Town where the dead to living ratio is 80 to 1

The joke (if you can joke about dead people) goes that Walhalla Cemetery is so steep its ‘residents’ must have been buried standing up.

The Walhalla Cemetery. Image: Laura Waters

The joke (if you can joke about dead people) goes that Walhalla Cemetery is so steep its ‘residents’ must have been buried standing up.

The rumour is untrue but as I wander the cemetery’s narrow grassy terraces peppered with tree ferns and headstones, it is hard to comprehend how they managed to squeeze 1300+ graves into such a precipitous plot.

Equally surprising is that there are 1300 souls resting here anyway. This, in a town that (at time of writing) has just 16 permanent residents. I’ll do the math for you: that’s 80 dead people for every one alive. Not quite a ghost town (or is it? wooo!), but almost.

The Walhalla Cemetery. Image: Laura Waters

Between 1863 and 1914, around 3,500 flocked to Walhalla, 2.5 hours east of Melbourne, for a gold rush that extracted over 50 tonnes of shiny stuff – worth about $3 billion in today’s money. Squeezed within the deep folds of a Gippsland valley, this tiny one-road town would have been heaving in in its heyday, and reading about those buried here provides some insight to the times.

There’s mine inspector and government surveyor Oliver Whitelaw who died in a raging flood at Stringers Creek (where gold was first found), leaving a destitute wife and nine children. William Henry Trembath had his 28-year-old skull crushed by a falling rock while chopping firewood, and Margaret Davis died from an apoplectic fit caused by an overdose of laudanum drops (opium-based), administered for dysentery. Then there are the countless men who perished in mining accidents or simply because they’d inhaled horrendous amounts of quartz dust; most were dead by the age of 46.

I learn a lot more of Walhalla’s colourful past while reading the dozens of interpretive signs sprinkled throughout the township on the Walhalla Heritage Walk. Just the streetscape alone evokes wonder, so frozen in the 1800s it feels like a movie set (Liam Neeson actually borrowed Walhalla’s Star Hotel as backdrop for The Ice Road 2 a few weeks before my visit). The quaint cottages, shops, weatherboard fire station, old bank vault and brass band rotunda are super cute but there’s more to Walhalla than its picturesque main street.

To get an insight into its raison d’être I head underground on a tour of the Long Tunnel Extended Gold Mine - for a while, Victoria’s richest gold mine. Tunnels are both tight and cavernous but it’s our guide’s stories that are most interesting: miners were paid $1 per week (good money in 1865) to chip away at the rock, working by candlelight and powered on a billy of tea.

Image: Destination Gippsland

I don’t think I’m the only one to appreciate sunlight and fresh air afterwards. They inspire me to try a few of Walhalla’s many walks: the Tramline Track which sidles around the hillside overlooking town, and a fern-lined route to Poverty Point Bridge, hovering 12-metres above the Thomson River.

My favourite outing though is a ride on the historic Walhalla Goldfields Railway, a stunningly beautiful journey on restored carriages that clatter and wobble through Stringers Creek Gorge to tiny Thomson station, passing lush forest, cascades and creeping over eight wooden trestle bridges.

Image: Destination Gippsland

Staying overnight at Walhalla’s Star Hotel seems to further open the portal to the past. When the day-trippers have gone, the town is quiet. Street lights haven’t yet made their way here and, while the sun sets, I sit on the first-floor wrought-iron lattice verandah, watching rosellas and cockatoos fly against the forested valley and listening to the river rush.

These days, the hotel’s boozy nights of raucous miners are long gone but I’m more than happy to swap them for a crackling fire and a glass of Pinot Noir.

The writer travelled as a guest of Destination Gippsland.

Originally published as Town where the dead to living ratio is 80 to 1