Welcome to Linton: a town with a fascinating history as one of Victoria’s Gold Rush Towns. Before you begin your tour, here is a very brief history of Linton.
Aboriginal people had inhabited this country for about 30,000 years, and at the time of the Europeans’ arrival, it was the Carninje balug clan of the Wathawurrung tribe who lived, as they had done for thousands of years, in the country that is now occupied by Linton.
European settlement in the Linton area dates back to 1839, when Mary and Joseph Linton and their three young daughters arrived from Scotland, and established a pastoral run comprising of 15,000 acres which they called Emu Hill. You should be able to view a photograph of Mary Linton taken in
In 1855, gold was discovered on the northern portion of the Emu Hill pastoral run and within months, there were hundreds of men and women of many different nationalities there, including many Chinese, digging holes, felling trees, erecting tents, and creating a settlement where before there had just been a forest of eucalypts. This became known as ‘Linton’s Diggings’, which subsequently became ‘Old Linton’s’ when a new township was built on Surface Hill (the hill between present-day Gillespie and Clyde Streets) in 1860.
Linton remained an important town in the region long after the gold ran out. Although Linton was always regarded as a steady producer of gold up to the 1880s, production declined into the twentieth century. The town’s largest ever official population was 1,969 people recorded in 1861.
