A NEW book on the Oxley Plains covers the area’s sweep of history from indigenous beginnings to the trek of explorers Hume and Hovell and connections with Ned Kelly.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
About a Mile Away is the 160-page work compiled by the Milawa Heritage Group and was two years in the making.
It was launched yesterday atop the ridge the explorers crossed in the 19th century.
Heritage group member Doug Brockfield said there hadn’t been a book on the Oxley Plains as a total entity.
“A lot of the people who have material and knowledge in their head are moving on,” he said.
“They’re in their 80s and 90s.
“If this material is not collated it disappears — it’s lost for ever.”
Hume and Hovell crossed the plains in 1824 and named them after John Oxley, the colonial surveyor general of the period, and also named Mount Buffalo.
The title of the book is also related to the contentious naming of Milawa.
Depending on who you ask, Milawa is derived from the mumbling of a Scotsman, named after an Aboriginal elder or a local clergyman.
But it’s the story of a passer-by asking the Scottish ancestor of heritage group chairman John Brown how to get to a village in the area that captured the group’s imagination and led to the history book’s title.
“Mr Brown was a Scotsman with a very broad accent and he replied ‘About a mile away’,” Mr Brockfield said, imitating the accent to sound like Milawa.
• About a Mile Away sells for $40 and is available from Milawa post office and cheese factory and Edgars newsagency in Wangaratta.
