In 1840, William Campbell took up the Strathloddon pastoral run by the Loddon River, which corresponded roughly to the Campbells Creek valley and its tributaries. Gold was discovered in 1851 and it would appear that Strathloddon was used to describe the station’s urban area. By 1860, this had changed as both Strathloddon and Yapeen were generally regarded as synonymous for the same district. In the first half of the 1860s, there were also large, stable Chinese camps extracting worthwhile yields of gold, even in areas that had already been worked over a number of times.