Granite Flat

Granite Flat, a former gold mining settlement in north-east Victoria, is 75 km south-east of Wodonga. It is situated on the Snowy Creek, about 7 km south-east of Mitta Mitta.

In 1858 a goldfield was established along Snowy Creek, from Mitta Mitta (where the creek enters the Mitta Mitta River) to Granite Flat, upstream. Upwards of 1000 people, including a substantial Chinese community, lived there in the late 1860s. Bailliere’s Victorian gazetteer (1865) recorded one hotel. A school was opened in 1873.

In 1886 the celebrated Mammoth Hydraulic Sluicing Company constructed a timber flume to bring water from the Snowy Creek to gold working at Granite Flat. The whole structure was nearly 20 km long, and at one point across a ravine it had a span of 230 metres and a height of 35 metres.

Granite Flat was described in the 1903 Australian handbook:

The flume was demolished in 1908, leaving the brick Catholic church (1864) as Granite Flat’s most enduring monument. (The church was restored in the 1970s). Sluicing ended in about 1914 and a few settlers remained on farms along river flats and on adjoining slopes. A school was briefly opened in 1936, succumbing to the 1939 bushfires when most buildings were destroyed. Some of the gravestones in the Granite Flat cemetery were also lost.

Granite Flat’s census populations were: