About 23km north-east of the city of Bairnsdale in Gippsland, Victoria, the small scattered township of Clifton Creek can be found - if you look carefully. The Scottish explorer Angus McMillan gave the place its name in December, 1839, during his expedition to find a suitable sailing port south of the Victorian Alps. A somewhat inauspicious occasion however, as Clifton Creek was a watercourse that he attempted to ford on horseback, and his favourite steed 'Clifton' became bogged along its bank. With Clifton injured and unable to carry on, McMillan was forced to return to camp and try to find a passage to the coast another time. Forever in McMillan's mind as a stumbling block, Clifton Creek may have been bad luck for him, but the area became something special over the years.

Eureka!

Put on the map by McMillan, the land around Clifton Creek remained almost impenetrable bush until the late 1860s. Gold had been discovered in many regions throughout Australia, and the rush was on to find more. While sluicing (a method of finding gold by dredging up the sediment of a river or creek and sifting through it for heavy metals), a prospector found a good source of alluvial gold - and over the next 40 years claims were made all along the creek, with gold batteries¹ built along its banks during 1868. While the gold has all but gone now, the lucky gold panner who braves the cold waters of the creek up to their knees might find a few specks of the shiny metal if they're patient.

Cows

Over the final decades of the 1800s many small miners' cottages and farms sprung up around Clifton Creek. The trees in the area were quickly felled to build houses for the miners, and then farmers, the fertile land turning from thick bush into grazing pastures without much effort. A sizeable dairy-farming community developed and when the gold finally dried up, the farms remained, supporting the community that had grown from the original gold miners. These dairies catered for nearby townships like Bairnsdale, and Clifton Creek cows even supplied the city of Melbourne with milk.

The wooden fences built to keep the cows from wandering off into the bush during the early years of settlement are still in use at some of the farms, but barbed wire and then electric fences soon replaced the old wooden ones, as they were easier to maintain (although an accompanying lesson regarding electric fences - it's wise to turn off the electricity supply before absent-mindedly letting an early morning call of nature get the better of you²). The dairy farms continue to thrive, and milk trucks thunder along Deptford Road (the main road connecting Clifton Creek with Bairnsdale) on a regular basis.

A Rural School

From little things, big things grow
- Clifton Creek Primary School motto
(from the song of the same name by Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly)

Because of the farming families in the region, and the fact that Bairnsdale was a fair distance away, a small school was built for Clifton Creek in 1909 - at an area known as 'Waterholes'. By 1926 the school became a state-run primary school and continued to provide education for the local children. In 1968 the old school building was replaced with a portable classroom common for the period, and by the late 1980s Clifton Creek Primary School had grown so much as to require further buildings.

During the early 1980s the school entrusted much of its development to the community, with a play-fort built and other activities taught by local parents (like plastic model-making, cookery and even life-drawing). The school was even visited by minor celebrities, such as local authors and Kevin Hines, a television gardener who assisted in planting some of the trees dotted around the schoolgrounds. This type of community spirit continued into the 1990s when parents helped fund and build the mud-brick art and music rooms, giving the school an excuse for increasing its enrolment numbers.

Clifton Creek Primary School always had a limited number of pupils from its very beginnings, and class size ranged from eight to 23 with one or two teachers. Due to this, the school soon gained a reputation for excellence, as the children would get almost one-to-one tuition. And with the added support from parents within the Clifton Creek community, the children received an education of a sort that many of the larger nearby primary schools did not offer.

For this reason, some parents in Bairnsdale had their children travel to Clifton Creek Primary instead of attending one closer to home, even though during certain times of the year the children would have to wear bicycle helmets or other forms of head protection (like old plastic ice-cream tubs) so as they weren't hurt by the swooping magpies who made their nests in the tall trees near the school!

Even the school's uniform was designed by the pupils themselves in the early 1980s; the image of the school with trees, a cockatoo and a kangaroo outside was drawn by one of the older pupils and transferred onto a bright orange T-shirt. The T-shirt changed colour over the years to an aqua-blue, but the design remained the same. It is because of the spirit of the school that even when its student numbers dwindled and it was threatened with closure by the government, or when fires and floods swept though Gippsland in 2007, it remained open not just for the children but as the heart of the Clifton Creek community.

A Quiet Retreat

Clifton Creek is one of those places away from it all. Your nearest neighbour is more than shouting distance away and you'll never be troubled by door-to-door salesmen. That's why the little settlement has grown, as many families are now prepared to commute the short distance from Clifton Creek to work in Bairnsdale, and even further afield. With a community hall, a tennis court and fishing platforms, the peace and quiet there is incredibly appealing.

Many homes in Clifton Creek combine self-sufficiency with modern technology too; vegetable gardens and hen-houses providing fresh carrots and the like, eggs and the occasional Sunday Roast. Unfortunately, the introduced animals such as foxes and rabbits are somewhat of a pest in the region, so it's also not uncommon for locals to have a shotgun or rifle in the home, along with a fox-skin rug or a pot of rabbit stew bubbling away on the stove in the winter-time.

During the long summer days it is easy to walk a little way along Clifton Creek and appreciate the native birdsong and flora of the region, or even spot an elusive kangaroo or wallaby. At night you might like to try 'spotlighting', and try and shine your torchlight on a bright-eyed possum or even a bat or sugar glider flitting through the trees. If that's not your cup of tea though, during the summer you could just dangle your feet in the creek and relax. Just mind out for the 'mozzies', these nasty little insects are probably the only downfall of a visit to Clifton Creek.