Qualla: Bundian Way

Bundian Way: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Each spring, billions of bogong moths rise out of the lowlands and beat their way toward the cool granite crevices of the Snowy Mountains, and for thousands of years Aboriginal people followed them up. They came from as far as the coast to feast on the fat little moths and to gather in the high country. The path they walked has a name now: the Bundian Way. It runs 265 kilometres from Targangal, the peak the maps call Mount Kosciuszko, down through the Monaro tablelands to Bilgalera on the saltwater at Twofold Bay. It is the first Aboriginal pathway ever entered on the New South Wales State Heritage Register, listed in January 2013, and it connects the very highest point of the Australian continent to the sea.

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bundian Way: A Road Older Than the Nation

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The word that keeps returning in the survey reports is shared. This was never a single people's track. It was a corridor of connection, crossed by other paths running north and south, threaded with campsites every dozen kilometres or so, always near water. People walked it to tra...

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bundian Way: Moths in the Mountains, Whales at the Shore

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Two great gatherings anchored the route at its two ends. In summer, families converged in the alpine high country near the headwaters of the Snowy River, drawn by the bogong moths that sheltered by the millions in the rock. The moths were nourishing food and the occasion for cere...

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bundian Way: The Guides Colonists Forgot to Credit

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Europeans pushed into this country in the nineteenth century, they did not find their own way through it. They were led. In 1841, surveyor Thomas Townsend was guided down from Omeo by two Aboriginal men along part of the Bundian Way. In 1842, the artist Oswald Brierly travel...

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bundian Way: Reading the Country Back

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Виктор В, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between 2010 and 2011, the Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council and naturalist John Blay walked and surveyed the full length of the route, matching oral history against scarred trees, artefact scatters, old yam fields, and the journals of long-dead explorers. What they confirmed is...

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Image: Виктор В | CC BY-SA 3.0