The Hume and Hovell Walking Track stretches over 440km between Yass and Albury and allows walkers to rediscover the route of explorers Hamilton Hume and William Hovell on their expedition to Port Phillip in 1824. The route offers a variety of topographies, vegetation types and land uses, as well as numerous points of historic interest.
Apart from bush walking, the track gives access to other recreational activities including camping, fishing, swimming, nature study, photography and wildlife observation. The track starts at Cooma Cottage on the outskirts of Yass and finishes at the Hovell Tree on the banks of the Murray River in Albury.
It has three track heads approximately 100 kms apart - James Fitzpatrick at Wee Jasper, Thomas Boyd on the Goobarragandra River 23 kms from Tumut and Henry Angel on Burra Creek near Tumbarumba. - (Ref-http://www.australiaforeveryone.com.au/journeys_footsteps.htm).
58 Australian Heritage - THE PUBLIC had no inkling of the hostility between the two explorers when The Australian, on January 27 1825, reported: Captain Hovell and Mr H. Hume have returned from their excursions to the southward. It appears that they penetrated as far as Western Port, Bass’s Straits, where they discovered a river of considerable magnitude. They represent the country to be remarkably rich.
Their actual achievement was far greater than the first sparse reports indicated. They were the first white explorers to see the snow-capped mountains of the Australian Alps and traverse their foothills and to cross the Murray and all the rich land and rivers south to Port Phillip Bay.
Settlers soon followed in their wake with mobs of sheep and cattle. Within ten years, many of the valuable river frontages had been taken up, and the settlement of Melbourne had been founded at the head of Port Phillip Bay.
The Hume Highway that now links Australia’s two greatest cities still follows to a large degree the track established by Hume and Hovell.
The public did not learn till thirty years after the exploration that Hume and Hovell were perhaps the last men on earth who should have travelled together. The blame was not wholly theirs. Ten years earlier, Governor Macquarie had sent George Evans on an expedition across the Blue Mountains to follow up the work of Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson.
Evans crossed the Great Divide, saw the western plains, named the Macquarie and Lachlan Rivers, and
To Explorers