The Campaspe River town of Kyneton, 84km north of Melbourne, is at its best in spring when avenues of golden flowers direct visitors to the Daffodil and Arts Festival.
The daffodil celebration completes a cycle of fiestas which begins with the Country Music Festival in February and continues with the annual Literature Festival in April.
English born philanthropist and early feminist Caroline Chisholm lived in Kyneton in the 1850s when her family kept a store and her husband sat on the magistrate’s court bench.
During her time in the town she resolved to ease the plight of the wives and children of miners heading north to the goldfields by developing a scheme to build a series of roadside shelters along what is now the Calder Highway. One of the shelters remains at Carlsruhe just outside Kyneton.
The town and its 4,500 people are well and truly focused on craft and you can watch award winning artists produce figurines and other works at Kyneton Fine China and Wattle Ceramics. Meskills Woolstore is one of the few plants in Australia where wool is spun and then made into knitwear and garments on antique machinery. The mill is set behind the Georgian façade of a brick and bluestone structure built as a butter factory in 1862.
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