Snowy River Country

February 15.16.17, 2009

The last time I was in Australia I worked on a sheep station, caught kangaroos, collected crocodile eggs and met Lana at Ayers Rock. One thing that I didn’t do was get to the Snowy River country.

Back in 1982 a film was released called Man from Snowy River. My parents just had gotten cable at that time and I had the opportunity to watch the film a lot since I was kind of using their house as a base at the time. The film was one of the reasons I went to Australia. Now it was time to see the area the film was talking about.

There aren’t many places in Australia that get snow but the Snowy River area is one of them. Some people call it the Australian Alps but, having just been to the Southern Alps in New Zealand, I think that title would be a gross overstatement since the highest peak (Mount Kosciuszko) is only 2,228 m (7,310 ft).

The Snowy River starts up on that mountain so that’s where we went.

One the way there we took a really quick detour through Canberra, the national capital. Somehow it didn’t really appeal to us. The Parliament building itself is really, uh, different. Not exactly what I would have built but then again it was built in the 1980’s.

The mountain roads took us up into the alpine highlands that look so familiar to someone used to popping over the mountains in BC. We finally made it to the town of Jindabyne and stayed at the Banjo Paterson Inn. (Banjo being the man who wrote the poem “Man from Snowy River” and also “Waltzing Matilda” but you already knew that didn’t you).

The towns up here are based around the ski business but nothing like on the scale of what you would get anywhere in Canada. We drove up to Charlotte Pass, which has the distinction of holding the record of the coldest temperature ever recorded in Australia (−23 °C (−9.4 °F) – HaHaHa – Sorry, I have slept outside in colder weather than that).

We planned to walk to near the summit of Mount Kosciuszko but only made it about 2/3 of the way to the emergency shelter hut at the 7 km mark. On the way we walked over a very small Snowy River as it started its journey to the sea. The cold, rain and high winds finally turned us around but it was a great hike through the high alpine.

The next day we lost a lot of altitude in the car as we made a run for the other end of the Snowy River at Marlo near Orbost in the state of Victoria. On the way we passed a lot of brown grasslands and also a few bush fire sites. The recent bushfires here claimed over 200 people and a couple of towns last week so we kept a good lookout. There was a haze in the air as we drove and, we found out later, we drove fairly close to one of the out of control fires.

Camped that night in Orbost on the banks of the Snowy. Much reduced from Banjo’s day, with much of the water diverted for various uses. From the signage on the bank there is a group fighting to restore the river. Hope they get there.