Buttlejorrk, Victoria
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Buttlejorrk Parish Victoria |
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 Buttlejorrk Parish
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| Coordinates | 37°34′44″S 144°40′41″E / 37.579°S 144.678°ECoordinates: 37°34′44″S 144°40′41″E / 37.579°S 144.678°E | ||||||||||||
| County | Bourke | ||||||||||||
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Buttlejorrk is a parish of the County of Bourke located to the west of Sunbury, in Victoria, Australia and a neighbourhood within the locality of Diggers Rest. It was named in 1839 by the surveyor William Darke. A township developed and was initially known as Aitken's Gap. By the 1890s it had commonly become known as Buttlejorrk. A Post Office opened on 5 September 1856 as The Gap, was renamed Buttlejork (sic) in 1875 and closed in 1919. One of the early settlers in the area was George Millett. George and his wife Suzanne established the Bald Hill Hotel, the first staging stop out of Melbourne on the road to the goldfields at Bendigo. The hotel was licensed in 1853 until 1907. The Aitken's Gap Gaol, now located in the forecourt of the Sunbury Police Station stood beside the hotel
It was reported in the Argus 21 October 1852- "Bushrangers at Aitken's Gap-Five armed and mounted bushrangers "bailed" up and robbed a gentleman riding in the neighbourhood of Aitken's Gap on Tuesday morning last about 11 o'clock". A settlement also grew at Aitken’s Gap, which was one of the key stages of the trip to the gold-fields. It was still a wild place in 1858 when traveller William Kelly arrived on the coach:- "Arrived at the top, it was a scene of extraordinary bustle and uproar, for it was then a special camping place for drivers and carriers, and the scores upon scores of horse drays and bullock-wagons that were preparing for a start, produced an amount of tumult, altercation, blasphemy, and compound abominations which would not find many readers even if I succeeded in reproducing it."
Why this spot was a staging-post is not clear. Perhaps it had to do with the achievement of the summit, and the end of the long haul that finished the ‘Keilor Plains’ stage of the journey. No doubt a spring of water, the branch of the Kororoit Creek which passed there, was vital.
However, when John Chandler and his horses arrived there "nearly famished" some years beforehand he had had to buy five buckets of water, at two shillings a bucket, at a shanty. Hotels (the Gap Inn, the Manchester and the Bald Hill) and stores were erected in the vicinity, and in 1854 the Government moved to formalise the township. The original Gap Inn and a store (in which a post office was established in 1856) were located centrally on a block of the main street on the Government’s later survey. Archaeological evidence remains of the Gap and Bald Hill inns. There were also burials behind the Aitkens Gap hotel; these may have been removed very early. Aitken’s Gap police station was by far the largest forage requirement in the whole of the Bourke District, indicative of its significance as a changing station for the gold escort. Together with most of the other wayside 1850s goldrush police stations, it was closed down in the early 1863 after the railway was opened to Bendigo. Most buildings were removed elsewhere, but the sturdy bluestone police lock-up has to remain. It survived in a deteriorated condition as a farm outbuilding until its removal and reconstruction in Sunbury in 1989. Its former site is now on a new house block; a bench associated with a former building appears to remain, along with a scatter of hand-made bricks that could have come from the chimney that had been added to it at a later date. It is likely that this site retains archaeological evidence of a seminal, ephemeral, and colourful event in Australia’s history. It may constitute rare evidence of an inter-town police station, an integral part of the main goldrush roads.
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Wikipedia