The daring, the desperate and the deranged who seek the High Country

3 weeks ago 9

The whispering forests of Victoria’s High Country, the hush of its snow-laden plateaus and the stillness of its deep valleys have long been the haunts of the daring, the desperate and the deranged.

Murderers, crooks, bushrangers on the run, hermits and those simply seeking to escape the daily doings of the world have sought sanctuary in the mountains ever since Bogong Jack is said to have made his pile in the 1850s by droving stolen horses over the Bogong High Plains between Omeo and the Ovens Valley, near present-day Porepunkah.

The mountains of the High Country have long provided refuge for those on the run.

The mystery of who Bogong Jack may have been remains muddied by legend and myth. Whoever he was, he appears to have got away without the law catching up with him, leaving little but his name attached to the site of an old mountain cattlemen’s hut on a track high above Mount Beauty near Falls Creek.

As hundreds of police descended on the Ovens Valley near Porepunkah this week in search of the conspiracy theorist and survivalist Dezi Freeman, the nation’s attention is once more on the mountains of Victoria’s north-east.

Freeman vanished into the forest below Mount Buffalo on Tuesday after allegedly shooting dead two policemen and wounding a third. He hasn’t been seen since.

Killings and disappearances have been a feature of High Country intrigue since at least 1918.

Far to the south of Mount Buffalo, across some of the more inaccessible mountain country in Australia, lies the Wonnangatta Valley.

There, the body of the manager of the old Wonnangatta Station, John Barclay, was found in February 1918. He had been shot in the back, and his skull was found nearby.

Mountain bushmen of the time assumed Barclay had been murdered by his cook and station hand John Bamford, a man known for a violent temperament.

But nine months later, Bamford’s body was found beneath a log on the Howitt Plains, 30 kilometres away across the mountains. He had been shot in the head. The killings were never solved, and the mystery has stoked a thousand campfire stories ever since.

Those stories were recounted with a hideous twist more than a century later when Russell Hill, 74, and Carol Clay, 73, went missing while camping in the Wonnangatta Valley in March 2020. Hill’s Toyota Landcruiser was found with fire damage. A tent and other belongings had been torched.

It took police many months of painstaking detective work to discover that a man named Gregory Lynn, an airline pilot, had been present at the camp when Hill and Clay died violently, that he had removed the bodies to another area of the mountains and later burnt them to ash.

Eventually, a jury found Lynn guilty of murdering Clay, but not guilty of murdering Hill. He was sentenced to 32 years in jail.

Precisely what happened on the night of their deaths in the remote Wonnagatta Valley may never be properly explained. It remains yet another High Country mystery.

Attention on the case unearthed stories of a mysterious character known as the Button Man, who inhabited the mountains and who had the habit of appearing and disappearing silently, unsettling travellers. He got his name from his hobby of carving buttons from deer antlers and leaving them near campsites for no apparent reason.

He is believed to still live alone in the High Country, surviving by skills unknown to the rest of us.

Father and son fugitives Gino and Mark Stocco, wanted after a shoot-out with police near Wagga Wagga, became the subjects of a sensational hunt through the hills and valleys of north-east Victoria in 2015. Members of the public were alerted to keep their eyes out for the pair in a white Toyota Landcruiser – problematic, given that at least half the vehicles on the north-east’s rural roads fitted that description.

They slipped the net and were eventually found at a property near Dunedoo in central west NSW. Each was sentenced to almost 40 years’ jail for numerous offences, including the murder of a farm worker.

This week, some romantics have begun speaking of the mountain fugitive Dezi Freeman as a sort of modern Ned Kelly, for no better reason than the Kelly Gang in the late 19th century vanished regularly ahead of their pursuers into the mountains of north-east Victoria.

Glenrowan, where Ned Kelly lost his final showdown with police in the winter of 1880, is virtually within line of sight of Mount Buffalo.

Indeed, a fine view of the mountain can be had from Morgan’s Lookout at Glenrowan, named after yet another bushranger, Daniel “Mad Dog” Morgan, who roamed the north-east High Country and its valleys in the 1860s before being shot and killed near Wangaratta.

Any comparison between Dezi Freeman and Ned Kelly, however, doesn’t need to extend further than the fact that Kelly and his gang murdered three policemen in 1878 at a place called Stringybark Creek in the Wombat Ranges.

Murdering police wasn’t a romantic act then, and certainly isn’t now.

Freeman, whose “sovereign citizen” ideology rejects the authority of the government and traditional law, might also lose points as a credible Ned Kelly-style “free man” by the mere act of taking the government’s shilling.

Those who know Freeman say he has lived “free” for years around the mountains by accepting government pension cheques paid through Centrelink.