Section 10 Northbound

Marker	Diretions	Distance from previous point
1	Start at bridge over Murray River	-
2	Turn right into Hume Street	1 km
3	Turn left at Townsend Street	0.2 km
4	Turn right at Dean Street	0.5 km
5	Turn left at Young Street	1 km
6	Turn right at North Street	1.5 km
7	Turn left at Mate Street	0.3 km
8	Gentle right veer after Union Road	1.8 km
9	Rejoin Hume Highway at on-merge north of Albury	7.3 km
10	Turn right into Bowna Road	15 km
11	Turn left to stay on Bowna Road (Sweetwater Road continues straight ahead)	10 km
12	Turn right onto Hume Highway	0.1 km
13	Take Woomargama Way exit	11 km
14	Rejoin Hume Highway north of Woomargama	9 km

• Albury
• Lavington
• Table Top
• Bowna
• Mullengandra
• Woomargama

Albury

Smollett Street metal arch bridge, Albury

Albury and Wodonga developed as the principal Murray River crossing place on the route between Australia's two largest cities. They grew and prospered as thoroughfare towns servicing the needs of travellers on the track to Port Phillip, later the Great Southern Road then the Hume Highway. Travellers have long recognised both Albury and Wodonga as the southernmost and northernmost points of the highway within the two states. To many people both places have special significance as border posts.

Prior to European settlement, stable Aboriginal populations were densely settled along the Murray River. They had in the riverine environment a rich source of fish, game and plants, and, as a result, there was little need to move from its banks.

In the late spring of 1824, explorers Hume and Hovell encountered the river and approached what seemed to be a natural ford, but they could not cross as the river was running swiftly.

Young cross-border cyclist having his papers checked for evidence of contact with anyone suffering from infantile paralysis, 1937. Photo: The Border Mail

They eventually got across a short way upstream, near the site of the present-day Hume Dam. A tree blazed by Hovell still marks their first encounter. One of the series of celebratory obelisks erected 100 years later to mark out the route they took to the Port Phillip district stands close to where they crossed near the present Hume Weir.

By 1838, Governor Gipps declared Albury the official Murray River crossing place and endowed it with a town plan and a contingent of police, who would apprehend runaway convicts and protect travellers from Aboriginal attacks.

Distinctive Albury architecture

Just over 20 years on, an aptly named ‘Union' Bridge was built to give New South Wales people better access to the newly separated Victoria which had suddenly become gold-rich. But travellers found they could not always cross the Union Bridge easily. At various times in the nineteenth century, customs officers collected stock tax and/or customs duties on some goods. They tried to prevent Chinese travellers from moving from one colony to the other by demanding they pay a poll tax. Through the twentieth century, the highway bridge became a checkpoint to stop the spread of influenza in 1919, and poliomyelitis in 1937. Inspectors seized fruit and vegetables to try to prevent the spread of fruit fly in the 1960s and 1970s. Roadside signs tried to prevent the spread of equine flu in 2007.

Albury town map

The expansion of Lake Hume behind the newly constructed Hume Dam changed the northern approach of the highway to Albury in the early 1930s. In the post-war years the growth of motor traffic diverted the highway from the main commercial area. But the principal change to the route through the city came with the freeway bypass in 2007. There was much argument about whether there should be an internal or external bypass. The dispute was resolved when the Federal Government announced funding for an internal route in 2002.

Hume and Hovell Centenary, 1924

Hume and Hovell obelisk near Hume Dam

In 1973 the Albury-Wodonga National Growth Centre project was to become the Federal Government's iconic decentralisation project, set to ‘attract population and economic activity away from the major metropolitan areas, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, in order to alleviate the undesirable pressures on these cities'.

Albury remains a central point for culture, entertainment, sporting and outdoors activities. The Albury Art Gallery hosts one of the largest fine art collections in the Murray/Riverina region. Stories of the indigenous peoples, the early crossing place, the Hume Dam, Australia's largest post-war migrant reception centre at Bonegilla, Albury's railway history and significance until 1962 as a break of gauge point, and the Hume Highway are told at the Albury Library Museum. The Albury Entertainment Centre hosts premier Australian drama, comedy, dance, opera and music.

Albury city is home to more than 460 hectares of parks and reserves, including the Albury Botanic Gardens and a host of riverside parks. It is also home to the Smollett St Bridge over Bungambrawatha Creek, on the Riverina Highway. This elegant 1888 structure is locally heritage listed, and is the older of only two metal arch bridges in New South Wales.

Further tourist information is available at the Albury Visitor Information Centre at Railway Place, on the corner of Young and Smollett Streets.

Lavington

Lavington is the second major centre of the city of Albury, with its own commercial CBD. Albury's population of about 50,000 includes Lavington with its population of 16,000, and growing at a rapid rate.

Lavington is located approximately 529 km from Sydney and 327 km from Melbourne on the Hume Highway. The Hume Freeway bypassed Lavington in 2007, reducing the constant drone of heavy vehicle traffic yet still maintaining an active truck stopover point at the northern extremity.

Prior to 1908 Lavington was known as ‘Black Range', but it was decided at a meeting held at the local School of Arts to change the town's name, chiefly because there were five other towns by the name of Black Range in Australia and it was the cause of some confusion. Lavington replaced the name Black Range in 1909. The name change was celebrated with a social at the arts school, which involved food, dancing, games, and vocal items contributed by the Lavington Glee Club.

No-one is quite sure where the name Lavington originated. One thought is that Joseph Box, an early settler at Black Range (a gold mining settlement on the edge of Albury in the 1850s), called his property Lavington after his home town in England. Another is that Lavington takes its name from a piece of machinery, possibly a gold battery or from the Lavington Gold Mining Company of 1865.

Dutch, German and Cornish immigrants settled in Lavington, and today, they and their descendants are stalwarts in the community. Their influence was reflected by the numerous orchards and vineyards in the area.

The Hume Dam and Murray River are found within close proximity, providing a variety of water activities.

Visitors can step back in time at the Jindera Pioneer Museum and imagine life as it was lived in those early days of rural community.

The area provides a range of community, cultural, sporting and social activities and offers all the amenities available within the suburbs of major cities. Sites worth visiting include Mungabareena Reserve and Albury Art Gallery. There are also numerous historic walks and bushwalks, cycling tracks and leisure activities for all ages.

Table Top

Stock feeding in paddock near Bowna Creek, Table Top

Aborigines long ago named this locality Yambla. To Captain Hovell, examining this range on 13 November 1824, one flat prominence resembled a fortification. The short trees standing along it recalled soldiers guarding battlements. Hovell named it Battery Mount. Later settlers, more prosaic, named it Table Top, ‘from its resemblance to that well known article of furniture' noted one traveller in 1881. Passengers admired Table Top when the railway came through in 1881. The Olympic Highway provides a splendid view of the fascinating knobs, bosses, and peaks of the Yambla Range, including Table Top, the Sugar Loaf, and Pulpit Rock, which is the sloping bluff visible from the Hume Highway at the eastern end.

Settlers arrived here in the 1830s, squeezed out of the Cumberland Plain by drought years. Among them were the Huon brothers, whose nephews Thomas, John F., and James Mitchell became one of the most prosperous – and munificent – squatting families of the district. James Mitchell (1835–1914), a kindly and popular man, was the master of Table Top. Among other distinctions, James was a top-class breeder of stud stock, and produced fleeces which gained international fame. James also achieved the astonishing feat of completely freeing his Table Top paddocks of rabbits, his yield totalling 16,000 pest-free acres, and 18,000 rabbit skins railed each week from Table Top siding.

Road builders near Table Top. Photo: Howard Jones

The Hume and the Olympic Highways (the Olympic Torch was carried along this route to Melbourne in 1956) meet at an interchange over Bowna Creek which was opened in 2009. The dual-carriageway Hume Highway turns south and splits Table Top. On the eastern side is Table Top Public School, 115 years old. It stands opposite a replica of cartoonist Ken Maynard's fabled Ettamogah Pub, which opened in 1987. On the western side, the railway station can no longer be seen – it closed in 1980. The former Presbyterian Church, erected 1933, can be glimpsed in Perryman's Lane. All these spots lie within the site once proposed for the National capital.

Table Top today is mostly hobby farms, though locals warily watch Albury's northern industrial area creeping their way.

Bowna

Extract from August 1937 Main Roads journal

The Murray River was named the Hume in 1824 by Hamilton Hume, in honour of his father. Charles Sturt, who encountered it further west in 1830, thought it was a different stream and named it the Murray in honour of the British Secretary of State. The latter name stuck. In the mid-1920s, it was proposed that the Murray's mighty snow-fed waters be dammed. The vast body of water so stored – ‘the largest artificial lake in the world… three times the size of Sydney Harbour' - was named the Hume Reservoir, now Lake Hume. There were some problems to be faced: the submerging of major lines of communication (roads, railways, telegraph and telephone lines), and the cost of buying up several first-class properties, like Cumberoona. There was also the question of uprooting lives and homes and history, for the villages of Bowna and Tallangatta were to be submerged.

From all accounts Bowna was a neat little town, running in a straight north-south line along the Sydney Road. Under the waters went The White Horse Hotel, and the barn-like Mechanics Institute. One or two of Bowna's distinctions seem to have gone down with it. For instance, architect Mr J. Kirkpatrick, whose father resided in Bowna, designed Bowna's steam-powered flour mill and won a competition in 1891 for a state house to be constructed in Centennial Park, Sydney.

Those Bowna buildings which could be dismantled were removed. Others remained. The final service of Bowna's Presbyterian Church, built 1866, was held in September 1933. Dr J. W. Dyer, Bishop of Wagga Wagga, laid the foundation stone for the New Bowna Catholic Church in 1935, and declared that new churches were fortresses against paganism.

Old Bowna is recalled in the Bowna Waters Reserve, on Lake Hume's southern foreshore, and by its western extremity, known as Bowna Arm. The old town lies below a line between the end of the Sydney Road on the Albury side, and Plunkett Road, on the Bowna side. The Old Bowna cemetery survived at this end, above water level, though it now lies on private property. Old Bowna rooftops sometimes emerge in drought years. Grey, dead trees stand near the spot like elderly sentinels.

Three hundred men were employed in constructing the Hume Highway detour around the western end of Lake Hume, which opened in 1933. It was a useful source of employment during the Great Depression. A site for New Bowna was proposed at the crossroad of the Sydney and Upper Murray Roads, on land purchased from Mr Charles Mullavey – but the new town site did not ‘take'. The move was made in the era of the motor car, when residents could relocate more readily, and had a greater choice of fresh destinations. Nonetheless, Bowna Post Office served Bowna locals until 1994.

Mullengandra

Well beyond the colony's authorised limits of settlement, Mullengandra (from the Aboriginal ‘mully-an-janderra', for ‘place where eagles breed') nonetheless had a number of cattle and sheep stations by the 1830s. Among the earliest licensed pastoralists was John Morrice who put a manager on Mullingandra, his 25,000-acre run, and for a time lived near Berrima. Such leases remained unsurveyed for decades, boundary pegs were unknown and fences were the exception. Actions for trespass were frequent, with neighbours suing one another for illegally grazing stock. In a country whose seasons could be treacherous, pasture was jealously guarded.

In 1854, a traveller noted that Mullengandra had an inn and a few scattered farm houses. By 1873, Mullengandra's Rose and Crown Inn had earned a pleasant reputation. ‘Opposite to the hotel is a capital garden, belonging to Mr. Pankhurst. Grapes in a splendid state of perfection, magnificent apples of many varieties, and almost every kind of English fruit attracted our attention in this garden,' wrote a visitor. Pankhurst was raising cherries at Mullengandra as early as 1857, perhaps in competition with Mr Darby, who could grow Mullengandra peaches at the rate of forty-two per foot of branch. The green-thumbed Mr Pankhurst also grew ‘the best looking wheat' of any in the district, and made his own wines.

St Luke's Anglican Church, Mullengandra

John Morrice died in 1875, and the Morrice Anglican Memorial Church was built to honour him; Morrice, a carpenter by trade, had carved an altar for the original place of worship. Mullengandra post office opened in 1877, operating from one end of the Royal Oak Hotel. In 1886, the Department of Lands drew up a plan for ‘the Village of Mullanjandra'. The site lies west of the present Bowna Road, north of Newton's Road, and was bordered by Mullengandra Creek to the west. Like Garryowen, its streets (South Street, East Street, West Street, Creek Street) do not ever seem to have been settled. Owners of township blocks marked on this map recall other early Mullengandra settlers: Mitchell, Plunkett, Taskis, Mullavey and Ross.

George Ross kept Mullengandra's Royal Oak Hotel from 1922. A customer and admirer of Mr Ross was artist Russell Drysdale, who in 1950 immortalised Mr Ross, and the Royal Oak, in oil on canvas. The painting is part of a private collection, and the hotel is a private home, listed by the National Trust. It can still be admired by the passing traveller. When the dual-carriageway Hume Highway was constructed in 2009, a length of Old Hume Highway was retained. Along it now stand the Royal Oak Hotel, St Luke's Anglican Church (1927, on the site of the Morrice Church), and Mullengandra's proud little public school, still going strong after 140 years of education.

Woomargama

Old Hume Highway, Woomargama

Every traveller on the Great Southern Road once knew Dickson's (or Dixon's) Swamp. The locality was also known as Mountain Creek. A design for a village was drawn up in May 1869, with a dozen streets, and given a less gloomy name, Woomargama, derived from an Aboriginal word for a native cherry, and taken from the name of Mr John Dickson's own run. Woomargama Village was proclaimed in March 1885, by which time it had a Public School (1873), the Anglican Church of St Mark (1877), and a cemetery (1880). The highway was called ‘Melbourne Street' where it passed through town, a reminder that these southern settlements looked to Port Phillip as their metropolis. Mr Dickson sold his run and moved to Albury, where he bought a brewery and in 1861, is supposed to have drunk himself to death. He is recalled by Dickson Street, and his swamp was recalled by Swamp Street, which has since sunk without trace. The Hume and Hovell expedition which came by in 1824 is honoured by a street name, and a commemorative boulder.

Less celebrated is the formidable Leah Augusta Splatt. Widowed in 1879, Mrs Splatt bought up several runs and selections around Woomargama during the late 1880s, eventually buying the famous Woomargama Station itself. Mrs Splatt was among those who successfully shipped frozen mutton to England, but there were a couple of black sheep in the Splatt family. In November of 1891, her sons William and Colin tried to bail up the Holbrook mail. Easily identified, they were hauled into court, where they claimed that they had been influenced by reading Robbery Under Arms. The magistrate, Mr T. A. Browne, was not amused, and fined them £20. Mr Browne is better known by his pen name of Rolf Boldrewood, author of the book in question.

St Mark's Anglican Church, Woomargama

St Mark's of Woomargama still stands and remains in use, a tiny weatherboard church in a gated paddock where flocks may safely graze. The Presbyterian Church did not weather a storm of 1935. Woomargama school closed in 1997, and is now a Post Office cum store. A mural painted by the pupils can still be seen there, and there is another more professional mural in Woomargama Park. A trio of assorted boulders stands shoulder to shoulder beside Woomargama Way, commemorating the opening of the Hume Highway bypass in November 2011. A sculpted squirrel glider, the Woomargama Village icon, is poised mid-flight atop the central stone.

His Royal Highness Prince William Arthur Philip Louis, later to become Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn, and Baron Carrickfergus, took his first steps at Woomargama Station in 1983, while his family was on a royal visit to NSW.

Visitors may take an afternoon (or longer) detour to the nearby Woomargama National Park, which features a number of hikes, some rewarding visitors with views of the Murray River, Riverina, and South West Slopes.

Marker	Location
Z	Smollett Street metal arch bridge