The Snowy Mountains are the roof of Australia: here, inside the vast Kosciuszko National Park, rises Mount Kosciuszko, which at 2.228 metres is the highest mountain on the continent. It's a landscape that breaks with the sun-and-beach image usually associated with Australia: alpine meadows, glacial lakes, snow gum forests and, in winter, snowfields that host the country's main ski resorts.
In winter, between June and October, the region becomes the capital of Australian skiing, with Thredbo and Perisher as the big stars, plus the resorts of Charlotte Pass and Selwyn. In summer, on the other hand, it turns into a hiking paradise: the Thredbo chairlift drops walkers near the start of the trail to the summit of Kosciuszko, one of the few 'national high points' in the world you can reach without being a mountaineer, among glacial lakes and alpine wildflowers.
Beyond nature, the area holds a powerful history: it was the summer territory of the Ngarigo people and other groups of the Alps, who came up every summer to feast on bogong moths; it was named by the Polish explorer Paweł Strzelecki in 1840; and it was the setting for the monumental Snowy Mountains Scheme, one of the greatest engineering works of the 20th century. The usual base for a visit is the town of Jindabyne, beside its lake.
Long before skiers and dams, the Australian Alps were the territory of the Ngarigo people and other groups who, every summer, made a pilgrimage to the peaks to feed on bogong moths, which shelter by the millions among the rocks. In 1840, the Polish explorer Paweł Edmund Strzelecki reached the highest peak and named it Kosciuszko, in honour of the Polish and American hero Tadeusz Kościuszko. Between 1949 and 1974 the Snowy Mountains Scheme was built here, a colossal system of dams and tunnels that diverts the Snowy River to generate electricity and irrigate the inland, employing tens of thousands of post-war workers, many of them European immigrants. Kosciuszko National Park protects this whole landscape today. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The birthplace of modern Australia: the First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove in 1788, on the lands of the Eora people. The country's most populous state and home to Sydney and its Opera House, it was the trunk from which all the other colonies branched off and the setting for the first gold rush.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Every summer, long before the ski resorts existed, the heights of the Snowy Mountains came alive with one of the most remarkable rituals of Aboriginal Australia: the pilgrimage to the bogong moths. When the heat set in across the lowlands, hundreds of people from different nations climbed into the high country, sometimes more than a thousand of them. They came to feast on the bogong moth (Agrotis infusa), a small brown moth that escapes the heat by sheltering in its millions, packed tightly into the cracks and caves of the rocky outcrops on the summits. Roasted over the fire, bogongs are rich in fat and protein: a seasonal delicacy that only the mountains could provide.
The heart of this territory was Ngarigo Country, which covered much of the Snowy Mountains and the Monaro plateau, with Mount Kosciuszko marking its western boundary. But the summer gathering was about far more than food. The Ngarigo sent messengers carrying message sticks carved with notches to invite other nations, such as the Walgalu and the Ngunawal, to meet in the bogong mountains. There, for as long as the feast lasted, people held corroborees (ceremonies) and initiation rites in ceremonial rings (bora rings), traded goods, arranged marriages and formed political alliances. It was a banquet and a great intertribal assembly of the high country at the same time.
The high country was woven through with sacred meaning. For these peoples, the peaks, rivers and glacial lakes were not an empty backdrop but living Country, with Dreaming stories and responsibilities of care. While they were up in the heights, they also gathered plants such as mountain celery and alpine medicinal herbs. This deep knowledge of the alpine environment, built up over thousands of years, came long before any European explorer 'discovered' these mountains.
There's a surprisingly European story behind the name of Australia's highest mountain. In March 1840, the Polish explorer and naturalist Paweł Edmund Strzelecki was travelling through the Australian Alps when, on 12 March, he reached what he identified as the highest point on the continent. He decided to name it Kosciuszko, in honour of Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish general and a hero of both his own country's uprising and the American Revolution. According to the story, the shape of the mountain reminded him of the Kościuszko Mound, the great earthen mound built in Kraków in memory of the national hero.
The name is hard for English speakers to pronounce (today they say something like 'kozzie-osko'), and for decades it came with some confusion over which summit was actually the highest. Records show that at one point the names Kosciuszko and Townsend were swapped between the two neighbouring peaks, until it was finally settled which one was the roof of the continent: Kosciuszko, at 2,228 metres. Aboriginal peoples, of course, had known and named these peaks long before, with place names tied to the bogong moths themselves.
The arrival of European settlers in the region, with their sheep and cattle on the Monaro grasslands, took a devastating toll on the First Nations peoples. Having lost their hunting and gathering grounds, many Ngarigo ended up doing occasional work on the stations, while diseases brought by Europeans (smallpox, influenza, measles, tuberculosis) devastated the communities. The great gatherings for the bogong feast carried on, still well attended, into the 1850s and 1860s. But the social and demographic collapse was so severe that the last mass moth hunts died out during that period. Even so, as the communities themselves point out today, the connection to Country was never completely broken.
Skiing came to the Snowy Mountains surprisingly early. By the late 19th century, in the mining town of Kiandra, Norwegian and Swedish gold prospectors had introduced skiing as a way of getting around on the snow, and this gave rise to one of the oldest ski clubs in the world. In the early 20th century, places like Charlotte Pass, the highest permanently inhabited settlement in Australia, became pioneers of snow tourism, with lodges reached by epic journeys across the mountains.
As the decades went by, and especially after the Second World War, skiing stopped being a curiosity and became an industry. The big resorts we know today were developed: Thredbo, with its European-style valley, and Perisher, which would grow into the largest ski resort in the Southern Hemisphere. Roads built as part of other projects opened up access to these once-remote mountains.
This is the only truly alpine environment on mainland Australia, with glacial lakes, wildflower meadows and snow gum forests. To protect it, a conservation framework gradually took shape, culminating in Kosciuszko National Park. Today it is the largest national park in New South Wales, covering more than 690,000 hectares. Unusually, the park combines the conservation of fragile natural areas with ski resorts, hydroelectric power generation and summer tourism, all regulated by the state parks service.
If anything shaped the Snowy Mountains in the 20th century as much as skiing, it was a colossal feat of engineering: the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Construction officially began on 17 October 1949 and went on for 25 years, until 1974. The idea was as ambitious as it was bold. The waters of the Snowy River naturally flowed south to the sea. The plan was to capture them and divert them through tunnels under the range and inland, generating electricity as the water fell and supplying irrigation water to the Murray and Murrumbidgee basins, in the farmland of the dry interior.
The figures are still impressive. The scheme includes 16 major dams, 9 power stations, 2 pumping stations and around 225 kilometres of tunnels, aqueducts and pipelines bored through the mountains. It cost about 820 million Australian dollars in 1974 terms and remains the largest engineering project ever undertaken in Australia; the American Society of Civil Engineers has listed it as a world-class engineering achievement. It also created the region's large artificial lakes, such as Lake Jindabyne, whose waters flooded the original town of the same name.
But the Scheme's deepest legacy was human, not concrete. More than 100,000 people from over 30 countries worked on it, and around two thirds of that workforce were newly arrived migrants: Italians, Germans, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Poles, Dutch and many more, escaping a Europe devastated by war. They worked and lived together for years in mountain camps, and that extraordinary mix of nationalities is seen as one of the great driving forces behind modern multicultural Australia. The project came at a tragic cost: officially, 121 workers died during construction, in brutal conditions of cold, rock and explosives. At the same time, it led the way on safety, for example by requiring every vehicle to have working seatbelts, something unusual in the 1950s and 60s.
Today, anyone travelling through the Snowy Mountains is moving across all these layers of history: Ngarigo Country and its bogong moths, the Polish explorer who left behind an impossible name, the skiing pioneers, the post-war migrants who tunnelled through the mountains and, above all, an alpine landscape that Kosciuszko National Park protects as one of Australia's most unusual natural treasures.
