Loxton's Pepper Tree

Towns get their names in odd ways, and Loxton's hangs on a single peppercorn tree on the riverbank. From 1878 to 1881 William Charles Loxton, a boundary rider on Bookpurnong Station, lived here in a pine-and-pug hut that travellers came to call "Loxton's Hut". The hut went, the name stayed, and a peppercorn tree — which a plaque says Loxton planted in 1878, though historians suspect it came a little later — became the town's founding monument.

The old tree has earned its gnarls. Termites got into it, and a severe windstorm in 1997 brought part of it down, but it still leans over the riverbank below East Terrace, beside the car park of the Loxton Historical Village — which was deliberately sited next to it, and whose first building was a replica of Loxton's hut, pug, pine and all.

It is a two-minute stop that anchors a lovely stretch of riverfront: combine it with the village, the Tree of Knowledge flood markers and the river walk for an easy heritage morning.