Lake Eildon National Park

The Lake Eildon National Park is a national park in the Central Highlands region of Victoria, Australia. The 27750ha national park is set in the northern foothills of the Central Highlands, approximately northeast of Melbourne and abuts the shores of Lake Eildon.HistoryThe Goulburn River Valley supported a population of hundreds of members of the Australian Aboriginal Taungaurung people. Cultural sites belonging to these people would have been flooded with the creation of Lake Eildon.The park includes a number of mine shafts related to Victoria’s gold rush of the 1860s. The park also contains relics from early pastoral use.In the 1950s, the Victorian Government purchased farming properties along the Goulburn and Delatite rivers for the construction of Lake Eildon to provide irrigation water for the Goulburn Valley. An area of 2670ha that wasn’t flooded was declared Fraser National Park in 1957. An area of 24000ha of state forest adjacent to the lake was reserved as Eildon State Park in 1980 to protect the catchment of Lake Eildon. In 1997, the two parks were combined to create Lake Eildon National Park.GeologyThe park is mountainous, with peaks up to, and includes the edge of the Cerberean Caldera, a huge circular volcano around across which was active around 380 million years ago. The caldera is evident in a few places as granite outcrops.