Members of the public have been invited to visit the Castlemaine Diggings and take a trip back to the gold rush of the late 1800s.
Parks Victoria said the area had a history much older and richer than the precious metal industry that briefly but dramatically occupied the landscape.
According to Parks Victoria Rangers, Ricki and Daikota Nelson (cousins) the landscape of the Dja Dja Wurrung Country is beautiful but still bears the scars inflicted during the gold rush.
Traditional Owners on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Ricki and Daikota work to protect and preserve Country and Aboriginal Heritage and part of this work involves looking for and documenting the extensive Aboriginal cultural heritage in the parks.
“At the time, the mining disrupted the landscape so much that one 19th-century visitor remarked that it looked like ‘a great cemetery in which all the graves had been opened and emptied of their contents’,” Ricki Nelson said.
“When you visit Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, you’ll see relics of the gold rush, from the Garfield Wheel to the Forest Creek Gold Diggings,” he said.
“Less visible, but no less dramatic, is the impact the gold rush had on Djaara people.”
Mr Nelson said the goldfields devastated much of Djaara Country with about 15 per cent of the topsoil removed through the process of gold mining, “leaving nothing but destruction on local ecosystems, cultural life and habitats”.
The Ranger said Djaara people were now working to heal their Country and to reverse what they knew as ‘upside-down Country’ – Country turned on its head by the gold diggings.
Mr Nelson said visitors could help in these efforts by looking to Aboriginal people as the leaders on regenerating natural and cultural landscapes and by learning the Aboriginal history of the areas they visited.
“Visitors should know the importance of interconnectedness of culture, the people and land,” he said.
“We’re woven together by spirit.
“If any one thing is impacted, whether it’s positive or negative, it affects all things,” Mr Nelson said.
Further information on Dja Dja Wurrung country can be accessed on the Djaara website at this PS News link.
