Central Goldfields

Distinguished and Famous people from Central Goldfields

🌟 Janet Watts

Janet Watts was named Central Goldfields Citizen of the Year in 2025 for a lifetime of volunteering. Her contribution included twenty-nine years with the CFA, SES involvement and work with the Dunolly Hospital Auxiliary. Council also credited her with helping restore Neighbourhood Watch and a physical banking service to Dunolly. These are the practical concerns that determine how comfortably a small town functions. Her recognition brings emergency response, health support and everyday access to services together in one documented local story.

🌿 Jim Willis

Jim Willis worked at Bealiba during his early Forests Commission career, after training at Creswick. Forestry gave practical expression to an interest in plants that had begun in childhood. He later joined Victoria’s National Herbarium, where classification, plant distributions and helping people identify specimens became central responsibilities. His fieldwork and scholarship produced A Handbook to Plants in Victoria, a reference used for decades. Bealiba’s association is an actual forestry posting, before the better-known herbarium work. It places a regional working landscape within the education of a botanist whose later books helped others recognise what was growing around them.