Suburb by suburb snapshot: Brown Hill

The size of Brown Hill is approximately 7.9 square kilometres with five parks covering nearly 10.5 per cent of total area.

The population of Brown Hill in 2011 was 3,078 people and by the 2016 Census the population was 3,565 showing a population growth of 15.8 per cent in the area during that time.

Brown Hill is a family friendly rural/residential suburb about 3km north-east of central Ballarat and was originally a gold-mining hamlet on the Yarrowee River.

The place name originated as Brownbill’s Diggings, named after an early gold discoverer, William Brownbill.

A school, named Eureka National, opened at the Diggings in 1853 on the site of a future Methodist church.

Four years later the ‘Brown’s Hill’ post office opened and the school’s name changed about then, or when it became a Common School in 1863.

In 1924 the main street had Methodist and Anglican churches, the Brown Hill hotel (1857), two stores and a police station.

The Brown Hill primary school, designed by Henry Bastow and built in 1877, was the most prominent building and remains so to this day being renamed Caledonian State school.

Brown Hill’s western boundary is Stawell Street, and the suburb extends eastwards across the Western Freeway to country that was in Bungaree Shire before municipal amalgamations in 1994.