Bacchus Marsh, Victoria

Bacchus Marsh is a rural centre and regional locality in Victoria, Australia located approximately 57km north west of the state capital Melbourne and 15km west of Melton at a near equidistance to the major cities of Melbourne, Ballarat and Geelong. The population of the Bacchus Marsh urban area was 20,345 at the 2016 census. The State Suburb by the same name is home to 6,394 people and contains the central business district. Bacchus Marsh is the largest rural area in the local government area of Shire of Moorabool.Traditionally a market garden area, producing a large amount of the region's fruits and vegetables in recent decades it has transformed into the main commuter town on the Melbourne-Ballarat corridor with its affordable starter homes proving popular.It was named after one of its original inhabitants, Captain William Henry Bacchus, who saw the great value of this locality as it was situated on two rivers — the Lerderderg and Werribee.HistoryAboriginalIt is believed that the tribe occupying the area at the time of white settlement were the Kurung. Bacchus Marsh was a meeting ground for anywhere between 150 and 400 Aboriginals even after white settlement, and corroborees were held quite regularly. While there do not appear to be any records of open hostilities between whites and indigenous people, by 1863 there were a total of only 33 Aboriginal people left in the Bacchus Marsh district, and apart from a handful of recollections of the original inhabitants preserved by pioneer settlers, sadly little remains apart from present-day locality names, mainly of watercourses: Coimadai, Djerriwarrh, Korkuperrimul, Lerderderg, Merrimu, Myrniong, Werribee.