Hidden valley of dark secrets

By MELANIE BALL

On the road through mountain ash and blue gum forests in Australia's north-eastern Victoria, I discovered - too late - that my life was in the hands of tour guides of convict descent.

Tales of ancestral bread theft take on a distinctly darker note when you're within cooee of the scene of an 82-year-old unsolved murder.

We'd been driving for six hours through the forests north of Briagolong. The trunks had framed glimpses of folded hills and great bluffs washed blue by the morning light, but the Pinnacles fire lookout provided the journey's ultimate view.

On our perch looking over plummeting valleys and towards rearing ridges, the tour leader outlined our afternoon journey. Along that track (barely a chalk mark), over that hill (mountain), down that ridge (knife-edge), into that valley (hidden).

The sun was heading west when we reached the junction of Conglomerate Creek and Wonnangatta River. Charcoal smudges in the valley beyond told of other nights spent folded into Victoria's majestic Alpine National Park.

Kookaburras and blue wrens cackled and flitted among the trees as we pitched tents, unrolled swags and sat chairs around the campfire. I wondered what Wonnangatta's pioneers would have thought of our chainsaws and Chardonnay.

Swept up in the 1860s gold rush, American prospector Oliver Smith rode the Crooked Creek area seeking his fortune. He found instead a valley of rich river flats protected from the outside world by the Great Divide.

In 1867 he gave up prospecting to farm here, one of Victoria's remotest stations. Life was tough and lonely for Smith, his wife Ellen and stepson Harry. Among their friends, though, was William Bryce, a Scotsman operating a packhorse train between north-east Victoria and the Gippsland gold towns. When work became too much for Smith he offered Bryce a partnership.

In 1873 Bryce brought his wife and seven children to Wonnangatta. The eldest rode their own mounts on the 50km journey. Two toddlers travelled in gin cases strung from a packhorse. Annie Bryce rode holding her baby.

A year later, Ellen Smith died bearing stillborn twins and Oliver Smith sold up to Bryce and left the area, with Harry, in 1878. Harry was to become dramatically reacquainted with Wonnangatta after returning to work a nearby property, but his stepfather never returned.

The Bryces ran Wonnangatta Station for nearly 40 years. Expert with horses, the Bryce children also sang and played music.

Rumour has it that Wonnangatta Homestead contained a grand piano reassembled from pieces brought in on horseback.

I imagined piano concertos drifting through the valley, but it was fog-muffled voices and saucepan clatter that woke me next morning.

Over breakfast the sunshine pulled back the fog, illuminating lone gum trees on the river flats, a colonnade of manna gums sheltering the river and white clouds drifting across an enamel blue sky.

A hot day threatened so we explored early, heading first across the valley to a wheel-scarred hill with a tiny fenced cemetery at its base and further along the homestead area on Conglomerate Creek.

Here pine trees shade a tumbledown post-and-rail stockyard choked with weeds, stones mark the layout of the Bryce homestead, burned down by careless walkers in 1957, and a corrugated-iron shed looks along the creek to where Jim Barclay's body was found on February 25, 1918.

Barclay became station manager after the Bryces sold Wonnangatta in 1914. An easy-going, handsome bushman, he enjoyed the station's solitude but needed help with the work.

In December, 1917, he engaged as cook and odd-job man John Bamford, an Englishman inclined to fits of temper and who some people believed had strangled his wife.

Harry Smith, Barclay's friend and nearest neighbour (22km away), told police that Wonnangatta was deserted when he delivered mail on January 22, 1918. The letters hadn't been touched and Barclay's favourite dog was near starving when Smith returned three weeks later. After searching briefly for Barclay, he took the dog home.

A week later, Wonnangatta's owner sought Smith's help to search for Barclay. On their return to the station, the dog led them to Barclay's body in a shallow grave beside Conglomerate Creek. He had been shot in the back. His revolver, razor and best suit were missing. So was Bamford, who was the prime suspect until his body was found under a wood pile on the Howitt Plains, about 20km away, nine months later. Someone had shot him in the head.

Theories abounded: cattle duffers (thieves) killed Barclay and Bamford; Barclay was a doublecrossing cattle duffer; Smith killed Bamford for killing Barclay; a jealous husband/brother murdered both (Barclay was a reputed ladies' man). But the murders were never solved.

Our campfire talk at Wonnangatta Station inevitably turns to murder and the passions that provoke it. Our leader said he knew "whodunnit" but he would tell us only off the record. He did.

Wonnangatta Valley's familiarity with death didn't end with murder. A cairn commemorates an engaged couple who died in October, 1983, when their four-wheel-drive rolled down the "Widowmaker."

Four-wheel-drive owners seeking more adventure than the drive to Wonnangatta continued hill climbing until National Park rangers blocked the ascents in 1995.

From the cairn my companions set off to climb a hill but the rising temperature drove me to find a shady spot. I opened a paperback about murder and mayhem, but the river's gargling flow over the rocks below proved irresistible.

Just upstream, the river flowed lazily through a cathedral of manna gums. Further again it filled a deep waterhole. A Dargo crocodile (Gippsland water dragon) climbed out as I slid into the breathtakingly cold water. I swam until warmed up enough to float beneath a sky framed by eucalypt branches. Then I clambered onto a submerged log and watched sunlit insects hover above the water, the colour of the gold Oliver Smith never found.

CASENOTES:

GETTING THERE: Wonnangatta Station is in the Wonnangatta-Moroka section of Victoria's Alpine National Park. There are three main access routes all 4WD-only and closed during winter.

CONTACT: For road information ring the Department of Natural Resources & Environment on 61-3-51482355.