Yackandandah
Postcode: 3749
Yackandandah is a small tourist town in northeast Victoria, Australia. It is near the industrial towns of Wodonga and Albury, and is close to the tourist town of Beechworth. It is a former gold mining centre known for it alluvial wet mining techniques. The area is now a dairy farming and forestry and has numerous bed and breakfast lodges, which allows it many visitors to enjoy the peace and tranquility of the districts forest and mountains. It is affectionately known as ‘Yack’. The commercial centre of the town, known as the Yackandandah Conservation Area, is recorded on the Register of the National Estate.
A railway once linked Yackandandah to Beechworth opening in 1891. The route out to Woorragee and then onto Yackandandah was steep. Trains descending the last gradient into Yackandandah would halt,(near the now Yackandandah turnoff, from the Beechworth-Wodonga Road) the guard would apply hand-brakes to carriages and wagons. The last train on the Yackandandah-Beechworth line was in July 1954. (Larsen, MayDay Hills) Though the line was torn up, many sections of the original right of way are visible from the roadway between Beechworth and Yack.
Used for the filming of the 2003 film, Strange Bedfellows, (starring Michael Caton and Paul Hogan), Yackandandah is also home to the annual Yackandandah Folk Festival attracting local, Australian and international artists in the folk genre to perform. Like its larger neighbour, Yackandandah promotes itself as a tourist destination on the basis of its gold mining history, and features a period streetscape and an increasing number of antique shops and the like to cater for them.
Two historic buildings, the 146-year-old museum (formerly the Bank of Victoria) and an adjacent timber store (“Rainbow Crystal”), were destroyed by a fire in the early morning of December 21, 2006. A real estate agency was also severely damaged.