History of the Germantown Streamside Reserve.

For thousands of years indigenous tribal groups lived in the North East of Victoria including the Yaitmathang, Pangerang,  Minjambuta, Duduroa, and Jaithamathang peoples. While there is limited knowledge of the culture and history of the first people of the Upper Ovens, it is well known that there were annual mountain gatherings of the tribes during the Bogong moth season. This event offered the opportunity for the tribes to interact with each other.

 

By the 1830s the indigenous people would have started to feel the devastating impact of foreign occupation of their land. Pastoralists such as John Hillas, took up an 85,000 acre run on the Ovens River from Myrtle Creek to where Eurobin is today. By the 1850s another group of European and Asian settlers entered into the picture with the onset of the gold rush era. People seeking gold started to travel from the goldfields near Omeo to the diggings at Beechworth and the Buckland Valley. A lot of these gold seekers started to spill over into the areas around what are now Germantown, Freeburgh, Bright, Wandiligong and Porepunkah and Harrietville.

 

The name Germantown developed as a result of German prospectors such as Ferdinand Blumer and Henry Traulsen setting up camp and working the alluvial gold deposits of the Ovens River and German Creek between Morse’s Creek (present day Bright) and Smoko O Creek (present day Smoko). By the 1860s, Germantown was settled by European and Chinese gold prospectors. They undertook extensive quartz reef and alluvial mining operations along the Reserve. Hotels, stores, grog shanties and a school were established by the diggers in the Germantown and Freeburgh area. A Chinese Joss house was built on the present site of the Bright Accommodation Park on the Alpine Highway. The Joss house was eventually demolished, but the location of the site can be identified today between two old Shaddock trees classified by the National Trust.

 

By 1880 the alluvial gold deposits started to run out. This resulted in the departure of many prospectors. However some of the gold diggers continued to live in the area. Gold mining continued up until 1940 utilizing 20th century industrial age technology such as the bucket dredge Maori Chief which operated near Woolshed Gully. Economic activity diversified into logging, cattle farming, the growing of fruit, nuts, tobacco and grapes. The descendants of those first European settlers are still with us today including the Blair’s and Lawler’s.

 

The impact of early mining in the present day Germantown Streamside Reserve can be viewed quite clearly by walking the several kilometres of walking tracks developed and maintained by the Friends of the Reserve and its partners.