The administrative centre of the Gippsland region, it services a very productive pastoral district. The town supports a variety of industries, particularly those relating to foods, plastics and timber. Sale is also a major supply centre to the Bass Strait oilfield in the Gippsland Basin.
Location: 276 km east of Melbourne on the Princes Highway. Map
Origin of name: honours British Army Major Sir Robert (Fighting Bob) Sale, who won fame in the first Afghan war and was killed in battle in 1845. The colloquial name Flooding Creek was replaced by a name commemorating General Sale.
Brief history: Archibald McIntosh was the first white settler, arriving soon after Sir Paul Edmund Eve Strzelecki passed through in 1840. The Omeo gold strike of 1851 brought growth to the area and Flooding Creek was the name given to the embryo settlement that grew on a creek not far from the confluence of the Thomson and La Trobe Rivers, on route to Port Albert. In the 1840's, Port Albert was the hub of the squatting enterprise in Gippsland (named after the Governor of New South Wales at the time, George Gipps). Drovers and carriers heading south to Port Albert crossed Flooding Creek and were faced with a notorious stretch of morass surrounding the Thomson and Latrobe Rivers. It was here that the fledging settlement of Sale began.
With the first land sales held in 1850, came the official naming of the town. By 1865, Cobb & Co had established a service from Melbourne to Sale, linking the new borough with the metropolitan centre via an uncomfortable 24 hour trip. The Latrobe Wharf, lose to the low level bridge built in the 1850s, developed in the 1870s. Located near the present swing bridge, little now remains. During World War II, an RAAF base at East Sale was developed to train bomber pilots.
Natural features: Sale Common State Game Refuge; Lake Wellington; La Trobe River; Thompson River; The Lakes National Park (400sqkm of lakes, estuaries and coastal lagoons and 2390ha of low-lying land).
Built features: RAAF Base
Heritage features: 'Grassdale' homestead (1850s); Swing bridge (1880-83); 'Kilmany Park' (4 km west); Fulham Park (1859); Our Lady of Sion Convent (1892-1901); Criterion Hotel (1865)