The story of this place
The Victorian High Country is the landscape that produced Australia's most enduring bush mythology: Banjo Paterson wrote 'The Man from Snowy River' in 1890, and the image of a fearless horseman galloping down a near-vertical mountain face — 'where the best and boldest riders shrank and paled to watch him' — became Australia's defining vision of frontier courage. The poem was drawn from real stockmen, real mountains, and real horses: the wild brumbies (feral horses) that still run through the alpine country today.
The High Country also produced Australia's ski industry: the first ski club in the southern hemisphere was formed at Mount Kosciuszko in 1861. The alpine resorts of Falls Creek, Mount Hotham and Mount Buller were built by European migrants — many of them Austrian and Swiss — after World War II, carrying mountain culture to the antipodes. The annual Alpine Muster in March sees hundreds of horsemen and women ride through the high plains to muster cattle in a tradition dating from the 1880s — one of Australia's last great working horseback traditions.