Location
Adaminaby is a small town near the Snowy Mountains northwest of Cooma, New South Wales, Australia, in the Snowy Monaro Regional Council.
Adaminaby is one of the highest towns in Australia, and snowfalls are not uncommon during winter. The historic Bolaro Station and scenic Yaouk Valley are located near the township and Charlie McKeahnie, said to be the inspiration for The Man From Snowy River, a poem by Banjo Paterson, lived and died in the district. Later, Nobel-winning author Patrick White wrote about the town. The construction of nearby Lake Eucumbene made it necessary to relocate the original township of (Old) Adaminaby in 1957. In times of drought, the original township and relics of the old valley re-emerge from under the waters of the lake. The present township is located on the Snowy Mountains Highway and is known as the “Home of The Big Trout” and the location of the Snowy Scheme Museum. (Wikipedia)
History
Aboriginal history
The Snowy Mountains region was an important gathering point for the Aborigines of the Adaminaby and surrounding districts for many thousands of years, with intertribal summer meetings being held in the High Country involving up to a thousand people for feasting on the Bogong Moth. This practice continued until around 1865.
Stockmen, gold diggers, poets and skiers
Agriculture led to the early development of Adaminaby as a township and the Kiandra gold rush and subsequent history of skiing in the Northern Snowy Mountains opened up new opportunities for economic development. A number of noted Australian writers have found inspiration in the Adaminaby district.
Paterson was not the only Australian writer to find inspiration at Adaminaby – the poet Barcroft Boake also wrote about McKeahnie’s ride in “On the Range”, in which McKeahnie chases down a well-bred horse that had escaped with a brumby mob of wild horses; while Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White worked as a jackaroo at Adaminaby’s Bolaro Station in the 1930s. His subsequent and critically acclaimed first novel, Happy Valley was inspired by his time working at Adaminaby and the people he knew in the town. It won White the 1941 Australian Society of Literature’s gold medal.
Goldrush and skiing in northern Skifields
The fortunes of the town were affected by the discovery of gold at nearby Kiandra in 1859 and the subsequent introduction of recreational skiing to the district around 1861 when Scandinavian gold prospectors are reputed to have strapped fence posts to their boots and slid down the snowbound hills of a landscape too frozen for mining. For around a century, Kiandra remained Australia’s highest township and a base for skiers, before the last permanent residents left the township following the completion of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Kiandra’s ski facilities were permanently shifted “up the hill” to Selwyn Snowfields in 1978 and Adaminaby remains the main service centre for the Northern Skifields of New South Wales–one of the oldest areas for recreational skiing in the world.
Early graziers used the high country wilderness above Adaminaby as summer pastureland. The area was set aside as a National Chase in 1906 and later became the Kosciuszko National Park. Today the area is renowned for its historic huts and access to unique wilderness areas, including the Mount Jagungal Wilderness Area.
Snowy Mountains Scheme
The most momentous episode in the town’s history came with the construction of the vast network of tunnels and dams of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, which began at Adaminaby in 1949. A lake nine times the volume of Sydney Harbour eventually flooded the valley in which the original townsite lay. A prolonged drought saw the ruins of the old township begin to resurface in April 2007, attracting the attention of global media – and even comparisons to the mythical city of Atlantis. (Wikipedia)
Places of Interest
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