Was gold ever mined in Mount Evelyn? Some selectors along the Olinda Creek flats held their land on miners’ rights in the 1890s. We have a reference to a mine shaft, used as a rubbish dump, at the rear of a rented Mount Evelyn house (location unknown).

Tim Thexton remembered a mine shaft near Priestley Crescent in the 1990s. 'It was between the Aqueduct and the creek … it was filled in and only about a metre deep but had logs around for walls and nearby what looked like the start of an open cut in the side of a hill. … There are limestone caverns in the area down the street.' There are at least two excavation sites, which may have been quarries associated with the Aqueduct formation, between Priestley Crescent and Hunter Road.

There is a tunnel near Olinda Creek Road Kalorama, about 106' long, height 5'6", width 2'6" to 3', with an air shaft and side tunnel at the far end. Mining expert Agnes Stagg thought it might have been dug by Chinese miners in the late nineteenth century. A tunnel in McKillop has a similar arched top and very small pick marks. It's possible that this too was a Chinese mining tunnel, but more likely it was a drainage tunnel from the Aqueduct (see 'Aqueduct Tunnels').

There's no site in Mount Evelyn that we can positively identify as a mine, but the Kalorama tunnel shows there was mining in the Olinda Creek Valley.

The tunnel at Kalorama. Photos courtesy John Keane.