Victorian High Country Guide

About the Victorian High Country

The High Country is the mountainous north-east of Victoria, the Victorian side of the Australian Alps. It runs from Mansfield and the King Valley across to Bright, Mt Hotham and Omeo, and up to the Upper Murray on the NSW border. Much of it is Alpine National Park, with Mt Buffalo National Park near Bright, and in between are old gold towns, wine and hop country and a web of back roads. The Great Alpine Road is the backbone, from Wangaratta through Bright and over Mt Hotham to Omeo and on to Bairnsdale.

Getting There and Accessibility

We drove up from Melbourne on the Maroondah Highway, over the Black Spur to our first camp at Cooks Mill, then through Mansfield the next day. Bright is about four hours from Melbourne on sealed roads, through Wangaratta on the Hume Freeway and the Great Alpine Road.

The main roads are all sealed, including the Great Alpine Road over Mt Hotham, though it’s steep and winding above Harrietville. The roads to Powers Lookout and Buffalo River Retreat are gravel but fine for any car. The Benambra–Corryong Road, our way north from Omeo, is long, well-graded gravel through the national park, and many of the park’s own tracks close over winter. In Mansfield we stopped for a stretch: a country town with a wide main street, a monument in the middle of the roundabout and the old Mansfield Hotel behind it.

Map of Our Route

Our route ran north-east from Melbourne to the Buffalo River, then east up the Great Alpine Road over Mt Hotham to Omeo, and north on the Benambra–Corryong Road to Khancoban and the Snowy Mountains.

Campgrounds in the High Country

We camped two nights on the way through, both very different. Cooks Mill, in Cathedral Range State Park, is a quiet forest camp beside the Little River, with sites you choose on arrival. Buffalo River Retreat was a farm Hipcamp near Myrtleford, with grassy flats under the river gums and rock pools by camp, but its listing now says it’s closed to bookings.

Lookouts

Three lookouts, three very different views. Powers Lookout is a scramble through giant boulders to a platform over the King River Valley. Danny’s Lookout is a bare summit at 1,705 metres beside the Great Alpine Road below Mt Hotham. And the Mt Kosciuszko Lookout, just outside Omeo, looks across the border to the Main Range in NSW.

Sights

Bright and Harrietville are the two towns on the Great Alpine Road before it climbs into the Alps: Bright the leafy, busy one with cafes and a visitor centre, Harrietville the small, quiet village at the foot of Mt Hotham. On the way up from Melbourne, the Black Spur winds through tall mountain ash and tree ferns.

Back Roads to the Buffalo River

From Powers Lookout we took the back roads east towards the Buffalo River: gravel through farmland and pine plantations, with granite peaks ahead. It was somewhere out here, on a rocky stretch, that we got a flat tyre, and we plugged it on the side of the road. Late in the afternoon we came out past a dam wall with Mount Buffalo’s granite behind, and hop gardens and vineyards in the valley below.

The Great Alpine Road over Mt Hotham

Past Harrietville the Great Alpine Road climbs through tall forest and hairpin bends, then breaks out above the treeline onto open ridges. Up here the snow gums are bleached and dead from old fires, snow poles line the road, and the road snakes along the ridgetops with huge drops on either side. We stopped again and again at the gravel pull-offs, at Danny’s Lookout near the top, then rolled over Mt Hotham and down through Dinner Plain towards Omeo.

North From Omeo on the Benambra–Corryong Road

Omeo is the old gold town on the far side of the mountains, and its tyre shop fixed our plugged tyre properly. From there we headed north-east across open plains towards Benambra, then onto the Benambra–Corryong Road: long, dusty gravel through Alpine National Park and Gibbo State Forest, over a single-lane bridge and through a long stretch of forest killed by bushfire, with green regrowth coming back underneath. It was well graded and fine for our Prado in the dry. By evening we came out into the Nariel Valley and the golden farmland of the Upper Murray, past the sign welcoming us to the Snowy Mountains.

Practical Tips

The main roads through the High Country are easy driving, but the towns are far apart and the gravel back roads are hard on cars and tyres. Here’s what we’d sort out before heading up.

Summary

The Victorian High Country makes a brilliant road trip between Melbourne and the Snowy Mountains: tall forest on the Black Spur, a bush camp at Cooks Mill, Powers Lookout over the King River Valley, a riverside camp on the Buffalo, leafy Bright and little Harrietville, and the Great Alpine Road over Mt Hotham to Omeo. We did it in three days and could easily have spent a week. From here we crossed into NSW for the southern end of Kosciuszko National Park.

Recommended Gear for the Victorian High Country

The back roads are hard on tyres, so carry a tyre plug kit and a compressor like the San Hima jump starter, and tyre deflators for the gravel. The Hema High Country atlas covers the whole region and its tracks, and it works where the phone doesn’t.