Kosciuszko Mountains

The Kosciuszko Mountains belong to the southeastern Australian highlands, where Aboriginal communities maintained seasonal relationships with alpine and lower country. Journeys linked river valleys, forests and higher ground, allowing people to use produce available at different times of year. Knowledge of weather, water and food shaped these movements, while kinship and ceremony connected groups across a broad landscape.

The wider Australian Alps were associated with seasonal gatherings and the use of mountain foods, including bogong moths in suitable districts. Such occasions could involve exchange, social relationships and ritual as well as subsistence. Highland places carried meanings within ancestral traditions and responsibilities that long preceded European naming. British expansion during the early nineteenth century gradually brought livestock and new land claims towards the mountain approaches.

These changes threatened familiar routes and access to produce, although the pace of direct occupation differed between areas. The mountains' historical setting therefore combines enduring Indigenous knowledge with the beginning of colonial pressure. Valleys and passes were parts of a lived network, linking communities whose practical and cultural relationships extended across elevations rather than following later property boundaries.