Creswick, Prime Minister John Curtin's birthplace

Curtin's biographer, David Day, gives good detail about Creswick, both its physical characteristics and history.  Day describes the road to Creswick as rising "almost imperceptibly from the coastal plain that extends westward from Melbourne before traversing a line of gently folding hills and ending amid the eroded remnants of long dead volcanoes." He notes how around Creswick "centuries of Aboriginal 'fire-stick farming' had produced sparsely tree grasslands that suited aboriginal purposes and which also, in the 1830s, attracted British squatters to the area with their immense flocks of sheep."

Day then notes how it was the discovery of gold in 1851 that really put Creswick on the map and "drew multitudes from across the world, like ants to a picnic."