2025 Australasian Rogaining Championships

Murrumbidgee Wayfaring

News

On the course and elsewhere in Kosciuszko National Park are a great number of historic sites, structures and artefacts. Traces of First Nations occupation are likely to be there – remains of campsites, ceremonial grounds, rock art, scarred trees, and grinding grooves. Roads and tracks, many overgrown and forgotten, criss-cross the landscape linking places of former activity. Fencelines and stockyards are remnants from grazing. A clearing may denote the site of a graziers selection, a sawmill, or a former hut. Here we have presented a few snippets about the area. We will add to this page with additional articles in the lead up to the event, including a bit about rogaining in the area.

 

Kosciuszko National Park is 80 years old, but there is a longer history for some parts.

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The first reservation of land for public recreation occured between 1882 and 1931 around the popular destination of Yarrangobilly Caves to the south of the rogaine area. Miles Dunphy proposed a large conservation reserve for the mountains in 1935 of 400 000 ha including land on both sides of the NSW/VIC border.

Kosciuszko State Park was declared in 1944 resulting in a reserve of 518 229 ha.

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First Nations peoples that used the Kosciuszko mountains included the Wiradjuri, Wolaglu, Ngunnawal, Monaro Ngarigo. They recognise that Wiradjuri, Wolgalu and Ngunnawal are known by their totem, and acknowledge the matrilineal (mother’s) bloodline of the Monaro Ngarigo people.

Snowy Mountains were first sighted by Europeans by George Bennett in 1834 “…the beautiful clearness of the weather has afforded me a view of the ‘Snow Mountains’, the existence of which has been doubted by many.”

Summer grazing Hainsworth Hut

From the mid-1800s into the 1950s, the high plains of Kosciuszko National Park attracted summer graziers who constructed timber and tin huts as shelter throughout the area. The region which the rogaine covers was part of four early pastoral holdings called Currangorambla, Currangorambla West, Cooleman, and Long Plain (see map below). In 1884, the NSW Government revoked the leases and, very simplistically, put conditions on use for the new scrub leases for trees to be cleared.