Don’t generally think of Arthurian characters if you stop off at the old Midland Highway gold village of Elaine. Or Mount Doran or Stony Rises for that matter.
You’ll find a few female towns in the area: Elaine, Maude or Meredith – local wits spuriously suggesting they were named for brothel madams back in the gold days.
No-one seems too sure who Maude might have been but the lovelorn admirer of Lancelot, Elaine of Astolat, who died of heartbreak after earlier patching up his knightly tournament wounds, was hardly an old slapper.
Widely celebrated in art and verse, she’s the very model of painful, unrequited love. Had Lancelot not been so smitten by Arthur’s missus, Guinevere, Elaine might have kept him clear of all sorts of strife.
Not too sure, either, what Tasmania’s Charles Meredith, who that town was named after, would have made of the brothel imputation.
He’d been rendered insolvent in NSW, unable to pay the interest on his mortgages, before being appointed police magistrate at Port Sorell in 1844 by the repetitively named Lieutenant Governor John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot. Later became a politician, was even colonial treasurer at one point.
Who says a poor business record can’t run the state? Seems a time-honoured occupation, if not a pre-requisite, as some curmudgeons might suggest.
As for Stony Rises, well that’s tied to the wild and rugged nearby Steiglitz environs, which also hosted another Tassie law-and-order luminary – William Champ, one-time Port Arthur commandant, overseer of Melbourne’s Pentridge build and a pollie, too, Tassie’s first premier – at Eclipse’s Darra homestead.
Bit confusing for posties, presumably, when you consider the Stony Rises of Pirron Yallock and Pomborneit, the other side of Colac. As might have been the case with the Elaine-Mount Doran-Elaine name switcheroo over the years as well.
All in all, a fairly lusty lot one way or the other. And bolstered neatly by claims the old Railway pub was a brothel in its early days, while publican Henry Gray was sent to trial for shooting dead a drunken customer, Michael Fahey, who had attacked him with an axe, in 1922. He managed to get off.
Another bloke, a murdered 19th-century miner named Lenny, supposedly serves as the pub’s in-house and mischievous ghost. Carolyn Mary Matkovic, who’s just re-opened the pub after an Irish-themed makeover, says visiting ghostbuster-psychics have felt Lenny’s presence, even if she hasn’t met Lenny herself … yet.
Meanwhile, an impressive book, Elaine Thru the Lens: A Photographic Journey, capturing the town’s rich and colourful past, well black-and-white past to be truthful, has been compiled by the good folks at the Meredith History Interest Group, spearheaded by Marg Cooper.
It’s a delightful journey, too, a gorgeous collection of rare photos; the people, buildings and day-to-day life of a small country town, some of which we’ve included here. It’s set to be launched at Elaine Hall 1.30 on 18 October and, in true country form, afternoon tea’s a bring-a-plate affair. Can’t beat it.
If you’re out that way, keep an eye out for the Brisbane Ranges’ three hills, the Three Sisters. Originally called the Three Brothers’, schoolkids in the area know them as Elaine, Maude and Meredith.
You might also poke your nose in at the striking Saint Sava Serbian Orthodox Monastery, which stands like a bright apricot-coloured eastern Euro sentinel in a heavily treed retreat west of town on the Elaine-Mount Mercer Road.
Want to see something extra special, call in at the Shepherd’s Daughter’s Grave north of town where Mary Paterson, 6, who died in 1867, is interred. Been there forever but fresh flowers appear every week … so the story goes.
This story appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 5 October 2026.
