Yambulla

The locality and cadestral parish of Yambulla in the County of Auckland include the site of the old village.

Another tributary of Genoa River, Yambulla Creek, despite its name, lies to the west, in the adjacent locality of Nungatta.

The name 'Yambulla' also refers to a property in the valley of Yambulla Creek, at Nungatta South, which is notable for its "range of not-for-profit enterprises that will support First Nations Culture, conservation, research, education and knowledge-sharing".

[19]The mining village of Yambulla was described in February 1909 as being, "romantically situated in a valley, surrounded on all sides by hills of considerable height, Mount Poole being the highest.

[21] It also lay between the quartz reef mines in the surrounding hills[22] and the alluvial workings that extended from around the village to three miles downstream of the confluence of the creek and the river.

[30] The village was connected to Towamba by an unsealed road, which continued beyond Yambulla, to the mining settlement of Wangrabelle, just over the border in Victoria.

[21][35] The shortages led to locals harvesting wildlife, such as wallaby and 'badger' (wombat), for meat, and substituting the leaves of a plant that they called 'wild musk' (Olearia argophylla) for tobacco.

[36][37] Miners used wombat skins for leather and to make buckets in which to lift the ore from mine shafts.

[38] Despite its remoteness, reportedly, no deaths occurred at Yambulla, before March 1908, when a five year old girl died.

[39] A miner died after being extricated from a ground fall, in March 1909,[40] followed, in September 1909, by the accidental death of the postmaster's three year old daughter from burns.

[41] In 1911, prominent citizen, storekeeper and mine owner, Joseph Meradian, an Armenian migrant, died as a result of a stroke, at the age of just 41 years.

[8] By 1911, it was lit by electricity, had a 60 foot high poppet head, a ten-head stamper battery, and both amalgam / 'copper plate' and cyanide processes in use for gold recovery.

John George Gough (1848 – 1907), one of the founders of the Labour Electoral League, the first labour political grouping in Australia and a direct predecessor of the Australian Labor Party, was involved in Gough's Battery and other gold mining ventures at Yambulla.

[54] In 1909, one newspaper article carried a prediction that Yambulla would soon grow, "very probably to the extent that the town will shortly become a busy mining centre, and compare favourably with the speedy growth of the township of Canbelego when Mount Boppy broke out.

By 1914, the population was down to 80 people and the village still had its school, post office, and hotel, but its last store had been pulled down and taken to Towamba.

The village had lost its branch of the Amalgamated Miners' Association, which at one time reportedly had 80 union members.

[62][63] After completion of the road between Eden and Genoa (Princes Highway), around 1918,[64] Yambulla and Wangrabelle no longer lay on the best route between those other places.

The Federal Hotel, including both building and contents, was for sale in February 1918, with its licence,[25] but had yet to be sold in August 1920.

[26] A report in 1931, stated that the hotel building "survived for some years as a guest house for occasional travellers on the through road to Wangrabelle, it too became unprofitable and was sold and removed from the locality".

[71] Relics from the old village were lost when the school at Genoa was destroyed by fire, during the catastrophic 2019-2020 bushfire season.

[22] Much of the locality is Yambulla State Forest, and the main industry of the area is clear-fell timber harvesting.