Residents in the tiny Victorian town of Boort were woken by a 3.4-magnitude earthquake early this morning.
Geoscience Australia reports show that 71 people in the town of 940 felt the ground move at 2.30am.
The tremor occurred about 10 kilometres underground.
Paul Haw lives less than 10 kilometres from the epicentre and says it is probably the most powerful earthquake in Boort in more than two decades.
He said the house shook and the whole family was awoken by what sounded like thunder.
"I had my grandchildren here from Melbourne and my daughter," Mr Haw said.
"You could hear everything on the verandah rattling."
Robert Coutts lives in Fernihurst, about 20 minutes south-east of the quake's centre.
He said he thought something might have been wrong with his house.
"There was this great rumble," he said.
"You could feel the bed shaking and the windows rattling and everything."
The State Emergency Service received no calls for assistance and there have been no reports of damage.
Hundreds of quakes recorded
Geoscience Australia senior duty seismologist Tanja Pejic said 90 earthquakes had been recorded within 200 kilometres of Boort since the year 2000.
"Earthquakes happen rather frequently in that area on these sort of scales — magnitude 2 to 3, approximately," she said.
"This is pretty in line with what we're observing with seismicity across the state of Victoria."
More than 640 earthquakeshad been recorded in Victoria in the past 23 years.
Dr Pejic said the most powerful was the 5.9-magnitude quake in September 2021, followed by a 5.4-magnitude earthquake in 2012.
She said Victoria and Western Australia were among the most seismically active areas of the country, along with the Flinders Rangers in South Australia.
"A lot of them are not reported [as] 'felt' to us, because a lot of them happen outside of populated areas … so people are generally not aware that Australia does have earthquakes," Dr Pejic said.
"In Australia, we see few large earthquakes … but we see a lot of these sort of smaller earthquakes."
She said there could still be seismic activity within tectonic plates, but it was generally characterised by infrequent, smaller earthquakes.
"You can't exclude the possibility of a larger one at any point in time," she said.
In the event of an earthquake of any magnitude, Dr Pejic said people should drop on all fours, seek cover under a sturdy object, such as a table, and hold onto part of it.
