The Long and Winding Ride: Episode 3 – Tawonga to Wandiligong: Wandering to Wandi

The Long and Winding Ride

 

Episode # 3 Tawonga to Wandiligong via Mount Beauty: Wandering to Wandi

 

Stage 3: Tawonga to Wandiligong via Mount Beauty

 

Prepare for some serious mountain bike riding in episode 3 as we cross over the range and back into the Ovens Valley taking the long way around. Our stage end is at tranquil Wandiligong where we will soak up the settlement’s history wandering across creek flats once bustling with gold prospectors. Wandi is the place where my maternal Great Grandmother and her family lived for many years.

 

We start on the Tawonga to Mount Beauty Trail, which runs beside the Kiewa Valley Highway, and then head off over Simmonds Gap on Dungey’s Track to Germantown before hitting sealed paths again on Bennett’s Trail to Wandiligong. After exchanging road bikes for mountain bikes at Mount Beauty, the cycle on gravel tracks and fire trails should be more fun. 

 

Mount Beauty

The Mount Bogong Lookout is our first stop where we see Victoria’s tallest peak towering over the Kiewa Valley. The alpine village of Mount Beauty lies at the foot of Mount Bogong (1986m). The settlement of Mount Beauty originated as a hydroelectricity town after the Second World War and is the gateway to Falls Creek. The town was built specifically to house workers on the Kiewa Hydro-Electric Scheme (developed between 1939 and 1961). As such, Mount Beauty has the characteristic feel of a 1950s and 1960s era new housing development and shopping village – not unlike two NSW Snowy Mountains towns – Jindabyne and Adaminaby. Skiers and mountain bike riders fit in well here.

 

Bogong (located between Mount Beauty and Falls Creek) formed a football club in 1946 and soon prospered with the influx of hydroelectricity workers to the district. In 1953 Bogong defeated Tawonga for the premiership of the Yackandandah League. When that league folded in 1954 Bogong entered the Ovens and King League, winning the flag in its second year. By 1960 Bogong was on the move once more, to the Tallangatta and District League where it was to join forces with Tawonga in 1964. 

 

The Mount Beauty Football Club was a derivative of the Bogong-Tawonga club in 1975. In the following year the club merged with Dederang to become the Dederang-Mount Beauty FC playing in the Tallangatta and District League. The first two decades were hard times for the new club, but in the late 1990s the Bombers started to emerge as a force. Dederang-Mount Beauty won three premierships in the years either side of the new millenium (1999, 2001, 2003).

 

Mount Beauty Reserve

(Google maps)

 

From Dederang-Mount Beauty to Docklands and the MCG

One well recognised AFL player who played his junior football at Dederang-Mount Beauty is ruckman Ben McEvoy. Ben is a dual premiership player with Hawthorn (2014, 2015) and was a member of St Kilda’s losing Grand Final Replay team in 2010. The giant ruckman, known affectionately as ‘Big Boy’, was born at Colbinabbin. His family moved to Dederang on a beef and sheep property and the Tallangatta League club is where Ben played prior to joining the Murray Bushrangers in the TAC Cup. He was selected by St Kilda with pick # 9 of the 2007 AFL Draft and played 91 games with the Saints before switching to the Hawks in 2014.  In a rare selection decision at Hawthorn, he was chosen as captain of the Hawks (2021) despite having commenced his career at another club. McIvoy retired soon after notching 250 AFL games at the end of the 2022 season. 

 

Jumping onto mountain bikes we leave Mount Beauty for a mid-morning ride over Simmonds Gap on the Dungey Track towards Germantown. Our route features some steep climbs, water crossings and fast descents. Without stops it is a 3 hour ride, but there’s no rush! The Dungey Track is named after a policeman from Beechworth who was appointed to Harrietville in 1881. Constable Dungey had been involved in tracking and capturing members of the Kelly Gang. Based on his knowledge of the mountains, Constable Dungey was tasked with finding an all-weather route from Bright to the gold diggings at Cobungra. He was the right man for the job as he had also blazed trails looking for cattle duffers in the high country. The policeman’s recommended track, which is below the snow line, has since been called Dungey’s Track. Cattlemen from the Kiewa Valley drove their herds of Hereford cattle back home by way of Dungey’s Track. I wonder if he ever crossed paths with ‘Bogong Jack’?

 

Wandiligong

Welcome to Wandi.  If you’ve not been here, picture a narrow valley clothed in greenery of many descriptions. Visualise a settlement whose unpretentious buildings and quiet streets speak of the past. See smoke from a wood fire drift above the poplars into the winter morning air. Welcome to tranquility.

 

Wandiligong is a place I will forever associate with walnuts, chestnuts and apples. Trips to Wandiligong and Porepunkah in my childhood to visit Chalwell and Raufers family relatives always resulted in a box of apples, bags of walnuts, hazelnuts and a few chestnuts for good measure. 

 

The old Chalwell family home at Wandiligong

(pic: author)

 

Lunch stop

 

Our lunch today is at the Wandi Pub – the Mountain View – established in 1864.. Grab an ale, a cider or a wine and wander around the pub discovering more about the history of the village. Food choices are hearty and pub-style. The beer garden on a mid-autumn afternoon is an ideal place to recover from the morning’s cycling. You might even catch some live music if your timing is good.

 

Let’s take a leisurely afternoon stroll across the creek flats on the Diggings Walk to learn more about the gold mining history of Wandiligong and the Chinese fortune seekers who lived here during the gold rush. Interpretation signs appear here and there, to inform the walker. 

 

There was a population of up to 500 Chinese living on the creek flats, with their own streets, stores, cook-shops, a circus and a joss house. At the peak of the rush in the mid 1860s 2500 people inhabited the town, known then as Growlers Creek. The alluvial gold boom era was over by the late 1870s. Reef and deep lead mining took over and was profitable for more than fifty years before dredging ended in about 1930. Eventually fruit orchards, nut groves, hop and tobacco farms, cattle grazing and pine plantations replaced gold mining as the economic base of the valley. Today Wandiligong is a National Trust heritage town where many buildings of its heyday era are preserved.

 

 

The red and black colours of the Wandiligong football club graced the grounds of the local football competitions – the Ovens Valley Association, the Bright District Association (later the Myrtleford-Bright League) and finally the Yackandandah and District League – for seven decades. Wandiligong established a football club in 1879. Regular competitive games of football between Myrtleford, Bright, Harrietville and Wandiligong began in 1888. Later, Porepunkah, Gapsted, Ovens, Buffalo River, Beechworth, Whorouly and Tawonga fielded teams in the Ovens competitions. 

 

Wandiligong football team premiers 1898

(Source: Wandiligong – A valley through time

Wandiligong Preservation Society 1988)

 

Wandiligong was a very successful club before World War I, winning premierships in 1896, 1898, 1899, 1903, 1904, 1907 and 1913. Wandiligong and Harrietville joined forces in 1936. The last football at Wandiligong was played in 1952.

 

Next episode

Stage 4 is one of the shortest and most leisurely rides of the tour. We will pedal from Wandiligong to Porepunkah via Bright.

 

 

More from Peter Clark can be read Here.

 

 

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