St Bernard and the hospice

There are only about six roads going north out of Gippsland and into the High Country. I’m not talking about 4WD tracks but roads that normal people can use for much of the year. The one I like most is the road between Dargo and Myrtleford. It is true that for part of the year the snow can close it to ordinary traffic.

My father took my brothers and me over it in the early 1950s returning from fishing at Benambra. At Omeo we turned right, away from the usual Tambo Valley route, toward Cobungra and up on to Mount Hotham. Sitting in the back of a Commer 10 utility and looking down those terrifying slopes was, well, terrifying.

At the Mt St Bernard saddle we turned south and headed down toward Dargo on a road that (then) required us to remove a couple of fallen tees and build a little rock reinforcement on the inside of a washed-out corner. It has come a little distance since then.

We did not see the Mount St Bernard Hospice, because it was no longer there though it still appeared on some maps. Just after we turned south Mt St Bernard rose up on our western side and the hospice name is obviously related to it, which sent me searching (now, not then).

I don’t know which name came first, the mountain or the hospice, but I suspect the former, because work began on the hospice in 1863

Our version of the Mt St Bernard Hospice was always far more humble than the millennium-old one in Switzerland. The discovery of gold at Omeo led prospectors into the High Country and into unbelievable winter hardships. Above Dago there were diggings around Grant and Crooked River, with many odd names given to small settlements that last only a few years and disappeared.

Where there were miners there was business to be done and tracks were cut to link Omeo with the Ovens Valley, and the connect this with the Dargo High Plains. The last track headed south from just NW of Mount St Bernard, at an altitude of 1540 metres (which sounds better as 5052 feet). Like the original, this was, at least in winter, a refuge from the snows and storms that are harder there than almost anywhere else.

The hospice was built during the summer of 1863-64 and operated by ‘Mother’ Morell to cater for travellers, mostly prospectors. At first it seems to have catered for traffic coming up from the Ovens Valley and turning down into Gippsland and the Dargo High Plains, which as not plains at all. The location made it equally valuable for travellers between the Ovens Valley (Myrtleford, Bright and then Wangaratta) and Omeo and it became a coaching house for the Myrtleford-Omeo run.

It was a fairly large place in those days of one-room shanties, though it was a log-walled building with a wood-shingled roof. There was the accommodation house, a building to one side which housed the bar and even a substantial ‘coolroom’ simply created by excavating into the hillside behind it. Worked well, too.

Mother Morell died in 1870 and assistant “Sailor Bill” Boustead took it over. It is likely that she left it to him in her will. He and his wife than ran it until 1893, when Bill died. It seems that it was in 1884, on the completion of the Alpine Road from Omeo to Myrtleford, that the location changed slightly. The hospice was apparently (and I am not quite sure) on the alignment of the remade road, so the government dismantled it and rebuilt it nearby with Bill and his wife as lessees,

Supplies were obviously always going to be a problem in a place so hard to reach. It was something like eleven hours on horseback to come up from Myrtleford to this ‘northern gateway into Gippsland’. In winter, the horses would be ridden up to the snowline, into the snow as far as was feasible, and then released to return home of their own volition. Onward travel was by primitive skis and snowshoes, neither of them quite like the ones used in other countries. I’ll come back to that.

Sailor Bill Boustead packed in his provisions up the Bon Accord Spur, parallel to the current road up from Harrietville but further east and no easy task. George Jones owned a grocery store in Harrietville and he got the hospice’s business by having his son, Jim, pack the stores up there instead of Bill. Frank Wraith took over the store, and then his son, Victor, and both continued packing the groceries up that steep climb. Regular business was good business, after all.

Morell and the Bousteads showed their intelligence by bringing in goats of a European breed that were happy at a fair altitude (by European standards 5052 feet is not such a high mountain) and these provided both meat and milk. They grew vegetables until the snows came and the cool room kept them fairly fresh for quite a while.

When the government took over the hospice in 1884 it was rebuilt to a somewhat better standard with an iron roof, verandahs, water tanks and other such improvements.

Various people ran the hospice after the Boustead’s but it was left untended for long periods with no-one running it all. Tor Holth tells of Bob Ellis getting to the hospice after becoming lost taking supplies into the Evening Star mine. “That was the first lesson I ever had, If you take a horse anywhere, let that horse bring you home…The blizzard was coming at me horizontally…I had a World War 1 great coat and a pair of mining boots greased with fat but I was saturated…Twenty five hours I walked and I got through to St Bernard’s next day around lunchtime. I was buggered, I put the horses in the stables and the dray in the shed and some coot had burned all the wood so I had to go out in a foot of snow and cut wood to light the fire..”

“That was before Barney Rush took it over – there was nobody there.” Just to make his lonely stay and his near-death adventure more telling, the rats ate his boots during the night, leaving “the soles and the stiffening, the rats were hungry. They left the eyelets.” It was not an easy part of the world at the best of times.

That’s about all the space I have for now so I’ll come back to the St Bernard Hospice next week, if I may.