Mintaro looks much as it did 150 years ago - a village of slate cottages, a grand Georgian mansion nearby, and a hedge maze to get lost in. Here is how to spend a morning in it.
Built from the ground up
Few Australian towns are so completely a product of their geology as Mintaro. Slate quarried on the village's edge built its cottages, paved its paths and roofed its buildings, and the whole settlement is now classified as a State Heritage Area - one of the most intact colonial villages in the country. To walk its streets is to step into the 1850s.
What to see
Start on the main street, where slate cottages and the old Magpie and Stump Hotel set the tone. Reillys occupies an 1856 bootmaker's cottage and makes a fine lunch stop. A short drive away stands Martindale Hall, the grand 1880 Georgian mansion that famously stood in for Appleyard College in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock. Round out the morning by getting cheerfully lost in the Mintaro Maze, a classic clipped-hedge puzzle.
Why it survived
Mintaro endured because the railway and the highway passed it by, leaving it quietly intact while other towns modernised. That accident of geography is the traveller's gain: a village that feels less like a museum than a place where the 19th century simply never quite left.
