Skipton

Sheep town

From the public record: the newspapers on Trove, the heritage listings, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the Department of Education’s school history. Where the sources disagree, the page says so. The year beside each part is the year it turns on. G. C. Notman’s Out of the Past (1939), written for the town’s centenary, and the district’s other histories are not online and were not read; this page is no substitute for them.

1. Before 1838

   Wadawurrung Country

   Skipton is on Wadawurrung Country, inside the area of the Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, its Registered Aboriginal Party. In the Corporation’s own words: “We acknowledge that our Ancestors nurtured and cared for Wadawurrung Country for tens of thousands of years.”

   No Wadawurrung name for the town or the creek was found in anything the Corporation has published. A colonial surveyor’s list gives words for the hills and the creek here; they are not the Corporation’s, and this page does not print them. Anything more is theirs to say.

   From Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation and the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council, Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation.

2. 1839

   The run on Emu Creek

   Sheep came first. A run was taken up here in 1838 by one account and 1839 by another, and the town keeps 1839: it held its centenary in 1939, and a cairn in Stewart Park marks the year. As it was told in 1937, William Wright, James Montgomery and Alexander Anderson took up a run they called Bamgamie, “their first homestead … just where Skipton stands, the woolshed being on the site of the police station.”

   In 1845 the partners fell out. Anderson kept the land west of the creek and called it Baangal; Wright and Montgomery went upstream, and in 1853 sold out to William Mitchell, whose station was Langi Willi. The novelist Henry Kingsley stayed at Langi Willi in the 1850s, and in 1883 Rolf Boldrewood wrote that Geoffrey Hamlyn was written there. The Australian Dictionary of Biography gives Kingsley only house-room.

   On the plan: 1, The 1839 cairn.

   From Victorian Places, Skipton, the Victorian Heritage Database, Mooramong (H2442), the Australasian, 7 August 1937, Rolf Boldrewood in the Australasian, 24 March 1883, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Henry Kingsley and Visit Great Ocean Road, Stewart Park.

3. 1852

   At Wright and Montgomery’s station

   The first town lots were sold at Geelong in April 1852, “Skipton … parish Skipton, at Emu Creek”, and that August the Government Gazette fixed a village at “Skip-ton, at Wright and Montgomery’s station, on the Emu Creek.” Who chose the name is not recorded. It is thought to be after Skipton in Yorkshire, whose Old English name means sheep town, and at the centenary the mother town sent a telegram.

   By 1855 the Eagle Inn stood beside “Wright and Montgomery’s bridge” on the road from Geelong to Portland Bay; it burnt down in April 1857. The Skipton Hotel was open by March 1858. In 1860 the Star’s correspondent found Skipton “remarkable for nothing in particular”: about thirty houses, a small brick church, a stone pub and a wooden one, a post office “where anything may be bought” and two blacksmiths. Then he gave the town its answer: “you should see us in the shearing season”, with both hotels “filled with drunken shearers, shearing more sheep in those bars than they ever did in the shed”.

   On the plan: 2, The bridge.

   From the Argus, 21 April 1852, the Argus, 5 August 1852, Victorian Places, Skipton, the Age, 10 April 1939, the Geelong Advertiser, 25 September 1855, the Star, 30 April 1857, the Argus, 2 July 1858 and the Star, 23 August 1860.

4. 1858

   The minister and the school

   The Presbyterians had trustees for a church site by July 1857, and called a minister, the Rev. T. M’Aulis. In January 1858 he was leading two horses when they bolted; their tethers caught round him and he was dragged nearly a mile, and he died the next day. “The reverend gentleman who was much respected retained his senses to the last.”

   The church opened a school on 1 January 1858, by the Department of Education’s record, with Ebenezer Blair and 22 pupils. It closed in 1864 for want of money, and that October opened again in a bluestone common school that the district had built, with 59 on the roll. (Victorian Places dates the school from 1864.) Before any of it, an old resident remembered, Mrs Parsons gathered the township’s children, and the punishment was the pantry, where they ate the jam.

   In 1888 the school moved to a red-brick building “on a high and well-drained position” on the east side of town. It is School No. 582, and it is there still.

   On the plan: 3, School No. 582.

   Fig. 2

   

   From the Age, 30 July 1857, the Age, 22 August 1857, the Argus, 13 January 1858, the Department of Education, Skipton Primary School No. 582, the Star, 26 November 1864, the Skipton Standard, 19 June 1915, the Camperdown Chronicle, 27 June 1888 and Victorian Places, Skipton.

5. 1859

   The Skipton show

   On 6 April 1859, with Francis Ormond in the chair, the new society at Skipton adopted its rules and changed its name to the Western District Agricultural Society, “it being considered that the word Skipton made it too local”. The first races were run the next day, and the first show on 7 September. (The Australian Dictionary of Biography has Ormond helping to found an association at Skipton in 1855.)

   For fifteen years Skipton’s shows and ram sales “drew breeders and buyers from all parts of Australia and New Zealand”, as the Australasian remembered in 1930, and the sheep sold there stocked the Riverina and Queensland. At the 1860 show J. L. Currie’s 426 two-tooth rams went at £3 14s to £4 15s each. The shows ran until 1873 or so, and then the main show went to Ballarat.

   Fig. 3

   

   From the Geelong Advertiser, 12 April 1859, the Star, 14 September 1859, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Francis Ormond, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Thomas Shaw junior, Bell’s Life in Victoria, 16 April 1859, the Argus, 21 September 1860, the Australasian, 30 August 1930, Victorian Places, Skipton and the Weekly Times, 24 August 1918.

6. 1870

   Show day under water

   The show of 8 September 1870 drowned. Alexander Anderson had sent word to the town to get ready; by eleven the water was two or three feet deep round the Skipton Hotel, and by afternoon it was higher than anyone had seen it, and one side of the creek was cut off from the other. Senior-constable Hurley rode in and saved the government books, then tried to bring Mr and Mrs Allan out of their stone cottage. They would not leave, and he had to be dragged ashore on a rope.

   Forty-five years on, an old resident remembered Whitpaine’s hotel laid for a hundred at a guinea a head, people “floating in and out of doors on rafts, improvised from tables upturned”, and a youth who made £4 15s ferrying people across in a dray at half a crown each. “This was about the death-blow to the grand old Skipton Show.”

   The creek has come up again and again. In 1909 the town’s traffic went by boat. In January 2011 the gauge read 6.04 metres, the largest flood on record: the shops at the low end of Montgomery Street and thirty houses went under, and the town was split in two. Which flood was the biggest nobody can say, because 1909 was never measured. Since 2022 a mural on the highway bridge has been the town’s informal gauge.

   On the plan: 2, The bridge.

   From the Ballarat Star, 12 September 1870, the Argus, 10 September 1870, the Skipton Standard, 24 April 1915, the Skipton Standard, 1 May 1915, the Portland Guardian, 23 August 1909 and VICSES, Skipton Local Flood Guide.

7. 1872

   St Andrew’s

   On 13 December 1871 Alexander Anderson laid the foundation stone of a bluestone church with a silver trowel, to plans by Davidson and Henderson of Geelong: Gothic, fifty feet by thirty-four, with a spire of eighty feet. It opened on 15 September 1872, “one of the handsomest churches to be met with in the country districts of these colonies”, with carved gargoyles where the gables meet the spire. The heritage register asks, in brackets, whether they are kangaroos.

   Beside it the Russell Hall, a Sunday school built with £1,000 left by George Russell of Langi Willi because the old one “was getting out of repair, and it was also in the flood area”, opened on 20 May 1918. The church’s honour board went up the next year, and there are Sunday services still.

   On the plan: 4, St Andrew’s and the Russell Hall.

   Fig. 4

   

   From the Geelong Advertiser, 16 December 1871, the Ballarat Star, 20 September 1872, the Victorian Heritage Database, St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (H0484), the Skipton Standard, 25 May 1918 and the Skipton Standard, 18 October 1919.

8. 1874

   The men who shore it

   This was merino country. In 1880 Borriyalloak held the Goldsbrough Gold Cup for the most valuable bale of washed wool in the colonies, and its rams had fetched 200 guineas a head; Mooramong’s flock came from the Ercildoune sheep Anderson bought about 1854. In 1920 Miss E. Earles won the Skipton Standard’s essay prize with “I believe that no finer wool is produced anywhere than in the water shed of our ‘silver stream’—the Emu Creek.”

   The shearers came on foot. A. J. Sullivan ran away from home near Ballarat at sixteen, and in 1874 he and his younger brother signed on as learners at Baangal, A. M. Gardiner’s, at fourteen shillings a hundred. “We soon found we were ‘messers’ and not shearers.” Gardiner told them he was so delighted with their work “that we need not come near his place again, adding slyly that if we did he would send for the police.” Sullivan wrote it down in 1922, after twenty-five years of lecturing, on Dickens among others, with “not a semblance of an education”.

   At the 2021 Census sheep farming was still what more people in the district worked at than anything else.

   Fig. 5

   

   From the Leader, 14 August 1880, the Skipton Standard, 10 January 1920, A. J. Sullivan in the Skipton Standard, 24 June 1922, the Skipton Standard, 1 July 1922 and ABS 2021 Census QuickStats, Skipton.

9. 1877

   Two shires and a bridge

   Mount Emu Creek was a boundary: from 1863 until the 1990s Ripon Shire had the west bank and Hampden the east, and the town had a Ripon side and a Hampden side. In March 1873 the townspeople met Anderson behind the brass band, took the horses out of his carriage and pulled it into town themselves, and read him an address as “the founder of Skipton”. In August 1877 the two shires opened a new bridge of bluestone and Mount Cole timber on the site of the first, of 1847, and Anderson broke a bottle of champagne on the centre pier. The councillors lunched at the Skipton Hotel “amidst a terrific dust storm”.

   The court house came from the Fiery Creek diggings at Beaufort, where it had stood in the Government camp since 1856; it was moved here in 1867, by the heritage register, which counts it one of the very few portable buildings left from the gold rush. (Victorian Places dates it 1857.) The court closed on 1 January 1983, and the Historical Society keeps it now, by the police stables of 1890 in Stewart Park. The Mechanics’ Institute opened on the creek bank in December 1880.

   On the plan: 2, The bridge; 5, The court house; 6, The Mechanics’ Hall.

   Fig. 6

   

   From Victorian Places, Ripon Shire, Victorian Places, Hampden Shire, the Ballarat Star, 8 March 1873, the Geelong Advertiser, 20 August 1877, the Victorian Heritage Database, Skipton Court House (H1485), Victorian Places, Skipton, the Auditor-General, Court Closures in Victoria (1986), Visit Great Ocean Road, Stewart Park and the Ballarat Star, 24 December 1880.

10. 1887

    V.R. in pines

    The trees were the town’s own doing. The water reserve was planted first, and in 1886 the schoolchildren and their friends planted the elms along Montgomery Street. For the Queen’s jubilee in 1887 the reserve was extended, and the children of Skipton and Spring Hill planted pines ten feet apart in the letters and figures “V.R.—1887”, the trees the gift of Robert Chirnside of Carranballac. On 2 February 1894 the Governor, Lord Hopetoun, opened it as the Royal Jubilee Park.

    The Ripon side planted its own main street the next year, “but through neglect only one of the 17 trees survived”. In 1901 the Ripon council fenced and planted Stewart Park, over “the old quarry holes and ragged appearance” at that end of town. (The visitor guide says the park was made in the 1980s from the police paddocks.)

    On the plan: 7, Jubilee Park.

    From the Skipton Standard, 17 April 1915, the Argus, 3 February 1894, the Ballarat Star, 3 February 1894 and Visit Great Ocean Road, Stewart Park.

11. 1916

    The railway

    In 1911 a parliamentary committee heard that carters were so scarce at harvest that teams had come from Port Fairy, at up to 1s 4d a bag, and that farmers were turning more and more to sheep. The bill passed in 1912. Choosing the station site, the minister tried to keep off the recreation reserve, which the Hampden council “fought hard” to keep.

    The first train ran over the line on Monday 17 January 1916, and the minister opened it the next day. “Skipton was en fete”; the schoolchildren had a free trip to Linton, and for some “it was the first experience … of having a ride in a railway carriage”. A Linton writer had said only two farmers would use it. The Skipton Standard suggested that “only two Skipton farmers might be carting their grain to Linton.” (Victorian Places dates the line from 1918.)

    By 1932 one train a week ran beyond Linton, and by 1939, the Age said, the passenger trains had stopped; other accounts have them, or a school train, into the 1970s. The line closed on 4 December 1986. It is the Ballarat–Skipton Rail Trail now, 54 kilometres back through Linton, Scarsdale and Smythesdale, and it ends at the station site.

    On the plan: 8, The station site; 9, The recreation reserve.

    From the Ballarat Star, 12 June 1911, the Skipton Standard, 20 February 1915, the Evening Echo, 17 January 1916, the Evening Echo, 18 January 1916, the Skipton Standard, 22 January 1916, VicSig, the Skipton line, Victorian Places, Skipton, the Argus, 18 October 1932, the Age, 20 July 1939 and Rail Trails Australia, Ballarat–Skipton Rail Trail.

12. 1918

    The avenue

    Frank Holford Williams of Banongill, who had been to school in Skipton, was killed at Gallipoli on 7 August 1915, aged eighteen years and seven months, and the flags at the Mechanics’ Hall and the school flew at half-mast. William John Angus, a carpenter, was wounded at Passchendaele and died at Boulogne the next day, 14 October 1917, aged twenty. His family gave a chair to the Presbyterian church in his memory.

    On 31 August 1918 the town planted an avenue of honour: 156 elms on the road to Streatham, each tree-guard with a soldier’s name, a flag and a twig of wattle, and wreaths on the guards of the dead, “and many a tear was shed”. Eleven more went in that September. The war heritage inventory counts 169 trees and a new avenue planted about 2000; where the old one stood is not recorded.

    In 1925 Lord Stradbroke opened a bush nursing hospital, built for £2,000 as the district’s memorial to its soldiers. The war memorial in Anderson Street carries a roll of the soldier settlers who took up estates here after the Second World War.

    On the plan: 10, The war memorial.

    Fig. 7

    

    From the Skipton Standard, 11 September 1915, the Australian War Memorial, DA09432, the Skipton Standard, 7 September 1918, the Skipton Standard, 14 September 1918, the Victorian War Heritage Inventory, Skipton Avenue of Honour, the Herald, 21 November 1925 and the Victorian War Heritage Inventory, Skipton War Memorial.

13. 1921

    “Pudden”

    Henry Bolte was born at Ballarat East in 1908, and his parents moved to Skipton. His childhood was the Ripon Hotel, which his father kept until 1921; the larger Skipton Hotel, which the Boltes bought from the Warrens that year; and the State school, where he topped seventh grade in 1920. He was “Pudden” or “Pud”, for his build, and swam with his friends in the “Big Hole” of Mount Emu Creek.

    In the Depression he worked in shearing sheds and joined the AWU. He played cricket and football for Skipton, was “a keen two-bob punter” and the racing club’s secretary, and in 1934 married his neighbour Jill Elder. He became Premier of Victoria in 1955, the longest-serving there has been, and in 1963 came back to open Skipton’s new memorial hospital.

    Fig. 8

    

    From the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Sir Henry Bolte, the Department of Education, Skipton Primary School No. 582, the Victorian War Heritage Inventory, Skipton Memorial Hospital and Rail Trails Australia, Ballarat–Skipton Rail Trail.

14. 1938

    Mooramong

    Anderson kept a third of his run, called it Mooramong, and in 1873 began a timber house on it. It went to the Stodarts in 1889 (the Leader had it in other hands by 1880), and in 1926 or 1928 to Scobie Mackinnon, bought for him by his father. In London in 1937 Scobie met the Canadian silent-film star Claire Adams, Rin Tin Tin’s leading lady in Where the North Begins, and they married three weeks later.

    In March 1938 they came to Mooramong and made it “a jazz-age folly with Art Deco cocktail bar, swimming pool, games room, and a bathroom reminiscent of a film star’s dressing-room”; the pool was the first private heated one in Victoria. They were life governors of the Skipton hospital. Scobie died in 1974 and Claire in 1978, and she left the rest of her estate to the National Trust for a wildlife sanctuary at Mooramong. It has been closed since the fire of January 2026, which spared its buildings.

    Fig. 9

    

    From the Victorian Heritage Database, Mooramong (H2442), the Leader, 14 August 1880, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Scobie Mackinnon and the National Trust, Mooramong.

15. 1940

    The platypus

    In 1860 there were blackfish and eels in the big waterholes. The eels came up from the Hopkins, and a naturalist who had known the creek nearly thirty years wrote in 1909 that a night’s fishing once always brought a fair take of blackfish, before the carp, tench, perch and trout. In 1940 Ernest Austin of Borriyalloak, forty-nine years on the creek, wrote to the naturalist David Fleay: “In six miles of the creek I should say there are about 20 platypuses, and one generally finds pairs of them in the largest holes.”

    There are platypus in the creek still. The platform in Stewart Park, by the highway bridge, looks out over the water.

    On the plan: 11, The platypus platform.

    From the Star, 23 August 1860, the Australasian, 13 March 1909, the Australasian, 26 October 1940 and Visit Great Ocean Road, Stewart Park.

16. 1944

    Fire

    On 6 February 1914 a fire from Mawallok, “probably caused by the sun’s rays focussing on a piece of broken glass”, burnt across the country between Skipton, Beaufort and Carngham, and a man died of his burns. On 14 January 1944 Skipton was “practically surrounded by fire”; about 300,000 sheep were lost in its district and the districts round it, and Mooramong lost its shearing shed.

    On 9 January 2026, a day of catastrophic fire weather, a grassfire started north of Streatham and ran east on westerly winds of more than 80 km/h, through Carranballac and along the Glenelg Highway, and burnt south of the township: about 20,000 hectares. The first counts of what was lost disagree, from more than ten homes to 59 buildings, eighteen of them houses. The town met in the Mechanics’ Hall, and by the end of March more than 690 people had been to the recovery hub. A book and a documentary about the fire are to be launched at the hall on 24 October 2026.

    From the Lismore, Derrinallum and Cressy Advertiser, 11 February 1914, the Argus, 15 January 1944, the Age, 18 January 1944, the Victorian Heritage Database, Mooramong (H2442), the Ararat Incident Control Centre’s community newsletter, 13 January 2026, the Courier, 12 January 2026, the Hepburn Advocate, 13 January 2026, Corangamite Shire, “Bushfire recovery continues across Shire”, 31 March 2026 and Corangamite Shire, Skipton fire 2026.

17. 2021

    From thirty houses

    Skipton had 121 people at the census of 1861 and barely more than 150 until the 1890s. It had 590 by 1911, and has stayed near five hundred since. In April 1939 it kept its centenary with three arches over the roads, a fancy-dress procession, a ball and a history, G. C. Notman’s Out of the Past; that July the electric light was on its way from Ballarat.

    At the 2021 Census 609 people lived in the Skipton locality, which reaches out to Langi Willi and Banongill, and 469 in the town itself. Their median age was 53.

    From Victorian Places, Skipton, the Argus, 5 April 1939, the Age, 20 July 1939, ABS 2021 Census QuickStats, Skipton and ABS 2021 Census QuickStats, Skipton (urban centre).