Carwarp

Carwarp is a rural locality in north-west Victoria, on the Calder Highway 30 km south of Mildura. It is also on the railway to Mildura.

Carwarp’s name is thought to be derived from an Aboriginal word describing a crow or the call of a crow.

In 1903 the railway to Mildura was opened, and in 1911 the Carwarp area was surveyed for closer-settlement farms. It was beyond the areas supplied with irrigation water, and remains so. Water supply is for stock and domestic use only, and is supplied from the Red Cliffs pumping station. The land was cleared by Mallee roller and burning, and sown down for wheat. Further east, at Nangiloc near the Murray River, water was pumped for market gardens which have been overtaken by citrus orchards.

A progress association built a hall in 1917, in which a school was opened. A store was opened in 1919. As a dryland farming area, holdings have been consolidated and population has fallen. The school was closed in 1991. In 1988 modern silos were built at the railway, making Carwarp a major wheat receiving depot for the Millewa region.

Carwarp became the centre of some of north-west Victoria's renewable energy production in 2013 with the opening of a power plant that used waste from almond, grape and grain growing, nearby one of Australia’s largest solar electricity plants. In that year Olam opened the southern hemisphere's largest almond processing plant at Carwarp together with a 35-megawatt biomass power station to process almond shells and grape skins to produce electricity. Nearby the Solar Systems' Carwarp solar facility opened in 2013. However, Solar Systems announced in 2014 it would not be going ahead with an expansion of its solar power plant at Carwarp, citing the uncertainty surrounding the Federal Government's review of the Renewable Energy Target. The facility would likely be shut down as a result.

Carwarp’s census populations have been: