Best 22 Real Estate Agents In Avoca [2025]

Avoca Suburb Overview

Avoca is a town in the Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia, 71 kilometres north west of Ballarat. It is one of two main towns in the Pyrenees Shire, the other being Beaufort to the south. At the 2006 census, Avoca had a population of 951.

The town stands in the gently undulating basin of the Avoca River, which rises in the Pyrenees Ranges to the west. To the south, the region is bounded by low hills of the Great Dividing Range;eastwards, the basin ends in a dry forested rise;to the north the Avoca River runs slowly through the plains of the Wimmera before petering out in swamps near the Murray. The town and river were named after Avoca, the village and River Avoca in County Wicklow, Ireland.

The region takes in an area of about 200 square kilometres, and includes the villages of Redbank, Natte Yallock, Rathscar, Bung Bong, Lamplough, Amphitheatre, Percydale, Moonambel, and Warrenmang. A few miles to the northeast, bare paddocks mark the site of Homebush, once a flourishing mining village.

Avoca has many small businesses servicing the local community including 2 pubs, several cafes, a chemist, convenience store, 2 butchers, a supermarket, its own newspaper and a community bank. Its local business group has worked hard to gain new residents and businesses over recent years, with their efforts starting to pay off.

The explorer and surveyor Thomas Mitchell was the first European recorded to have travelled through the Avoca district. He found the area more temperate in climate and better watered than inland New South Wales, and he encouraged settlers to take up land in what he described as ” Australia Felix “.

The Blood Hole massacre occurred at Middle Creek, near Moonambel north of Avoca, at the end of 1839 or early 1840 killing an unknown number of Dja Dja Wurrung people.

By 1850 there were several large sheep runs, and pastoral settlement was well established.

Like Ballarat and many other Victorian towns, Avoca sprang into being suddenly in the 1850s with the discovery of gold. Gold was first found in Victoria in 1849 in the Pyrenees Ranges near Avoca. But it was not for another two years that the first discovery of any importance took place. In 1851 a shepherd called James Esmond found gold at Clunes, forty kilometres from present-day Avoca, setting off a gold rush to the region. In 1853 gold was found at Four Mile Flat, near Avoca, and the main lead at Avoca itself was opened up a few months later. By the beginning of December 1853, the population had increased from 100 to 2,200, and by June the following year, Avoca, with a population of 16,000, was regarded as one of Victoria’s more important gold rush districts.

With a Court, a police station, Post Office, gold wardens, churches, and schools, Avoca had established itself as an administrative centre. This was a crucial development in its survival as a town, for when the gold miners left their Avoca claims to travel to the new Dunolly rush in 1856, Avoca continued to serve as the focus of the region’s commercial and administrative life. With the Lamplough rush in 1859, miners returned to the Avoca district, and in that year rich deposits were also opened up at Homebush, established on the site of the 1853 Four Mile Flat rush. This discovery brought renewed activity to the district. The value of gold mining to the economy of the area may be seen in a single statistic: from 1859 to 1870 gold worth

Avoca’s economic basis was shifting rapidly from gold mining to agriculture. Many of the miners who had rushed the area in the 1850s and early 1860s settled and took up land. The big pastoral runs that had existed before the rushes were broken up for closer settlement. Mining continued to be an important source of employment, but for the last decades of the nineteenth century most miners no longer worked individually or in small teams but for larger companies working deep leads. Homebush, about ten kilometres from Avoca, was based almost entirely on company mines and flourished for several decades before these mines became uneconomical. Rural Victoria was hit particularly by the depression and drought of the 1890s. From 1895 the larger mines in the Avoca district closed and at the outbreak of World War I very few companies were still in operation.

Across Australia rural productivity was rising, partly through the development of agricultural machinery by implement makers such as Mackay and Shearer. Some rural areas in 1901 recorded five times the harvest yields of the 1890s, at a small fraction of the cost.

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