VICTORIA'S FORGOTTEN VOLCANO REGION BY ANN JONES, ABC NEWS (INTERNATIONAL NEWS)iNT

Victoria’s forgotten volcano region

Ann Jones

Image: Artist Joseph Wright's representation of eruption of Vesuvius seen from Portici (ca. 1774-6) (Wikimedia Commons)

‘I’m biased of course,’ says University of Melbourne seismologist Gary Gibson, who lives in the Victoria’s central goldfields.

Although seismologists generally deal with earthquakes, Gibson has a passion for volcanoes, especially the ones that are right next door to his place.

We’re looking out across a cluster of hills of different sizes; they’re all rounded, covered in pasture and have fences transecting them.

Gold rush-era miners figured out that the gold was below the old lava flows and mined it relentlessly, leaving the area we are standing in scattered with mullock heaps.

To the untrained eye it’s idyllic, but not recognisable as a unique collection of every type of volcano possible in the middle of a continental plate.South-west Victoria, insists Gibson, is a very special volcanic region.

‘[It’s] a very, very young sequence of volcanoes. Some of them probably date back to about four or five million years, and the youngest of them are post-Aboriginal, almost certainly.’