Today, Duntroon is a much more peacefull little town, though busier since the A2O cycle trail opened bringing over 60,000 cyclists through in the space of a year.

Take a break when travelling up the valley and have a look inside the Duntroon Gaol (jail). The Gaol has had it’s fair share of prisoners! 

In 1861, five months after gold was discovered in New Zealand at Gabriel’s Gully, Henry Beresford Garrett led a gang who robbed 15 miners of their gold on the trail back to Dunedin. He became notorious as the First New Zealand Bushranger for a robbery which, like the one he led on the Ballarat Bank, was carried out with unarmed revolvers. 

Garrett spent the rest of his life in New Zealand jails, where he wrote convict recollections of Norfolk Island, Tasmania and the Melbourne hulks (floating prisons).