Yea, Victoria

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Yea Victoria
Population:	969 (2001 census)
Postcode:	3717
Location:	108 km from Melbourne 38 km from Seymour
LGA:	Murrindindi Shire
State District:	Seymour
Federal Division:	McEwen

Yea (37°12′S 145°25′E) is a town in Victoria, Australia. It is in the Murrindindi Shire local government area. Located 109 km north-east of Melbourne via the Melba Highway, Yea sits at the junction with the Goulburn Valley Highway, and 172 metres above sea-level. At the 2001 census, Yea had a population of 969.^[1]

[edit] History and Settlement

The area was occupied by the Woiwurung people before white settlement. The first Europeans in the area were a party of explorers lead by William Hovell and Hamilton Hume who crossed the Yea River near the location of current day Yea in 1824. Their favourable report of the grazing land they had seen contributed to the formation of a new settlement that is now known as the state of Victoria.

The first settlers in the district were overlanders from New South Wales, who arrived in 1837. By 1839, settlements and farms dotted the area along the Goulburn River.

The town was surveyed and laid out in 1855 with town lots going on sale at Kilmore the following year. Whilst the townsite was known initially to white settlers as the Muddy Creek settlement, (the Yea River was known as Muddy Creek until 1878) the town was formally renamed Yea after a Colonel Lacy Yea who was killed in the Crimean War.

Gold was discovered in the area in 1859 and a number of smaller mining settlements came into existence at this time, including Molesworth. Yea expanded and grew as a town under the influx of hopeful prospectors, with the addition of several housing areas, an Anglican church (erected in 1869) and a population of 250 when it formally became a shire in 1873.

When the gold ran out, the town survived on the back of farming and timbergetting (chiefly from the Murrindindi forests). The heyday of the Yea sawmilling industry was from 1907-1915, when the great War saw many men enlist, and then another boom was between 1923 to 1930, after which the onset of the Great Depression saw production greatly reducing as demand fell. In these times of huge production, there was in excess of 2.5 million feet of timber sent out each year over the tramlines to Cheviot.

The railway arrived in 1883, with an extension to Molesworth in 1889, chiefly for timber transport to Melbourne. Running steam trains, the train service cut through steep hills and undulating country to connect the shire with the main city. Although the line was discontinued in the 1970s, and much of the railway property appropriated by nearby farmland, the original tracks and crossings may be still be discerned across the countryside, and the railway station, built in 1889, has now been converted to a Heritage Information centre.

Yea was promoted as something of a tourist centre in the 1890s with trout being released into King Parrot Creek to attract recreational anglers. A Post Office was built in 1890, followed by a Grandstand and a Butter factory (now Cheese factory) in 1891. There was a proposal in 1908 to submerge the town under the Trawool Water Scheme but it never went ahead.

By 1911 the town's population had increased to 1126 and has remained relatively stable, despite two severe floods in 1934 and 1973 and a major conflagration in 1969. The Limestone Road Baragwanathia fossil site has been registered in the National Estate due to the discovery of the most ancient leafy foliage so far found on earth.