The road to Omeo

This column has covered things that happened on the Omeo Road many times in the last forty-seven years (the first of these columns was written in 1973) but has never covered the road itself.

I am talking here of the road between Bairnsdale and Omeo – the road running north from Omeo across The Alps to Tallangatta via Mitta Mitta is the actual Omeo Highway.

The road through Nariel to the Murray Valley Highway at Cudgewa doesn’t have a name and doesn’t deserve one. To the west the Kiewa Valley Highway runs south from Wodonga through Tawonga, Mount Bogong and joins the Omeo Highway north of Anglers’ Rest.

The road furthest west from what might well be called “Omeo Junction” is the Great Alpine Road, running southeast from Wangaratta through Bright and up and over Mt Hotham. This is the ‘main road’ that continues south from Omeo and is called the Great Alpine Road. The name was given, quite deliberately as a pairing with that other very popular tourist attraction, the Great Ocean Road.

The road to Omeo from Bairnsdale, though, is one of Victoria’s most historic roads, starting, in a sense with Angus McMillan and others finding their way into East Gippsland and the Lakes, coming down from the Monaro to Omeo and then down the Tambo Valley.

It grew into a track and then a coach and dray road serving the goldfields and the stockmen and the mailmen and the bullockies. It slowly became the easy, and very beautiful, drive that it is today.

The Omeo Shire was gazetted in 1872 and at the turn of the century it had 5,580 people within its borders, including a great many miners. Omeo was home to 900 of them. It also held a few settlements that are now little more than memories, including Brookville, Hinnomunjie, Nugong, Saltpetre, Sheep Station Creek, Stirling and Wombat. It was the Omeo Highway down as far as Bairnsdale in the 1950s when Dad took us trout fishing in the Morass, Deep Creek and the Mitta, a long haul from Longwarry in those days, and it only became the Great Alpine Road in 1988 when the last bit, near Mount Hotham, was sealed.

Coming south from Omeo it passes through Tongio, Swifts Creek, Doctors Flat, then follows the Tambo down to Tambo Crossing and Double Bridges.

The road goes into some rugged country then, and the Tambo heads of eastward. The highway rejoins it at Bruthen and then we have a pleasant 24 kms to the Mitchell River at Bairnsdale. From Omeo to Bairnsdale is now about 120km, a little shorter since the new road was built in the top end to avoid the Tongio Gap.

This story, which will now be in two parts because I am having my usual trouble in getting to the point, was not to be a tourist guide, but a story about the development of the road.

In 1900 there were two ways to get to Omeo if one could afford the rail fares. If one could not, there was the horse-back option, walking and the stagecoach. None of these were even remotely comfortable.

One could take the train to Bairnsdale, which cost more than a pound, one way, in second class and half as much again in first. It was another thirty five shillings to take the coach to Omeo (or three pounds return), and a minimum total of two and a half pounds was a huge cost. The normal wage for a workman was around eight shillings a day.

It was even more expensive to come in from the Melbourne Sydney railway at Bright. The Gazetteer says “by rail to Bright, 196 miles…coach thence 74 miles, fare two pounds; coach to Harrietville from Bright daily, far 5 shillings; Harrietville to Omeo coach weekly 40 shillings (two pounds); otherwise by horse or buggy, except June to November when road may be blocked by snow…” The first wheeled vehicle into Omeo from the south other than the bullock drays (usually only two-wheeled wagons) was a buggy driven by Goldfields Commissioner A.W. Howitt in 1864. He came up the ‘painted line’, which was first route.

In 1882 Blacks coach ran up as far as St Patrick’s Creek where passengers were switched to horse-back as far as Tambo Crossing before riding another coach up to Omeo. Remember that with all the other difficulties of a rough and ready track, the coaches and wagons of the day had narrow wheels which not only churned up the road but sank deeply into it whenever it was wet. Those deep ruts. By 1892, and perhaps a little earlier, coaches could make it all the way to Omeo but it was an adventurous trip, even using the Tambo riverbed as part of the ‘road’.

There were some spectacular accidents and there were occasional fatalities. In 1895 driver Billy Walsh was killed at Ten Mile Creek when a brake block fell off his coach and the remaining block could not hold it back on the steep descent and they bolted. The coach came down to the tight turn over Ten Mile Creek and had no chance of making the turn.

It hit the bridge railings and overturned, throwing all the passengers out but, amazingly, there were no apparent serious injuries, Walsh quieted the horses and tended to the passengers – until he suddenly died, perhaps from a heart attack. The cutting at the top of the Mountain Ash Range is named after him. In 1890 another coach fell on its side, but onto the roadway and not over the edge.

Once a passenger, Mrs Mogg was thrown from a coach and killed and on another occasion a

The isolation, social distancing, and restrictions on movement to try to combat the spread of COVID-19 may be getting a bit wearisome for many people ... but the measures are very minor compared to what eventuated at Walhalla some 153 years ago.

The about 2000 residents of the then gold mining town invoked some drastic measures after a resident, a Mrs Hanks, died from small pox. Her husband succumbed to pressure by the locals to burn down his house and she was denied a burial in the local cemetery because the coffin would have had to be carried through Walhalla’s main street.

Mrs Hanks was buried on a hill at the rear of where the house was located and Mr Hanks was paid compensation of 75 pounds ($150) for his house, quite a significant sum at the time.

The story is told in a book “Doctors and Diggers on the Mount Alexander Goldfields” and centres on the arrival of Mrs Hanks and her son back in Walhalla from Melbourne where they’d stayed in a house that also accommodated some people from a ship that arrived arrived in the port “with small pox on board”. driver was thrown from his coach when a wheel dropped suddenly into a pothole. It could be a rough ride. It was a long one, too. The coach would leave Bairnsdale after the afternoon train came in and the passengers would spend the night at Bruthen. The coach left at 5.00am in the morning, a little later in the winter and would stop at Double Bridges for breakfast, then at Ensay for lunch, and would be in Omeo around six in the evening.

There were staging stables at Double Bridge, at Ensay and at Swifts Creek. It had been the practice in other area to have the horses changed over at about ten mile intervals but either there were more staging posts on the way than I know of, or the running in this area was so slow the horses could go further, though this seems doubtful given the rugged terrain.

The motor car, the bus and the truck were about to arrive and to thus bring Omeo, Gippsland’s northern gateway, rather closer to the rest of us – but that is next week’s story.

Mrs Hanks and her son had travelled from Melbourne by Cobb and Co. coach to Shady Creek and then on horseback to Walhalla.

After she fell ill at Walhalla the local medico diagnosed Mrs Hanks as suffering from small pox. The magistrate was informed – Walhalla had a doctor and a magistrate in those heady days – and a local health committee formed “to take immediate action”.

The town’s hotel was placed under surveillance with nobody allowed to leave but Mr Hanks caused the health committee to become “furious” when he disregarded the order and removed his wife and son to his own house.

Some severe measures were put in place by the committee to protect the community including around the clock patrols at the Hanks’ house, erection of a high fence around the property and a requirement that the doctor change clothes and take over protective measures when visiting and leaving the house.

After Mrs Hanks died on March 23, 1867, her husband and son were transferred to a hospital that had been set up three miles (about five kilometres) from the town where they stayed in isolation for six weeks.