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From snow to ash: a journey on foot to an impending crisis
LONG JOURNEYS by foot across wild country are journeys external and internal. Their pleasures and struggles are those of the trail and the mind.
So it was for Anthony Sharwood during the summer of 2019. Jaded with his job as a sports journalist, Anthony set foot on the Australian Alps Walking Track (AAWT) to follow its 655km length from its southern extremity at the Victorial town of Walhalla to Tharwa in the ACT. He didn’t complete the walk but that was not because the hardships forced him to quit. This was the summer of 2019. East Coast Australians know what happened then.
The track
To walk the AAWT takes between five and eight weeks. It is one of Australia’s premier long-distance trails. It is also no walk for the novice. That is not only because of its length, it is because the name ‘track’ is a misnomer. It is a track only where it follows established walking tracks. Elsewhere, it traverses informal and unmaintained trails, fire trails and rough service roads, and sometimes no trail at all. Competency in navigation is a basic requirement for following what might better be described as a route rather than a continuous track.
If anyone thinking of walking it imagines the track’s name to connote something like the long-distance tracks of the USA, New Zealand or Europe, or even Tasmania’s Overland and South Coast tracks, they are in for a rude surprise. With the exception of the South Coast track, many of those tracks are well-signposted and have hospices and hut wardens who supply meals, huts to overnight in or are close to towns where walkers can resupply. Not so the AAWT. It passes through no towns at all although in NSW it passes close to some ski resorts. This limits resupplying with food and other needs. Anthony talks about how, before he set out, he and his father hid 20 litre plastic drums containing food and propane cartridges for his Jetboil bushwalkers stove around a week’s walk apart. Reading this reminded my of how in the 1950s and 1960s long distance walkers in Tasmania’s wilderness would be resupplied by airdrops from light aircraft.
The outer journey
Long-distance bushwalks consist of two journeys: the outer and the inner.
Anthony starts his outer journey by climbing into the ranges a few kilometres out of the small Victorian town of Walhalla. He starts off in forest and ascends into snow. Walkers of Australia’s high country — a term applied to the mountains of the Great Dividing Range where it reaches its highest elevation in the Victoran Alps, NSW’s Snowy Mountains and the ACT’s Brindbellas in the country’s southeast — know that moist weather fronts speeding in from the Southern Ocean are pushed upwards when they reach the ranges, their moisture falling as cold rain and snow even in summer. That is the snow Anthony walked into as he set foot on his adventure.
His journey moves from snow into one of Australia’s hottest, driest summers as he treks northwards. He sees how dessicated the country is. In some parts it has been burned by bushfires, leading to some sections of the AAWT being closed. Fortunately, he finds a mobile phone signal and asks for advice on a bushwalkers’ social media, securing lifts around the closed sections and meeting people in the towns he overnights in.
His descriptions of the small, out of the way towns at the foot of the ranges, the people he meets and what he tells of their lives makes the book more than a straight-forward tale of a long-distance bushwalk. There’s Riverman, one of the people he shares an out-of-town campsite with while awaiting a lift. Anthony realises he lives in his ute-converted-into-a-basic-camper and leads a peripatetic life between the mountain country in summer and the coast in winter, using bourbon as a painkiller for a back injury and telling tales that end in violent encounters.
Others he meets are farmers, one of whom moved his family to a small town at the foot of the ranges because he likes the conservative vibe of the place. Anthony asks whether this signals a shift of conservative-minded people out of the politically and culturally progressive cities to rural areas, and whether this is a new form of the urban-rural divide that persists in the Australian mindset. He discounts that, saying that rural areas are losing population to the cities.
Anthony’s descriptions of the mountain country he traverses paint a picture of country alien to most Australians. He talks of the difficulties of the unmaintained parts of the track, the pleasures of fast walking in the undulating country of the Snowy Mountains, of route finding where there is no track at all, of steep descents into river valleys and tiring, steep ascents out of them. Such descriptions are a necessary part of any story about mountain travel, however it is the encounters with the people he meets in the towns he diverts to and those walking the track that enliven the book to make it more than the narrative of travel on foot in rough country.
Anyone who has followed long-distance walking trails has tales of fellow walkers met. While still in the Victorian section, Anthony encounters two women heading in the opposite direction. For one of them, this is her third traverse of the AAWT. She is a fast walker, she says. Three times along the AAWT? She must be one extraordinary woman. At another campsite he meets a New Zealander who walked up to the headwaters of the Murray River, to where it is a mere creek. His canoe is a few kilometres downstream. He intends to paddle the river its full length to its mouth. That is one long paddling journey.
Anthony’s writing gains an increasing sense of the impending threat as we heads north into the snowy Mountains. The first hint comes when he sees ash and burned leaves falling from the sky. He figures these come form a bushfire to the west of the ranges, uplifted on updrafts of hot air to fall in places distant from their source. He smells smoke but thinks that it comes from fires a long way off. The sense of threat builds as he notices how the smoke of distant fires is starting to tinge the sky, and as he moves on he sees how the sky is taking on that sombre rusty colour so well known to Australians during bushfire season.
It is the summer of 2019. The country is burning. From southern Queensland to southern Victoria, forests and towns are incinerated in the most extensive, most intense, most destructive bushfires the country has seen.
Anthony realises that the fires are close when he reaches the mountain known as Jujungal in the northern Snowy Mountains. Now, he is getting more than a little concerned. The story has been building tension ever since he first noticed signs of the fires. Now, that tension is about to culminate.
There are huts through the Kosciusko high which were built by cattlemen and by the Snowy Mountains Authority in the 1950s and 1960s,, when the extensive hydroelectric system was being built. The cattlemen and hydro workers have long gone, but their huts remain and are today use by the bushwalkers who come into the region.
One night, Anthony overnights in one of these huts. Come the morning he hears an unusual sound in the mountains. He steps out to see a fire services helicopter landing. One of the crew gets out and comes over. He tells Anthony that the fires are spreading and becoming more intense, and that they are looking for a solo walker who is following the AAWT.
The inner journey
Anthony’s inner journey will be familiar to long distance solo walkers. It reveals how the inner and outer journeys affect each other, how the mind takes walkers from depression to exuberance, or the other way. Mood becomes the product of the weather, the terrain and rest.
For many, long distance walking provides the mental space for deep thinking and making life-changing decisions. For other, and this was how it was with me when I did an off-season solo walk along Tasmania’s Overland Track decades ago— before it was deluged with walkers and regulated and during which I saw no one other than on the first and last days—it is immersion in the process of walking, camping, then walking again next day that occupies the mind. Immersion in process repeated, I guess.
The book takes us on another inner journey, one shared by many Australians that hot, dry summer. It is a journey into forests aflame, farmhouses and town houses engulfed and vast clouds of ominous brown smoke blotting out the sun with their threatening pall. The fires of 2019 have been engraved into the national consciousness.
Reading Anthony’s thoughts on the trail will interest anyone wondering about the psychology of solo, long-distance walking.
The book
Throughout the book, Anthony introduces readers to brief histories of some of the places he passes through. He reminds us that towns reliant on the extraction of natural resouces like minerals or timber can be emphemeral. Walhalla, once home to thousands, is now home to few. The slopes once denuded of timber are again forested.
Later in the book, closer to the end of his walk, he writes of the history of the Snowy Mountains, the controversy over the large number of the wild horses known as brumbies that are damaging the terrain, the hut builders and people like novelist Elyne Mitchell and Klaus Heuneke, author of Huts of the High Country and other books. Anthony reveals that there is an authentic culture of the high country that is embedded both in history and place.
I guess it was my earlier years as someone who enjoyed hard walks that accounts for my picking up Anthony’s book. There was much in it that I could identify with. Anthony writes of how he is attracted to the mountains and how they are his favoured terrain. That is how it was for me, too, although the coasts now have an equal attraction.
There are plenty of books about long distance journeys by foot in wild country. Most are about the long-distance trails in the US, records of journeys made and the reasons for making them. They are interesting, however a book about long-distance trail walking in Australia brings the experience close to home, close to the minds and experience of local readers. In doing that it is revealing and refreshing.
From Snow to Ash-Solitude, soul-searching and survival on Australia’s toughest hiking trail; 2020, Anthony Sharwood; Hachette Australia. ISBN 9780733645280.
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