The Golden Triangle gold mining and gold mines in Victoria Australia
Goldmines in Victoria Australia.
Victoria is a southern state of Australia with an area unusually rich gold mining belt quite close to our Capital city of Melbourne.
Melbourne is built around Port Phillip Bay, with other major cities like Ballarat and Bendigo within an hour's drive inland from Melbourne all huge gold producers in the past.t
These areas provide a wonderful playground for those of us who like to pan for gold, seach for nuggets and investigate old gold mines.
Moliagul, between Bendigo and St Arnaud is famous as the site of the "welcome stranger" a single nugget found at Moliagul which weighed 69Kilos! Many others have been found since, but this was the biggest,
A lot of large nuggets probably remain at Moliagul. This is due to the problem metal detectors have registering signals correctly through the local ironstone.
Many of the goldmines in this part of Victoria produced tons of gold, with one mine alone producing more than 40 tonnes.
Moliagul was and still is an exciting place to find gold nuggets, and a friend of my father did just that for many years after retiring, and found quite a lot of gold around the area, enough to keep him and his girlfriend in a comfortable lifestyle.
Ballarat still has a working gold mine for tourists.
Mining near Walhalla
In Victoria the gold rush started in around 1850 and continued for more than 15 years, many declaring the end in 1866. Walhalla lasted till 1911.
Melbourne was to grow very rich from the goldrush, and many other "gold" cities like Ballarat and Bendigo had huge boosts to growth from all the mining activity in the golden triangle.
Walhalla is well to the southeast of Ballarat and Bendigo, but the area was very rich, and returned many thousands of ounces of gold too. The mountain and river views in this gold town are spectacular, as it is nestled in the river valley surrounded by mountains, and the town is very narrow due to the very narrow valley it is in.
Daylight hours are severely curtailed in the winter as the sun does not rise till late and sets early behind the mountains. Some wonderful and almost unknown mines are scattered right throughout this area, and it has been my privilege to have searched for gold throughout many of them.
More gold.
Starting from Walhalla there is gold all the way around Melbourne and even in some of the suburbs. For an exciting look inside an old goldmine area go to the link.
