On the 20th of August 1860, Robert O'Hara Burke, 39 years of age and the superintendent of police in Castlemaine, led an expedition of 16 men out of Melbourne with the ambition of being the first persons to cross the continent from south to north.
The idea was to open up a route by which the new-fangled invention of the telegraph line could be connected via Java to Europe, to explore whether there existed a large inland sea, and to discover a possible route for a railway.
Together with William John Wills, 26 years of age, a Doctor and Surveyor, they set out from Menindee near Broken Hill on their ill fated expedition.
A base camp was setup at Cooper's Creek, and a lead party consisting of Burke, Wills, King and Gray pushed on and succeeded in reaching the Gulf of Carpentaria in February 1861. With supplies running short the return journey was tough, so much so that Gray passed away on April 17. On April 21 the remaining three members staggered into the moonlit camp on the Cooper, where they found the warm ashes of a fire and, carved on the trunk of a coolibah tree, the words "Dig. 3ft. N.W. April. 21 1861".
Wills and King dug up meat, rice, flour, sugar and a letter from depot party leader William Brahe who said that, since no one had arrived with further supplies from Menindee, he was turning back. Brahe had waited four months — a month longer than his orders. He had left just nine hours before Burke, Wills and King returned.
Had Burke's men not been so depleted, they might have caught up with the support party. Burke felt they had no chance on the mostly waterless track to Menindee and made the disastrous decision not to pursue them. Burke and Wills both perished in June 1861, and only King survived after meeting up with Aborigines, who looked after him until a search party turned up on September 15.
The "Dig Tree" still grows beside a billabong on Nappa Merrie Station and is now a national monument and popular tourist destination.
Castlemaine built Victoria's first memorial to Burke and Wills, an obelisk hewn from local Harcourt granite, and erected on top of a small hill in the town.
A procession of more than 2000 people marched to the hill for the inauguration of the monument on the 1st of July of the year of its erection by public subscription.
Let (abcd) = the year of the monument's erection.
Our next stop is located a scant 360m away, but many millions of years earlier at S 37° 03.[920-ab] E 144° 13.[299+cd].
Here you will find a geological phenomenon that dates back to the Ordovician Period (about 450 million years ago), when the Castlemaine area was under a shallow sea.
During this period beds of clay, silt and sand gradually built up.
Sometimes layers that were deposited in shallow water slipped and moved into deeper water in an underwater avalanche.
This underwater movement of sediments, called turbidity currents, deposit sediments, called turbidites, in layers about 30cm thick, separated by a thin layer of fine-grained rock, formed by the slow settling of material suspended in the water.
Sediments harden to form sedimentary rock, sand deposits form sandstone, and clay and mud form mudstone and shale.
About 400 million years ago (in the Devonian Period), molten rock welled up, without reaching the surface. This rock cooled and solidified to form granodiorite (granite). The sedimentary rock near the granodiorite was also altered by exposure to this extreme heat. Sandstone was changed to quartzite (quartz), and mudstone and shale to slate and hornfels (lime silicates).
Hot solutions carrying quartz filled cracks in the rocks, and gold was sometimes deposited with the quartz.
The rocks in this area were subjected to pressure from the east, which caused them to fold and break. Upward folds are called anticlines, and downward folds are called synclines, while breaks in the strata are called faults.
This is the most famous of the local anticlines, and more information can be found in the "Geological features of the Castlemaine District" leaflet, available from the local tourist information centre.
Let (efgh) = the year that this fold was disclosed.
Continue on to our third stop, which is located 1.7km away at S 37° 04.[424-ef] E 144° 14.[247+gh].
During the gold rush of 1851-52 it is thought that there were some 25,000 people on the Mount Alexander diggings, living in shanty towns of canvas tents which housed stores, the first school at Castlemaine (1852), dwellings, sly-grog shops and even an office of the Bank of NSW (also 1852).
It was around this time that a local confectionary maker started producing what was to become a true aussie icon, and by 1853 he was selling it in paper cups from a tent on the diggings. It is still being manufactured today by his descendants.
His given names were Thomas Shinkfield, but what was his surname ?
Let (k) = the number of letters in his surname.
Returning to the present time, our fourth stop on this rocky journey is located 415m away at S 37° 04.[538-gk] E 144° 14.[545+hk].
Here you will find a classic example of what can be achieved when the local council offers a grant of around $20,000 to the artistic talent that is bursting from this great city.
Designed by artists, and thankfully assisted by a collaboration of local primary school children, this work is known as "River Art" and was built on a flood plain where the rushing waters of the next 100-year flood would enhance its dynamic properties (imagine the chained objects being tossed about in the river's mighty flow).
Unfortunately, due to safety concerns and council regulations, the central element, originally intended to stand an impressive 50cm high, was reduced to ground level. This change from the artist's original design has perhaps destroyed any chance of the work's heady promise being fulfilled, but we all live in breathless anticipation of the next river flooding, and I, for one, will be present to witness what I hope will be a modern-day equivalent of turbidity currents; a single layer of turbidites would see me well satisfied.
Let (m) = the number of objects that are (or were) chained the centre element of this breath taking monument to grant-based artistry.
Our final stop on this time-travelling journey takes us 36 years beyond the discovery of alluvial gold, and is located 1.5km away at S 37° 04.[417-bm] E 144° 15.[535+dm].
The year is 1887, and by this time the alluvial (river deposited) gold had long since petered out. Although the area lacked the gold-rich quartz reefs of other centres, the late 1850s saw several substantial mines were being worked, and in the Chewton area many small parties of miners sank shafts to the reefs over the next 20 years.
Water was often used to power a stamp battery for extracting gold from ore produced by the mines, and the structure present here was the largest of its kind in Victoria, perhaps even the largest in the southern hemisphere.
Let (pqrs) = the year this magnificent water driven structure was abandoned in favour of a compound steam battery engine.
The cache is a 1 litre Sistema container hidden in the traditional manner, and is located 210m away at S 37° 04.[236-pq] E 144° 15.[551+rs].