Page 189 - (DK Eyewitness) Travel Guide - Australia

NE W SOUTH W ALES AND A C T  187

THE SOUTH COAST

AND SNOWY MOUNTAINS

Although the busiest highway in Australia runs through
southern New South Wales, the area remains one of the
most beautiful in the country. Its landscape includes the
Snowy Mountains, the surf beaches of the far south, the
historic Southern Highland villages and the farming towns
of the Murray and Murrumbidgee plains.

Ever since European settlers crossed the walking paradise into a playground
Blue Mountains in 1812 (see p174), the for keen downhill and cross-country skiers.
southern plains of New South Wales The area also has a long and colourful
around Goulburn, Yass and Albury have cultural heritage: Aboriginal tribes, gold
been prime agricultural land. Yet the diggers and mountain cattlemen have all
wilderness of the Snowy Mountains to the left their mark here. During the 1950s and
east and the steep escarpment which runs 1960s, the region became the birthplace
the length of the beautiful South and of multicultural Australia, as thousands of
Sapphire coasts, from Wollongong to the European immigrants came to work on
Victoria border, has never been completely the Snowy Mountains Scheme, an
tamed. Today, the splendour of southern engineering feat which diverted the flow
New South Wales is protected by a of several rivers to provide hydroelectricity
number of large national parks. and irrigation for southeastern Australia.
The great Snowy Mountains offer alpine But southern New South Wales is more
scenery at its best. In summer, the than just landscapes; civilization is never
wildflower-scattered meadows, deep far away. There are excellent restaurants
gorges and cascading mountain creeks and hotels along the coast, Wollongong
seem to stretch endlessly into the distance; is an industrial city and the gracious
in winter, the jagged snow-capped peaks towns of the Southern Highlands offer
and twisted snow gums turn this summer historic attractions.

Snowy Mountains landscape in autumn
Bucolic landscape around the Thredbo River, in the Snowy Mountains