Daylesford

Daylesford is a town located in the Shire of Hepburn, Victoria, Australia. It is a former goldmining town about 115 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. At the 2006 census, Daylesford had a population of 3,073.

The broader area around the town, including Hepburn Springs to the north, is known for its natural spring mineral spas and is is the location of over 80 per cent of Australia's effervescent mineral water reserve.

History

Prior to European settlement the area is thought to have been occupied by the Djadja Wurrung Aborigines. Pastoralists occupied the Jim Crow and Upper Loddon districts following white settlement in 1838. In 1848, Irish immigrant John Egan took up land on the future town site then known as Wombat Flat. He and a party of searchers found alluvial gold in 1851 on ground now covered by Lake Daylesford initiating the local gold rush. Other finds quickly followed. With the finding of alluvial gold a town site was surveyed and founded in 1852. Initially called Wombat, it was renamed Daylesford.

In 1859 around 3400 diggers were on the local diggings. The post office opened on the 1st of February 1858 and a telegraph office was opened in August 1859. Daylesford was declared a municipality in 1859 and a borough in the early 1860s.

By the 1860s the alluvial gold was exhausted and a shift to quartz reef mining began. This continued on and off into the 1930s. In later years Daylesford became associated as being a fashionable spa resort, but fell out of favour in the Great Depression.