High Country & Heritage

Mountain Dreaming

Traditional Aboriginal life in the Alps included an annual migration of some thousands of people from the valleys and foothills up to temporary summer camps just below the treeline. Its focus was the seasonal harvest of cori, or Bogong moths (Agrotis infusa). The moth season drew great gatherings of neighbouring tribes, summoned by messengers within a range of 160 kilometres — for thousands of years, Aboriginal people travelled to the High Country in summer to hold ceremonies and feast on the protein-rich moths.

Five or six hundred people in each campsite would hold corroborees lasting six days before feasting began, when songs were exchanged, trade and initiations would take place, and betrothals and arguments would be settled. It’s possible that even tribes from south Gippsland took part.

Alpine National Park

Covering 646,000 hectares, the Alpine National Park is the largest park in the state of Victoria. It links with protected areas in NSW and the ACT, encompassing most of Australia’s alpine environment. Winter brings snowfields; the warmer months bring spectacular wildflower displays. The Australian Alps Walking Track spans 655 kilometres, from Walhalla to Canberra.

The park is one of eight that make up the Australian Alps national parks. All eight are managed co-operatively, so that the mainland’s alpine and sub-alpine environments are protected consistently across state and territory borders.

Fauna

The Alpine National Park supports diverse wildlife, including threatened species such as the Smoky Mouse, Broad-toothed Rat, Powerful Owl, Spotted Tree Frog and She-oak Skink. The rare Mountain Pygmy Possum — the world’s only exclusively alpine marsupial, and the only marsupial that stores food to last it through the winter — inhabits isolated boulder slopes covered with heathland, a specialised habitat found in only a handful of places across the Victorian and New South Wales Alps.

Bogong moths shelter in rock crevices on the Bogong and Dargo high plains from November through April, escaping the heat of the inland plains and providing sustenance for Mountain Pygmy Possums and Little Ravens.

Vegetation

The park spans an extraordinary range of environments, from the dry river valley of the Snowy to the alpine summit of Mount Bogong, Victoria’s highest peak. More than 1,100 native plant species grow here, many adapted to survive severe winters, and twelve — including the Bogong Daisy-bush and the Silky Daisy — are found nowhere else on earth.

Snow Gums dominate the woodlands across the sheltered upper slopes, while mature Alpine Ash forests are common around the river systems west of the Snowy. Higher still, where conditions are too severe for trees, the country opens into heathland, alpine herbfields and grasslands, mossbeds and snowpatch communities.

Heritage

European pastoralists from New South Wales began moving south into the Alps in the 1830s. Grazing started around Omeo in 1836, runs were taken up in the foothills, and summer grazing soon extended to the higher country, where huts were built for shelter and storage during mustering.

That history is still standing. Cattlemen’s huts are dotted along the high plains, and the ruins of Wonnangatta Station — home to the pioneering Bryce family for many years — sit alongside its cemetery. Wallace’s Hut near Falls Creek, built in 1889, is among the oldest surviving huts in the area.

From the 1850s to around 1900, gold drew people to the Alps in numbers. Relics remain in historic areas adjacent to the park, and towns like Dargo, Harrietville, Mitta Mitta, Omeo and Bright retain strong links to the era. Later, the 1939 bushfires and the post-war housing boom drove demand for alpine timber, and the network of roads built to extract it opened the Alps to visitors.

Explorers

The Victorian High Country was noted by Hume and Hovell in 1825 and explored by Strzelecki, McMillan and Howitt through the 1840s. By far the most detailed work was Ferdinand Mueller’s, in the 1850s.

Mueller’s third expedition set out in November 1854. He ascended Mount Wellington, travelled the Mitchell and Dargo rivers, climbed Mount Hotham, then explored the upper Mitta Mitta, Mueller’s Peak and Mount Kosciuszko before returning to Melbourne via Buchan, the Snowy River and South Gippsland. By 1855 the whole central section of the Australian Alps had been surveyed, botanically and geographically, by this “solitary wanderer in the most perilous and lonely regions”, as he described himself. He carried little, setting out on horseback with just two packhorses.

Early Cattlemen

The first recorded European journey to the Bogong High Plains was made by John Mitchell in 1843, who crossed the Murray near Thurgoona and approached up the Kiewa Valley, guided by local Aboriginal people.

Jim Brown and Johnny Wells, two skilled bushmen, cut the first track from the High Plains northeast along the spur running from Mount Fainter towards Tawonga. They also pioneered the route over Mount Hotham into the Ovens Valley, which was heavily used through the early 1850s by miners heading for the Omeo fields.

For a time the two had the Bogong High Plains to themselves, and they named most of what they found: Mount Feathertop, The Fainter, The Jaithmathangs, The Razorback, Blowhard, Bucketty Plain, Rocky Valley, Pretty Valley, The Rocky Knobs and Mount Jim. Local cattlemen followed, cutting tracks up many of the access spurs to the lush summer pastures.

Goldminers

Having promoted gold extraction across alpine Victoria, the government found its ambitions hampered by the absence of roads. In 1861 it fitted out a track-cutting expedition and appointed Angus McMillan to lead it.

In twelve months the expedition cut 220 miles of track — from the Wonnangatta to Dargo, over the Snowy Plains to the watershed of the Macalister and Moroka rivers, and on to the Barkly Range at the head of the Goulburn. Further tracks ran from Dargo to Harrietville, from the Wellington to the Moroka and the Macalister, and from the Jordan to Mount Tamboritha.

McMillan cut the last of the Dargo tracks alone, sick and broken but determined to finish. The end came quickly: his packhorse missed its footing and rolled on him. Mortally crushed, he struggled towards Bairnsdale and died at Iguana Creek on 18 May 1865.

Bushrangers

Even the High Country’s own bushranger played a part in opening the region, treading routes between Gippsland and the Murray as he gave the law the slip.

Bogong Jack — real name John Payne — began as a drover working the mountain routes between Gippsland and Omeo. In the 1850s he turned to cattle duffing and then horse stealing, which he found rather more profitable. Police eventually caught him, but nothing could be proven and he was released. He retired to his hut near Mount Fainter and was not seen again. Whether he turned to prospecting, or was murdered for the fortune he was supposed to have amassed, nobody knows.

Ned Kelly was active in the North East ranges too. According to Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, he camped at Bogong Jacks Saddle below Mount Fainter.

Blazing the Tracks

Many of the roads and tracks we ride today have been in use since the 1860s. Their history is the history of the High Country itself.

Dungeys Track takes its name from Detective Dungey, who cut the route during his long pursuit of cattle duffers in the 1860s — Bogong Jack among them.

Eskdale Spur is one of the access spurs onto Mount Bogong from Mountain Creek.

Track 107 was built by Angus McMillan under government contract, linking the gold-mining communities of Gippsland and the High Country. Its original rock work is still cut into the contour leading down to the Glen Wills Valley, and the track is still used today.

And we only ride with the flowing tide
as we follow the blazed line back
so we drink the toast of the vanguard host
And “The MEN who blazed the Track!”

— Will Ogilvie, Saddle for a Throne

Recreation

Organised walks were being run in the Bogongs as early as 1898, though they resembled expeditions more than bushwalks. Large parties employed packhorses to carry food, clothing and shelter, and packhorses meant employing a packer to manage them. One horse was generally reckoned sufficient for two walkers, and the packer — often a local cattleman — doubled as guide.

Maurice Harkins, a member of the Melbourne Walking Club and later Director of Tourism in Victoria, established the Skyline Tours under Railways management. They ran each Christmas from 1935 until the Second World War, week-long to ten-day trips on foot and horseback, provisioned and assisted by cattlemen, restricted to all-male parties of no more than 25.

The trips were substantial. The 1935 tour started at Mansfield and worked towards Wangaratta via Mount Cobbler, the King River Hut and Bennie’s homestead. Equipment, food, tents and saddles were all provided; walkers paid eight pounds ten shillings, riders twelve pounds.

The thread running through all of it is the packhorse. The mode of transport we use, the tracks and camps we ride, and the gear we carry are a continuation of that tradition.

Spring Spur

The Baird family established Spring Spur in Tawonga in 1986, arriving with a truck load of horses and a vision for a family business that would honour the traditions of the High Country horse and offer unique, quality visitor experiences.