Matlock, the mountain capital

In 1870 Anthony Trollope visited Gippsland and the notes he made on his journey from Sale and then up into the mountain goldfields are very entertaining. We’ll visit it some time in the future, but he passed through Matlock, our topic for the moment.

Matlock is said to have been at the highest altitude of any town in Victoria. Mount Matlock stands 1373 metres above sea level, and the town was pretty much on the summit. Certainly the winters were remarkably hard. It grew up on the Yarra Track, the road to Woods Point and the Jordan demanded by Melbourne commercial interests when Gippslanders were trying to get McEvoy’s Track up from Sale upgraded.

Of course, the merchants in Melbourne were fighting hard to have the Yarra Track as the main route into the goldfields, and they won.

Matlock, at first known as Emerald Hill, was on the junction where the Woods Point Track and the Yarra track separated. It was more of a ‘junction town’ than a mine town. The formal survey was carried out in February 1864, but the grand days were already starting to pass.

In 1867, when Matlock was already in decline the Yarra Track was remade to pass round the hill on which Matlock stood, instead of going over it, and with the local gold running out that was the end of Matlock’s growth. The 1873 fire destroyed nearly everything that was left and the rebuilding was on a new site.

The 1886 Municipal Gazetteer does not mention Matlock at all but it has a large entry for nearby Woods Point. Indeed, Woods Point was a borough, not part of a shire, with a population of about 562.

Not that all was doom and gloom. Matlock held the occasional race meeting on the very limited flat land below the two. Ashton’s Circus came to Matlock in 1866. There were the pubs and dance halls, of course, but there were also churches, small and rough though they might have been, with socials and suppers and dances.

Charles Perry, the Anglican Archbishop and his counterpart, Catholic Bishop John Goold both conducted services at Matlock while visiting the district and these would have been real highlights.

The first school in Matlock was No. 829, begun in 1865. The application for government aid to set up a proper school was made by Father Patrick Courtenay in June 1865, but instruction was already being carried out in a ‘hut’, though a wooden building about 13 metres by 6.5 was being built. William Kelly was the teacher, and the weekly fee was two shillings per pupil, a very large sum at the time.

Father Courtenay was passionately committed to education and started goldfields schools at Woods Point, Jericho, Raspberry Creek and Red Jacket. These schools lasted only as long as the gold, but at least the children had some schooling.

The Matlock school opened, at least officially, on 1 Jul 1866, but it had been operating since January in the Catholic Church. Michael Sheehy was the Head Teacher from 1 July and the net attendance was 48.

In November 1867 the correspondent (School Council Secretary in today’s terms) reported that a storm had blown the school to pieces and that classes were now being held in the Wesleyan Chapel

Headmaster Sheehy resigned at the start of 1878 and the Reverend Courtenay reported that the school could be considered defunct and it was officially closed. I gather that this was a Catholic School (with some friends in the Wesleyan congregation) because Rural School 58, to later become State School 1100, was also opened in Matlock in 1865, under Frederick Drake.

A weatherboard building of three rooms, with a shingle roof, was bought for 120 pounds, a very large sum, but everything in this mountain fastness had to be carried in my packhorse. When a new school was built in 1879, with two rooms attached as a residence for the Head Teacher, was 323 pounds. In 1892 it was closed but in 1893 it was opened again to work halftime with Red Jacket State School. In 1895 it closed again only to reopen 1898. It finally closed in 1911.

In 1873 a major bushfire destroyed the whole of Matlock, except for Donaldson’s Store – there is no mention of the schools being burned down in the official history above. The town was built fairly quickly, but on the site that was until then called Thackeray, which name thus disappeared.

The Post Office perhaps reflects the town’s history best. It opened for the first time on 21 July 1864 and lasted until 1934, watching over a steady decline. Wikipedia says that in 1930 there were only the Post Office and a wine saloon, a strange thing to find in what such as out of the way place then, It was reopened in 1956 when a big sawmill was set up at Matlock, but then closed again in 1970, though the mill lasted another five years.

A couple of explanations might be in order. The prospectors who first found gold in the area –William Gooley won a one hundred pound reward for finding the Woods Point gold in Golleys Creek in 1861 – worked the very bottoms of the gullies.

It was soon obvious that the gold was coming from the quartz reefs that formed the bedrock of the steep ridges and within just a few months reef mining became the ‘go’. We got names like The Jordan, Red Jacket, Jericho and so forth, and above it all, on the ridge, on the Yarra Track, sat Matlock.

The place names here were flexible. Emerald Hill became Matlock to distinguish it from the

Emerald Hill that became South Melbourne. A tiny settlement close to it on the west was called Toorak, believe it or not, but this became Thackeray when the government formalised things a little. When Matlock was burnt out the new Matlock was built at what was really Thackeray at the time. It hardly matters now.

It had the suburbs of Thackeray, which it swallowed up, Mutton Town, Harpers Creek and Alhambra.

Woods Point gold was first found in 1861 and within four or five years there were about fifty reef-mining companies calling Woods Point home. Matlock was surrounded by mines but few had a postal address of ‘Matlock’ because Matlock was high on the Great Divide. The Yarra Track had followed the Divide and that was Matlock’s raison d’etre more than the mines themselves. Nonetheless it was surrounded by mines and in a story yet to come I’ll try to sort all that out.

The story of the prospectors, and the transition to reef mining, and the stories of the countless mining companies in the area are worth another visit.

And now I’d like a little help. I know all about the destruction of the Warragul Clock Tower, one of the icons of my childhood, but I can find little or nothing on its building. If you know anything at all, I’d really appreciate your helping me out on this.