Best Ghost Towns in Australia: Where the Gold Rush Left Its Ruins

Australia’s gold rushes of the 1850s to 1890s built entire towns almost overnight — banks, theatres, churches, thousands of residents — and then, just as quickly, emptied them out again once the gold ran thin. What’s left scattered across the outback and goldfields today is a strange kind of time capsule: crumbling stone facades standing alone in paddocks, cemeteries with more graves than the surrounding population, and the occasional pub still somehow serving beer to the handful of people who never left.

I find these places genuinely haunting in the best sense. Walking down what was once a bustling main street, now just gravel and a few standing walls, gives you a completely different feel for Australian history than any museum can.

Here are the ghost towns worth the drive, and what’s actually still standing at each one.

👻 TL;DR — the quick version

• ⛏️ Hill End (NSW): Once home to 8,000 people during the gold rush, now a heritage village with original buildings you can walk straight into.
• 🥈 Silverton (NSW): A near-abandoned silver mining town near Broken Hill, famous as a film location for Mad Max 2.
• 🚂 Farina (SA): A collapsed outback settlement being slowly restored by volunteers, complete with an underground bakery.
• ⚓ Cossack (WA): Australia’s first port town in the Pilbara, now a preserved stone ghost town by the sea.
• 🏔️ Walhalla (Vic): A gold town rebuilt into a living heritage village tucked deep in a mountain valley.
• 💀 Kanowna (WA): Once a 12,000-person goldfields boomtown near Kalgoorlie, now almost entirely gone.
• 🚗 Most require a proper drive: Few of these towns are on the way to anywhere — visiting one usually means dedicating a full day.

⛏️ Hill End, New South Wales

Hill End, in the central tablelands west of Sydney, was one of the richest goldfields in Australian history. At its peak in the 1870s it had around 8,000 residents, dozens of hotels, and its own newspaper — remarkable for a settlement that barely registers a population today.

What sets Hill End apart from most ghost towns is how much of it is still standing and genuinely open to explore. It’s managed as a historic site, with original buildings including a general store, a courthouse and several cottages preserved rather than fenced off behind glass. A handful of residents still live here, running the pub and a small visitor centre.

🗺️ What to see in Hill End

1. The Royal Hotel. Still a working pub, and one of the few original gold-rush hotels in NSW still pouring drinks in its original building.
2. Holtermann’s Nugget site. The site where the largest single mass of gold ever found was unearthed in 1872, weighing nearly 290 kilograms.
3. The old cemetery. Rows of weathered headstones, many belonging to miners who never made it home, tell their own quiet story about the era.
4. Bald Hill Lookout. A short walk out of town giving a wide view over the old diggings and the surrounding valley.

👉 Book a Central Tablelands Gold Rush Tour on GetYourGuide →

🥈 Silverton, New South Wales

Just outside Broken Hill in the far west of New South Wales, Silverton once had a population of around 3,000 people supporting a booming silver mine. When the mine shifted operations to nearby Broken Hill in the 1880s, the town’s population collapsed almost overnight, and today fewer than fifty people call it home.

Its stark, empty streets and surrounding red desert have made it one of Australia’s most-used film locations, most famously doubling as the post-apocalyptic setting for Mad Max 2. The old Silverton Hotel is still open, its walls covered in memorabilia from decades of film shoots, and a small gaol museum gives a glimpse of frontier justice in a town this remote.

🚂 Farina, South Australia

Farina, in South Australia’s outback north of Port Augusta, is one of the more dramatic examples of a town that simply couldn’t survive its environment. Founded in the 1870s on the mistaken belief the surrounding land was suited to wheat farming, it grew to include two breweries, several hotels and a school, before drought and the failure of the promised railway extension left it abandoned by the 1960s.

What makes Farina worth the detour today is an ongoing volunteer restoration project. Each winter, a group of heritage volunteers camps at the site and works to stabilise the crumbling ruins, and in recent years they’ve even reopened the old underground bakery, selling fresh bread and pies to travellers passing through — baked in a wood-fired oven that’s over a century old.

⚓ Cossack, Western Australia

On the Pilbara coast near Karratha, Cossack was Western Australia’s first official port, founded in 1863 and central to the region’s early pearling and pastoral industries. Cyclones, a shifting harbour and the rise of nearby Point Samson eventually made Cossack redundant, and by the mid-20th century it was essentially deserted.

Unlike many outback ghost towns built from timber and corrugated iron, Cossack’s buildings were built to last, in solid local stone. Several of them, including the old courthouse and post office, have been restored as small museums, making it one of the more polished ghost-town experiences on this list, set against a genuinely striking stretch of Pilbara coastline.

👉 Book a Pilbara Coast Heritage Tour on GetYourGuide →

🏔️ Walhalla, Victoria

Tucked into a narrow mountain valley in Gippsland, Walhalla was once home to around 4,000 people and one of the richest gold mines in Victorian history. When the gold ran out, the population dwindled to almost nothing, and by the mid-20th century it was down to a handful of residents.

What makes Walhalla different from most towns on this list is that it’s been actively rebuilt rather than left to crumble. Heritage-style buildings have gone up on the original foundations, a narrow-gauge tourist railway now runs along the old mining line, and the Star Hotel has been reconstructed on its original site. It’s less a genuine abandoned ruin and more a town that’s come back from the brink, which makes it an easier, more comfortable stop for travellers who still want the gold-rush atmosphere.

💀 Kanowna, Western Australia

Few ghost towns illustrate the boom-and-bust cycle of the gold rush as starkly as Kanowna, a short drive from Kalgoorlie. At its 1898 peak it had roughly 12,000 residents, sixteen hotels, its own stock exchange and even a horse racing track. Today, almost nothing remains standing.

What you’ll find instead are scattered building foundations, rusted machinery, and a large, eerily well-preserved cemetery — by far the most substantial physical trace of the boomtown that once stood here. It’s a stark, slightly unsettling place to visit precisely because so little remains to explain what an enormous town this once was.

🚗 Planning a ghost town road trip

Ghost towns are, almost by definition, out of the way. Getting the most out of a visit takes a bit more planning than a standard day trip.

1. Check opening hours before you drive out. Many heritage sites and small museums at these towns are only staffed on weekends or by volunteers with limited hours.
2. Fill up on fuel before you leave the last major town. Several of these locations, especially Farina and Kanowna, are well beyond the reach of the nearest servo.
3. Bring your own food and water. Facilities are minimal to non-existent at most sites — Farina’s bakery, when it’s open seasonally, is a rare exception.
4. Go slow on unsealed access roads. Several of these towns, particularly Farina and Cossack, involve stretches of gravel or dirt road that can be rough after rain.
5. Respect fenced-off ruins. Some structures are unstable and closed for safety reasons — resist the temptation to climb over barriers for a better photo.

👉 Book a Broken Hill and Silverton Outback Tour on GetYourGuide →

📷 Getting good photos without disturbing the site

Ghost towns photograph beautifully, and it’s tempting to want the perfect shot standing inside a crumbling doorway or perched on a collapsing wall. Resist it. These sites are fragile, often unstable, and in many cases actively protected heritage listings, meaning climbing on or moving anything is both dangerous and, in some cases, an offence.

The best results usually come from shooting early or late in the day, when low light picks out texture in old stonework and rusted iron that gets washed out in the flat light of midday. A wide lens helps capture the scale of an empty main street, while a longer lens is better for isolating small details — a rusted kettle left on a windowsill, or a headstone leaning at an angle in an overgrown cemetery — that tell a more specific story than a wide shot ever could.

🗿 A few more worth knowing about

Beyond the six major sites above, Australia has dozens of smaller ghost towns scattered across every state. A few are worth mentioning if you’re already travelling through their region.

🍺 Steiglitz, Victoria

An easy day trip from Geelong, Steiglitz was once a thriving gold town with its own courthouse, still standing today as the centrepiece of a small historic park. Unlike some of the more remote sites on this list, it’s an easy, low-effort stop for anyone exploring the Bellarine Peninsula or Great Ocean Road region.

🌵 Innamincka, South Australia

Not fully abandoned, but close to it — Innamincka in South Australia’s far north-east has a population that can be counted on two hands. It sits near the site where the ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills died in 1861, and the small hotel here is often the only sign of life for hundreds of kilometres in any direction.

⛰️ Yalgoo, Western Australia

A former gold and mining centre in the mid-west of Western Australia, Yalgoo still technically has residents, but its grand old stone buildings, including a striking Catholic church, look wildly out of proportion to the town’s tiny modern population — a clear sign of how much bigger it once was.

🏚️ Why so many towns disappeared

It’s worth understanding the pattern behind all these abandoned places, because it repeats itself again and again across the country. Gold rush towns were built fast, on the assumption that the mineral wealth underneath them would last. When it didn’t, or when a richer field was discovered somewhere else, entire populations picked up and moved within months, sometimes literally taking their houses with them on carts to the next boomtown.

Other towns, like Farina, failed for a different reason entirely: they were founded on bad information about the land itself, in places too dry or too remote to ever sustain the population their founders hoped for. And a few, like Cossack, were simply overtaken by geography — a better harbour or a more convenient rail line a short distance away was enough to drain a town of its purpose almost overnight.

That pattern is exactly what makes these places so compelling to visit today. Each one is a physical record of a specific decision, a specific piece of bad luck, or a specific moment when a boom turned into a bust — frozen in place, decades later, for anyone willing to make the drive.

If you only have time for one, pick based on what you want the experience to feel like. Hill End and Walhalla are the easiest starting points, with enough preserved infrastructure to feel welcoming rather than eerie. Kanowna and Farina, by contrast, are for travellers who want the rawer version — fewer signs, fewer facilities, and a much stronger sense of standing somewhere the rest of the world genuinely forgot about.

Either way, bring more water than you think you need, tell someone where you’re headed, and give yourself time to just stand still for a minute once you arrive. These towns reward patience far more than a quick drive-by ever will.

Whichever town you choose, treat it less like a checklist stop and more like a slow walk through someone else’s abandoned dream. That’s really what these places are.