, irregular, but still very traceable, roads of yesteryear. The ghost road to Hamilton passes through Bannockburn, rather than Inverleigh on the modern Hamilton Highway, then Shelford, which has a fine old bluestone general store, indicating the former significance of this route.

The old and new roads overlap from Cressy to Derrinallum, but then the ghost road strikes out for Woorndoo, almost disappearing crossing Emu Creek, then reappearing as a sealed secondary road through Chatsworth that runs to within a few kilometres of central Hamilton.

Logically, the road from Geelong to the Deep Lead goldfields should have gone directly there. Instead, it struck out from Shelford via Rokewood, Skipton, and somewhere north of Maroona, for the 1167 metre peak named by Major Mitchell in 1836, Mount William. Why? Still a bit of a mystery.

Try repeating that map and ruler exercise for other west coast ports. Port Campbell was exposed and rather hazardous for sailing ships, but you can trace a line all the way through Camperdown, Skipton and Beaufort to Avoca, and beyond to Dunolly, which had a population of 20,000 in 1868. There are branch routes via Cressy and Shelford to Geelong, and most of the way to Ballarat, via Lismore and Cape Clear.

Old Belfast (Port Fairy) is less clear, because of a large swamp just to the north, but start tracing from about 8 km from the town, and you'll appreciate the grandeur of the goldfields roads surveys. You can still go straight, with minor deviations, from Belfast to Glenorchy, north-west of Stawell, via Penshurst, Dunkeld and Halls Gap.

From Koroit, the line goes via Woolsthorpe, Hexham, Woorndoo, Streatham, near Beaufort, Raglan, Lexton and Talbot, to end up - where? Certainly Carisbrook,  east of Maryborough, but probably the intended destination was either Sandhurst (Bendigo) or perhaps Castlemaine. If you drive this route, stop and look at one of the culverts: they're solid bluestone, an indication of the road's former importance.

Cast your eye a little further afield, to Robe in South Australia: you'll find a suspiciously straight line coming in via Penola, Dergholm and Vasey, headed straight for Ballarat. Many Chinese gold-seekers came this way, to avoid a tax upon being landed in Victoria. One obvious problem, though: the southern Grampians got squarely in the way.

Between Ballarat and Bendigo, surveyors surveyed roads from absolutely everywhere to everywhere else. Some are quite obvious, though little used: the old Dunolly-Bealiba Road, for example, or the former St Arnaud-Wedderburn Road. It takes a keener eye, however, to spot the original road, from the crest of the Great Divide, near Woodend, directly across the hills to Daylesford, most of which is still there.

Intrigued? Take that ruler and map again, place one end on Bendigo, and rotate it to another old mining centre, Beechworth in the north-east. Back in the days when Bendigo was still Sandhurst, and Beechworth known as Mayday Hills, you went from one to the other by a different route to today's highways and freeways.

Branching off the McIvor Highway just east of Axedale, the ghost road is first the Axedale-Toolleen Road, then the Toolleen-Mount Camel Road. The view from the crest of the Camel Range is well worth a breather.

On the east side of the Northern Highway, the Mayday Hills Road is now Tait & Hamiltons Road. This track undulates through ironbark forest, and also passes Osicka's winery if you feel inclined towards a tipple.

This is one ghost road that goes to a ghost town as well: Whroo, 9 km south of Rushworth. Whroo has everything an old goldfield should - the remains of old puddling machines, a quaint cemetery, a hill that was literally blasted open in pursuit of the elusive metal. And of course, picnic areas, and an information booth.

As the Murchison-Whroo Road, or Old Whroo Road, our ghost road continues to Murchison, onto the Goulburn Valley Highway for a bit, then becomes the Murchison-Violet Town Road to Violet Town, long, flat, and straight, except for one hill in the middle.

And where did the ghost road go from there? It appeared to join the Sydney Road up to somewhere near Winton, then cut across the Kelly Range and the Ovens Valley to Beechworth. But it's no good looking for the rest of it. The original crossing of the Ovens River has long gone, and highway and freeway works around Benalla have messed things up.

As I've mentioned Sydney Road, here's a trick question: how many Sydney Roads are there, or were there? Most people would say two, the old highway and the freeway. The right answer is three, but where's the third?.

The Old Old Sydney Road is easy to find, once you know where to look. Start off on the Tullamarine Freeway, and turn off at the Mickleham Road exit. Nothing ghostly about Broadmeadows, lots of traffic, shopping centres, and roundabouts.

But turn right on Fawkner Street, and along Ardle Street, taking a closer look. The giveaways are the Westmeadows Tavern, and the Catholic church on the hill, both much older than all the surrounding buildings. For this, in the 1850s, was Sydney Road, as was Mickleham Road. The deviation was needed to get bullock drays through the creek valley.

Heavy traffic continues to Donnybrook Road, then it all turns off, you go straight ahead on the gravel, and this really is the Old Sydney Road, it says so on the map. It also goes over a well known hill from some years ago, Pretty Sally.

But not the Pretty Sally so long feared by truckies, the Old Sydney Road really goes right over the top of the hill, before joining up with the modern-day Northern Highway. For other old things of interest, drop in at the Tram Museum just up the road at Bylands.

Kilmore, Victoria's oldest inland settlement, surveyed in 1838, is in no danger of becoming a ghost town, but it's a fine old place, with many historic buildings of bluestone, such as the court house. North of Kilmore, turn right on the Broadford Road, then watch out for Three Chain Road on the left, which is the Old Sydney Road in yet another guise.

It becomes briefly sealed crossing the Broadford-Glenaroua Road (Glen-a-where-a?), gravel again to the Broadford-Sugarloaf Road, and more gravel, as Scott's Road, past Sugarloaf Creek. The final section, after the Tallarook-Pyalong Road, describes perfectly why you can't follow it all the way through to Seymour: Ashes Bridge Road, ashes is exactly what became of the Sugarloaf Creek crossing. There's also a Burnt Bridge Road on the Tooborac Road into Seymour.

There are only two Sydney Roads from Seymour to Avenel, the old highway and the freeway, but three again for most of the way from Avenel to Euroa. The ghost road, the oldest Sydney Road, runs beside the railway line through Monea, a bit of a ghost town itself, Locksley, which has a bit more life still in it, and finally Longwood, which has a shop and pub.

For a long way, through Euroa, Violet Town and Benalla, roadworks have obiliterated most traces of earlier routes, but take a close look at Glenrowan for something other than Ned Kelly. Sure enough, there's a ghost road again: the oldest Old Sydney Road north of the rail line (and where the Kelly pub siege really took place), a later one on the south side, and the freeway again south of that.

Ghost roads couldn't possibly follow straight lines across the rugged hills of Gippsland. True, but one of them, the Old Gippsland Road, starting in suburban Lilydale, certainly had a good try, following a straight, but violently hilly, route to near Woori Yallock, where the intrepid surveyors seemed to have come to their senses.

A little further south, you can find the two ends of McDonalds Track, the original route from Westernport to the Latrobe Valley, but it seems to disappear in the middle. From Port Albert, established as Gippsland's earliest port in 1841, you can certainly trace on a map a straight line to Rosedale, but in practice, the area around Carrajung and Gormandale being rather hilly, the actual road, the Hyland Way, takes a bit of a wiggle.

The best ghost roads in Gippsland are to one of its best ghost towns, old Walhalla. Its population is a mere 12 today, but a century ago, it was more like 3000, mostly due to that magic word, gold. How did you get there? Parts of three ghost roads to Walhalla survive, though accessiblity to them varies.

The most used route, for over 50 years, came from Toongabbie, north of Traralgon. It went, and still goes, up into the hills just north of the town, runs due west for a while, then turns right down to Bruntons Bridge. This is quite a road, passing through, among other things, a spot called Ostler's Camp, which is still visible if you know where to look, and Flourbag Cutting, so named because in days of old, a horse with a flour-bag either side of the saddle was about all could get through.

But the problem is, you can't get through now either, at least in a car or 4WD. Bruntons Bridge, an impressive structure of cast iron built in the 1870s, has had the decking taken off, and is pedestrian only. So if you really want to see the famous Little Joe Road and Happy Go Lucky, you have to go back up to the Erica Road and right around via the Moe Road to get to the other side of the bridge.

While you're over at Erica, take a look at the second Walhalla ghost road, at Moondarra, 5 km south of Erica. This Old Coach Road (gravel, needless to say), crosses Jacobs Creek to the Tyers Road. Turn left, drive north a kilometre, then turn right to Coopers Creek. The old Copper Mine hotel has been recently (and beautifully) restored, but Walhalla-bound stage-coaches were passing through here as early as 1880.

The third and final ghost road to Walhalla starts much further away, about 5 km south-west of Willow Grove, on the Old Sale Road, a ghost road in its own right, running from near Drouin to Moe. Wilkes Road looks like any other farm track, running from the Old Sale Road north-east to the Hill End Road.

But the significance of this road is not what's there today, but what was there 140 years ago. Shady Creek, today a pair of poplars beside a plank bridge, was in the 1860s the site of a hotel, and an important staging post on what was then the only Sale Road, and Wilkes Road was where Cobb & Co. headed for Walhalla.

But there's a problem just the other side of the Hill End Road. Well, Blue Rock Reservoir wasn't there in 1865. There are ways around everything. Turn left at Hill End Road down to Willow Grove, turn left again at Blue Rock Dam Road, then follow Blue Rock Road north, on the east side of the reservoir, to Old Tanjil.

Blue Rock Road joins onto Stuart Mine Road, which in turn joins onto Tanjil Bren Road, but you need to keep an eye open for Beynon Creek Road, which runs down to Western Tyers.

Where to now? That's a bit of a mystery, as there's no trace of any road direct from here to Parkers Corner, about 8 km due east. Meantime, you can drive south-east through Telbit Crossing to Collins Siding, then north to Erica and Parkers Corner, turning right to Rawson.

After Rawson is the fun bit. Follow Old Depot Track into the forest, turn right, and down the long, steep spur, straight across the Moe Road,  through Platina all the way down to Coopers Creek. Cross the Thomson River at the ford, then go up, up, up, all the way to the Bruntons Bridge Road, 300 vertical metres above the river. Turn right if you'd like to see the other side of Bruntons Bridge.

Otherwise, follow the stage-coach, turn left, still climbing to old Happy Go Lucky, and Happy Hill beyond, then down, down, down, all the way into Walhalla, the famous `Little Joe' Road that took so much effort to build, and is so little used today, coming out on the Moe Road (finally) just above the railway station, which looks like the one in old photos, but actually isn't.

Why did stage-coaches take such a convoluted and difficult route to reach the old gold town? (Chances were the horses were totally wrecked by the time they arrived) Well, the Moe Road, which most Walhalla visitors use today, didn't exist in more or less its present form until the 1890s. Walhalla was founded in 1863, so for at least 30 years, either the track from Toongabbie, the road via Coopers Creek, or this incredible road from Shady Creek, were the only ways to reach the `city in the hills'.

Ghost roads are a lot of fun, ghost roads are in many parts of Victoria, and ghost roads are often a key to some fascinating local history. Explore them, enjoy them, and be surprised at what you find.

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