We’ll round up our visit to Hill End firstly with the wildlife we encountered. We saw lots of Eastern Grey kangaroos at dawn and at dusk in the outskirts of town.

And various local parrots feeding at the back of the pub all day, every day.

They reminded me that Hill End is still a remote town, surrounded on all sides by forested hills, and quite a bit of wildlife (though nothing really human-eating, as in the North American Gold Rushes when those miners were faced with wolves, bears, coyotes etc.). Still, it would have been a bit of an effort to reach the town during the Gold Rush, when there were only rough tracks and no public transport. The miners and their families would have had to walk in from Sydney (a distance of over 250km nowadays, and might have been much longer in those days) with all of their possessions in tow.

On the outskirts of town, there were more remnants of the town’s mining past. These open tracts of land used to host miner’s campsites. Nowadays it hosts tourist campsites.

And we passed an old miner’s shack, ironically named. Then again, it would have been one of the more luxurious modes of accommodation available, especially in the early days of the town when most people would have been sleeping under canvas.

And from a nearby lookout, we could still see the scars on the hill-sides where the diggings were.

During the Gold Rush, the valley would have been filled with the noise of miners and their machines working. Now, we heard only the sounds of nature.