The High Country

Rich and rare

Covering less than 0.2% of the Australian land mass, stretched across 3 states, the Australian Alps and the High Country are extremely rare, and their peculiar Australian context also makes them unique.

“It’s a really tiny ecosystem, but it’s an incredibly important ecosystem. It’s full of diversity,” says Dr Michelle Stevenson, curator of the National Alpine Museum of Australia at Mount Buller. “You get species that don’t exist anywhere else.”

Michelle, whose love of the alpine region and skiing led her to undertake Australia’s first PhD on the history and heritage of skiing, undertook extensive surveys across a broad cross-section of the alpine and skiing community, enquiring what the key values were for the non-scientific community. For example, what would they miss if they couldn’t ski in Australia? “I think about 80% of people said the snow gums,” Michelle says. “To have this really Australian tree, a gum tree that is up here, in the mountains, battling against the elements, just kind of helps create an incredibly unique setting.”

High on the windy summits of the Australian Alps, the granite-studded heath and perennial grasslands are generally treeless between about 1,200 and 1,800m of elevation, depending on where you are, before the hardy snow gums begin to grapple to the lee side of the hills, bent and twisted from the weight of snow and the intense buffeting of winds.

“When snow blankets the landscape, everything about how you engage with it changes,” Michelle says. “You have these tracks that have been used for, you know, thousands of years – 20,000, 40,000 years – across Australia’s Alpine regions, going back to the first peoples. They have become roads that we use today. But then you put a blanket of snow over the landscape, and you’re not forced to use existing tracks. You’re on your skis, you’re gliding along – your way of engaging with it totally changes.”

Snow sports are just a brief interface in what is a year-round relationship that Australians have with the High Country. There’s horseriding, walking, camping, mountain biking and 4WDing, and in the winter there’s skiing, snowshoeing and tobogganing. 

Getting to the top

Possibly the best indicator of the popularity and accessibility of the Australian Alps is that the summit of Australia’s highest mainland peak, Mt Kosciuszko, is not the aspirational goal of intrepid mountain explorers, but a moderate walk on a paved pathway for more than 100,000 visitors each year. One of the people making this, and other trips into Australia’s wilderness areas possible, is Cameron Lindsay, whose company Wild Tracks is busy at the summit of Mt Kosciuszko completing the last sections of path.

With steel platforms and stone paths along every step of the 6.5km trek from the top of the Thredbo chairlift to Australia’s highest point, this path is hardly typical of the sort of track-making work that Wild Tracks undertakes. “Most of the tracks that we do are remote, so you don’t have immediate machine access or vehicle access,” Cameron says. “I spent a lot of time camping in the bush up here as a kid, and I probably identify with the mountain country and the granite country up here ... If you look at some of the track infrastructure around, it leaves a bit of a legacy, particularly the stone work. It’ll last 100 years.”

Of course, 100 years is a mere blip in the geology of the mountain known since 1840 as Kosciuszko, and also a fraction of time for its oldest and longest enduring human inhabitants. “For Walgalu people, Kosciuszko is known as Tidbilliga,” explains Traditional Custodian Shane Herrington, whose business Wolgalu Footprints offers cultural heritage knowledge, training and support in the Tumut area. “All of these places hold great significance, particularly the snowcapped mountains, which are deeply intertwined with our ceremonial traditions. In this region, ceremonies would attract First Nation groups from various locations, including as far as the Victorian border, the ACT and further downstream along the Tumut River.”

Gatherings would typically occur during the months of November, December and January, coinciding with the migration of the bogong moth. As the seasons cooled, the Walgalu people relocated to more sheltered locations, like the Tumut Valley.

As the daylight hours lengthen and the snow and frost of the winter months change form, melting and filtering through the heath and grass into rivulets and streams, cascades soar over granite boulders and scream through cleft gorges before spreading into rippling, shimmering, silver ribbons that wind through flatlands and fern-fronded banks in the dappled shade of mountain ash and eucalypts. In the upper King River, sleek forms beneath the surface face the upstream current and lurk in the shallow pools, eyes alert, piscine muscles tensed and ready to ambush unsuspecting insects. Just downstream, other predators cast languid lines in long arcs, hoping to hunt the hunters.

“I think most fly-fishers will agree, it’s sight fishing that is the most rewarding,” Trent Storer says, as he deftly switches out his fly to correspond with an insect he has just spotted. “So, being able to fish at a time of year when the conditions are conducive to being able to spot the fish in the water, see it feeding, identify what it’s feeding on and then put that right fly on and cast the fly out in front of the fish and watch the fish come up and eat it off the surface – that’s probably the pinnacle of fly-fishing for 90% of fly-anglers.”

Trent runs his business Back of Beyond Fly Fishing out of Mansfield in the Victorian High Country, taking first-timers and experts alike into locations around Mansfield, where the trout are plentiful. “For beginners, I’ll give them all the tuition they need and supply all the gear, the rods, the flies, the boots, the waders and all that, and we’ll fish for the day and they’re away. Sometimes they camp out, sometimes they return to their accommodation and get ready for the next day.”

Fly-fishing combines a love of nature and wild places and the thrill of the chase, the science of animal movement, an eye for the weather and sense of conditions. From early September through to the end of May, eager anglers navigate to their favourite locations, sometimes hiking into hidden valleys for days, searching for that perfect, ephemeral moment when all the elements of the High Country, and that singular human experience, come together.