August 31, 2023: Indigo Shire Council has formally agreed to seek membership of consortium pursuing World Heritage Listing for the Victorian goldfields.
Councillor Peter Croucher moved at this week’s meeting for the council to endorse a memorandum of understanding with central Victorian councils and the Victorian Goldfields Tourism Executive that have been working on the listing bid from an idea first put more than 35 years ago.
Fellow councillors unanimously agreed to the move, authorising council chief executive Trevor Ierino to sign the memorandum and, if accepted by the consortium, commit to participating in the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) bid process.
Australia currently has 20 World Heritage sites, including Uluru, Sydney Opera House, Great Barrier Reef and the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape aquaculture system in south west Victoria.
Mayor Sophie Price said the bid aims to recognise the outstanding global heritage of the Victorian goldfields in Ballarat, Bendigo, Mount Alexan
der, Ararat, Northern Grampians, Moorabool, Macedon Ranges, Hepburn, Campaspe, Pyrenees, Central Goldfields, Loddon, Golden Plains and - if accepted - Indigo local government areas.
It centres on ways the colonial-era goldrushes created “a global mass movement of people, formative social and political processes and a spectacular period of world trade, industrial and commercial expansion, all showcased in the world’s best preserved goldrush landscapes, gold towns and some of the world’s most notable historic gold cities”.
The Ovens and Murray Advertiser reported early in January 1857 that 243 tonnes of gold was shipped from Victoria between 1854 and 1856, worth $23.5 billion in today’s money. In just three weeks in late 1856 almost 1.2t of gold worth almost $114 million today was shipped from the Ovens goldfield administered from Beechworth.
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