Clunes is a town in Victoria, Australia, 36 kilometres north of Ballarat, in the Shire of Hepburn. At the 2016 census it had a population of 1,728. Clunes is best known as the site of Victoria's first registered gold discovery in 1850 and its first gold strike in 1873, which lasted three months. A campus of Wesley College is based in Clunes and parts of the original Mad Max were filmed in the town, famously showcasing the Creswick Creek Bridge, in Clunes’s more regional farming area.