From the water-filled holes ground into the rock by indigenous people sharpening their tools over the centuries to the scars left in the earth by gold rush prospectors, central Victoria’s early history is deeply embedded in the landscape of Chewton’s Post Office Hill.
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In 2008 custodianship of that history was entrusted to the local community when the then Department of Sustainability and Environment handed responsibility for the site’s upkeep to the Post Office Hill Action Group.
Since then the volunteer group has worked tirelessly, weeding, revegetating and preserving the history of the area.
POHAG president Ian O’Halloran said some of the Aboriginal sites dated back thousands of years.
“The (Aboriginal) people that roamed around Mount Alexander and so on as they travelled, in some places they would have water holes and most of them would be ground out of the rock,” he said.
“They’d keep working and working and working and ultimately they’d become a water catchment for them.”
Fellow committee member John Ellis explained how even up until recently, the site was still a place of significance for many locals.
“Quite a few of the older people in Chewton, you talk to them about their childhood when they were coming to school here,” he said.
“They often talk about (how) it was a slow walk to school after rain because you could pick up the specks (of gold), they’d be visible.
“The history’s just too valuable to be let developed and just disappear so that was the reason for the public management.”
Despite a concerted push to bring younger families into the fold by actively involving the local primary school, illegal dumping on the former tip site remains an issue and POHAG recently took to Facebook to try to catch one of the latest culprits.
“Someone made the outrageous suggestion on Facebook – there were TV sets and microwave ovens there – to check and see if there’s any serial numbers as you might be able to track them down, which I don’t think is correct, but someone must have read that because they came and reclaimed the TVs and microwaves straight away, disappeared over night,” Mr Ellis said.
“The lounge suite was still there, no serial numbers on that.”
The Chewton Post Office has been proudly owned and managed by the local community for nearly a century.
“Back in the 1920s I think it was, the Postmaster-General’s Department decided it was going to close down the Chewton post office and the community got a bit uptight,” local John Ellis said.
Local businesses stumped up the money to buy the property on behalf of the community and from there it was passed on to the council before again being put up for sale following the amalgamations of the 1990s.
“The commissioners obviously had no use for the title and decided to sell it off and of course the community erupted, having bought it once,” Mr Ellis said.
“In their wisdom, (they) passed the title back to the Chewton community to own.