Richard Helms

Kosciuszko’s managed decline: how politics and bad science burned the high country

7 November 2025 / 5 Comments

“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The place becomes a circus.”

Old Turkish Proverb

Settlement, snow leases and the rise of the grazing scapegoat

By the 1830s, white settlers from the Monaro, Canberra, and Goulburn districts were driving cattle into the Snowy Mountains each summer.

The 1939 fires – a blame game

“And of course there were ignitions by the fistful. Lightning kindled some fires, but most emanated from a register of casual incendiarists that reads like a roster of rural Australia: settlers, graziers, prospectors, splitters, mineworkers, arsonists, loggers and mill bushmen, hunters looking to drive game, fishermen hoping to open up the scrub around the streams, foresters unable to contain controlled burns, bush residents seeking to ward off wildfire by protective fire, travellers and transients of all kinds.