Jupiter Creek Diggings

In 1868, Henry Sanders and Thomas Plane found payable alluvial gold in the scrub at Jupiter Creek, and within months around 1,200 people were living on the new diggings. The easy gold was gone by the end of that first year, but reef mining carried on into the twentieth century, and the Echunga goldfields ultimately yielded an estimated 30,000 ounces — the most productive goldfield South Australia ever had.

Today the diggings are a State Heritage area, and a marked heritage trail of two to three kilometres loops through the stringybark bush past the evidence: the brick chimney of the Beatrice Gold Mining Company from 1869, a sluicing dam built in 1906, the New Phoenix Tunnel of 1930, and countless shafts and mullock heaps slowly being reclaimed by the scrub. Interpretive signs along the way explain what you are looking at, and the walking is easy enough for older kids.

Fossicking is still permitted with hand tools — pans and sieves, no machinery — and on weekends you will often find hopeful prospectors swirling gravel in the creek. Whether or not you find colour, it is a strangely atmospheric place: quiet bush that once held a canvas town of a thousand people. The story of the rush is told in our piece on gold fever in the Hills.