Body dumped in old Vic goldmine

Police are in the dark over the identity of a man found dead in an abandoned goldmine shaft in a Victorian ghost town.

He was wearing a Neil Young 2009 tour shirt, a blue-striped knitted jumper and only his top dentures were attached.

He was killed, most likely in an assault, wrapped in a tarp and dropped into the shaft of the Balaclava Hill mine, police said.

Interstate and international missing persons registers are now being scoured for an identity.

"It is a tough investigation, if we get his identification I think that will get us a long way," Detective Inspector Mick Hughes said on Tuesday.

Emergency services were called to the former goldmine, about two hours north of Melbourne, on Saturday March 12 when two men climbing made the grim discovery.

The mine tunnel was officially closed as a tourist attraction after a geo-technical stability assessment found the shaft had deteriorated to an unsafe condition.

Det Insp Hughes said it was likely the person who put the body in the mine knew the area and could have believed the shaft was a bottomless pit.

"It was a significant piece of work for us to recover his body, the way we had to recover it was not the way it went into the mine shaft," he said.

"It would take a fair bit of work to get him in there I think.

"I'd say it's been dropped into one of the entrances and probably slid to where we found it.

Police believe the man was more than 50 years old, Caucasian, about 176cm-183cm tall, with no upper or lower teeth, but he did have a full upper denture.

There was a healed depressed fracture on the back-left side of his head, but Det Insp Hughes said it was an old injury and not related to his death.

During the Gold Rush, Balalclava Hill was a "mountain of gold" with six rich reefs intercrossed through the quartz.

Millions of pounds worth of gold was extracted from the area during the gold rush before the town went into decline during the 1890s.