Lake Anderson, the Gold Mine That Became Chiltern's Lake

Walk down to Lake Anderson on a calm morning and it looks like it has always been there. A short track around the water, places to sit, a playground for the children. It is a good place to sit with a pie and watch the birds, which is more or less what the town intends it for.

It has not always been there. The lake exists because of a gold mine.

A town built on what was underneath it

Gold was found around Chiltern in late 1858 and early 1859, and the town grew up fast around it. The post office opened in September 1859. For the next fifty years or so, roughly 1860 to 1910, Chiltern was a busy mining town, with at least four foundries turning out the picks and tools the diggers needed.

One of the mines was the Alliance. Like most deep mines of its day, it was a network of shafts and drives under the ground, and the ground above it stayed where it was only for as long as it was held up.

What the Alliance left behind

When the mining stopped, the earth around the old workings sank. The hollow that formed filled with water, and that is Lake Anderson. The town's own walking guide puts it plainly: created from the subsidence of Alliance gold mining operations.

The lake is not the only thing the Alliance left. In the parkland nearby sits a mullock heap, the pile of waste rock that came up out of the shaft. It is the only remnant of the mine still standing, a grassy mound near the fountain.

The house across the road

Lake View, the brick house opposite the water, pictured at the top of this page, was home to the Richardson family, and the writer Henry Handel Richardson lived in it as a girl. A photo caption on the Wikipedia page for Chiltern says that in the Richardsons' time the lake was a swamp, not a lake. So the house looked across the road at something that was still a swamp, and the lake we know came later.

Going to see it

Lake Anderson is point 16 on the Chiltern town walk, between the old blacksmith's foundry and Lake View, and it makes an easy way back to the main street from the railway station. The old Federal Standard newspaper office is on the same walk. The paper was established in 1859, and the building still holds its printing press.

Take your time over it. The lake is small and the walk around it is short.

If you are passing through, drop in to the bakery on Conness Street. We open at seven, and a pie eaten by the water is hard to beat.