Colac, Victoria
city in Victoria, Australia
Colac ( COAL-ack) is a town in the Western District of Victoria, Australia, approximately 150 kilometres south-west of Melbourne on the southern shore of Lake Colac.
History
For thousands of years clans of the Gulidjan people lived in the region of Colac.
British settlement
The British first entered the region in March 1837, when several land-holders came upon Lake Colac while searching for the missing colonist Joseph Gellibrand. Another larger search party, which was acting on information that local Gulidjan had killed Gellibrand, arrived in April. This group returned to Geelong after two Gulidjan people were killed by Aboriginal trackers accompanying the party.
Settlement of the area began in September 1837 with the arrival of grazier Hugh Murray (died 1869) who selected 14,000 ha (34,000 acres) of land and established three sheep stations: Warrion, Elliminyt and Barongarook. According to Murray, conflict with the resident Gulidjan was limited, with one Aboriginal man being shot dead during punitive raids upon Aboriginal settlements following the taking of sheep. In 1841, around forty Gulidjan lived and worked on what was now Murray's property.
The surveying for a village began in 1841 and the township of Lake Colac was proclaimed in 1848.
The Post Office opened on 1 July 1848 as Lake Colac and was renamed Colac in 1854.
“Colac, Victoria” enters the record as city in Victoria, Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Colac, Victoria and city can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Colac, Victoria” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Colac, Victoria and city provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1009509. VIAF identifies the subject as 147802110. The Library of Congress control number is n84195976. Authority coordinates are -38.333, 143.583. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1837, 1869, 1841 and 1848.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Colac, Victoria” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.