Throughout the Kosciuszko[1] high country there are many signposts to an era of adventure and survival in a time now passed. It’s akin to a parchment upon which one can see faint signs of an earlier story long since written over.
The Spencers of Waste Point stand at the centre of this earlier story.
For more than 70 years from the mid 19th century James Spencer and one of his sons of the same name rode and worked the valleys and mountains of this region, establishing the earliest cattle runs, guiding famous expeditions, introducing others to its wonders, and leaving indelible markers to their presence among the streams and peaks of the area.
James M Spencer, born in 1827 in Bathurst, first appears in the late 1840s working on the Kalkite run for Stewart Ryrie, one of the pioneering landowners on the Monaro. Soon after, he begins his own squatting venture, the Excelsior Run, 26,000 acres stretching along the north side of the Snowy River valley from Mt Kosciusko to the Gungarlin River.[2] This venture, however, was relatively short-lived because of the limited period of fair weather. Spencer said of his run: “A man is fortunate if he can keep his stock more than three months on it.”[3] Hard to imagine in this era of encroaching climate change.
Spencer established his home on 40 acres at Waste Point in the 1850s, at the junction of the Snowy and Thredbo rivers (now under Lake Jindabyne). By the 1880s, the property had grown to 1280 acres and the homestead long served as the terminus for the coach run from Cooma. In fact, Waste Point in the early days was the most important settlement on the western side of the Snowy River. It was the starting point for cattle and sheep taken up onto the Main Range along the Snowy River track.
Spencer snr. died in 1911 and throughout his life in the mountains and, according to the famous geologist, Dr R von Lendenfeld, he was known as the ‘King of the Mountains’.[4] This moniker is well deserved when one considers the number of places in the Snowy Mountains that are attributed to Spencer senior. Driving up to Perisher resort, you encounter Piper’s Creek, named after Spencer’s lead bullock and Prussian Creek, named after another of his bullocks (although George Peterson, the last manager of the Kosciusko Hotel, reckons it was named after a horse that grazed in the area!). Spencer’s Creek (the location for official snow depth measurement) wasn’t named by Spencer but about him. George Petersen says an old stockman in the 1920s told him Spencer was crossing the stream in flood when he fell in and one of the stockmen quipped: “If he wants to have a swim he can have it to himself”. And thus the name.[1]
The same stockman is quoted by Petersen as having been part of a mustering party collecting Spencer’s cattle during a blizzard when they rode up to what is now The Paralyser (directly to the south of Mt Perisher) when Spencer said: “This is a perisher,” and when they rode on to the western side of the Guthrie range, he said: “If that is a perisher, this is a paralyser.”In those early years, Mt Guthrie was known as The Perisher and Mt Perisher was known as The Paralyser. The names stuck but at some time transferred to the currently named peaks. Also according to Petersen, Mt Blue Cow got its name from one of Spencer’s cows that was bluish in colour and every spring disappeared from Waste Point and could be found on that mountain. A good yarn but stretches plausibility.
There is also a Spencer connection with Smiggin Holes. According to Petersen, the area was a resting point for cattlemen and was known as “the lick”. One of Spencer’s men, a Scot, asked why it got its name and was told that it was where they placed salt for the resting cattle. He is reported as saying: “Where I come from the place where the salt is placed, the cattle paw holes in the ground and the water lays there, and we call it the smigginholes.”[2] Again, the name stuck.
Apart from Spencer senior’s association with the names of so many places in the Snowies, he also acted as a guide for many of the early expeditions to the mountains, including that of the scientist Ferdinand von Mueller in 1855, after whom Muellers Peak is named. It was his son James, however, who is remembered as the greatest of the mountain guides. James Spencer junior rides in his father’s shadow until the last decades of the 19th century when he became famous as a horseman and guide among those who lived in the NSW high country and among those who visited the region. Born in 1855 in and died in 1919, Jim Spencer (as he was known) outlived his father by just 8 years but left a legacy unequalled among his peers. His name as the guide on nearly all of the major expeditions to the main range in the 1890s. He led the first recorded winter ascent of Mt Kosciuszko in August 1897 and the Wragge expedition in December 1897, when the meteorologist established his weather station on the peak. Jim Spencer was part of the crew that achieved the hazardous first winter ascent of Jagungal, the most northern 2000 metre peak, in 1899.
Spencer was also employed by the NSW Tourist Bureau to take visitors up to Kosciuszko. An early 20th century bureau pamphlet mentions Spencer: “Waste Point … is the last house on the Snowy where Mr James Spenceraccommodates the angler. As a guide to Kosciusko, Mr Spencer has ridden over this wild region since boyhood; and all that he does not know of the Snowy country from Perisher to Kiandra is a negligible quantity.” A guided trip to Kosciuszko took three days on horseback, overnighting at the Betts Camp resthouse (just south of today’s Perisher resort), and he charged a pound a day with the tariff including all food and equipment.
On his death in 1919, Spencer was hailed as The Man from Snowy River and many claimed he was the rider depicted in Banjo Paterson’s poem. Percy Harris, an old timer who worked with Spencer on many of his guided tourist trips, said in an interview with mountain historian Klaus Hueneke in the 1960s, when he was 78, that Spencer used to ridicule the idea, saying it was written when he was a “mere bairn.” Paterson had in fact stayed with the Spencers at Waste Point and Percy Harris said that Paterson confirmed that there was no actual Man from Snowy River, and it seems most likely that the character was an amalgam of many mountain horsemen of the time. George Petersen claimed that Banjo wrote his famous poem while staying with the Spencers. Fascinating but only conjecture.
Upon hearing of Jim Spencer’s death in June 1919, Tom Heney, former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and a friend, wrote a eulogy published in the Daily Telegraph which summarised the amazing life of the mountain man. It included this excerpt:
“He was a big, burly man, very active in spite of his great weight, bearded like the pard, what you could see of his face and handsburnt by the unmerciful suns of the high hills … handy, taciturn, helpful, knowledgeable in all sorts of knowledge of the country near, of soils, trees, stock, wild things, men and women roads and tracks, and bridges, a true son of old Monaro.”
Author: Paul Pearce
[1] The local Ngarigoname for Kosciuszko is Targangil but for convenience the white fella name will suffice.
[2]One of three runs covering the Main Range, according to David Scott of the Kosciuszko Huts Association.
[3] Spencer snr. revealed this in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald in February 1885.
[4]Curiously, despite this accolade, Spencer, in the above-mentioned letter, was prompted to write to the Herald to rebut a ridiculous claim by von Lendenfeld that the famous guide had never before ascended Kosciuszko and that he, Lendenfeld, in company with the guide, had ‘discovered’ an even higher peak.
[5] George Petersen, Manager of the Hotel Kosciusko Hotel from 1939 to 1951, quoted in an article in Snow Revelry, the journal of the Kosciusko Snow Reveller’s Club.
[6] George Petersen in a Snow Revelry article December 1956.
