Cavendish - VIC

The village of Cavendish is located on the Henty Highway 27 km north of Hamilton in the shire of Southern Grampians. It originated in the 1840s at the site of a ford over the Wannon River, and owes much of its early importance to this factor. Cavendish is the family name of the Dukes of Devonshire, after whom the village was named.

Cavendish once boasted a sawmill handling timber from the nearby Grampians ranges and the Wannon River valley, but the breakup of nearby sheep runs - Kenilworth and Moorala - under the closer settlement act during 1909 was more significant and created an increased patronage of the village hotel and store. Pressure for better rail services in the western district led to the funding of a railway line between Hamilton and Horsham, and this reached Cavendish in 1915.

Evidenced by a substantial memorial hall, soldier settlement developments after both World War I and World War II boosted the local population and briefly improved the village economy. But the amalgamation of many uneconomic agricultural smallholdings and the rise of the motor car to provide easy access to Hamilton's supermarkets and services posed a considerable competition to what Cavendish had to offer the local community.

Today the village has four churches, a memorial hall, the Banyip Hotel, a general store, a recreation reserve and a school (32 pupils in 2014). The hotel is run as a community-owned cooperative, providing useful work experience.

An abandoned composite timber and steel railway bridge across the Wannon River and the site of the station are relics of the Horsham-Hamilton railway line which closed in 1975.