Golden Pipeline

Sandford Rocks can be a return detour (10 km each way) from Westonia or included in a loop north of Great Eastern Highway as described in the See & Do section if you are travelling from No 5 to No 6 Pump Station.

Nowadays in a nature reserve, these rocks are home to fauna and flora that rely on it for life-giving water, such as the casuarinas that hug the edge of the rocks taking advantage of runoff. The rocks provided water for the earliest prospectors rushing to the goldfields.

Vera Whittington in Gold and Typhoid: twin fevers writes how hundreds of men, gripped by gold fever that swept through the colony in the second half of 1892, followed Hunt’s old track from Mt Bakewell near York.

They struggled through thick forest to Durdguding Rock, north of today’s Merredin, proceeding in a north-easterly direction over scrubby sandplain to Burancooping and Sandford Rocks (Yorkrakine Hill). Then on through dense thickets and forest to Koorkoordine (site of a Hunt’s Well) and south, south-west to Lake Polaris near Southern Cross.