Tim the Yowie Man visits the ‘great wall of Jindabyne’ to dispel some myths around its origin story.
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00:00Welcome to the Great Wall of Jindabyne.
00:03I could call it the Mysterious Wall of Jindabyne
00:05because it's hidden away here on the eastern shores
00:08and it's also mysterious because some people have speculated
00:12that because it runs east-west
00:15that it's a wall built by some ancient civilization
00:18in alignment for some astronomical purposes
00:22in alignment with the sun, the moon, who knows what.
00:25One person, however, who is certain they know
00:28the origins of the wall, is Australia's leading fencing guru
00:32John Pickard.
00:34He is certain that this was a boundary fence built in the mid-1880s.
00:41A long-time local, Jim Crocker,
00:44he believes that it is also a boundary fence.
00:48It's stories passed down through his generations in his family.
00:51They used bullocks in those days and they had stock,
00:55cattle and that that they bred up
00:56and they had to have somewhere to hold them
00:59otherwise they'd just bloody wander all over the place.
01:01And coming from England and Scotland,
01:05if you look over there, it's all stone walls.
01:09But there's, from my understanding, just one wall?
01:12Wouldn't they have needed four walls for a paddock?
01:14There would have been, but they also used timber brush
01:19like tripod and timber laid in between them.
01:25And that's deteriorated over time or burnt?
01:27It just would have been burnt and rotted away.
01:30So does it really run east-west?
01:34I could, of course, use my trusty compass,
01:37but you don't need to do that here.
01:39Have a look at the wall on this side.
01:41The southern side of the wall is all the moss growing,
01:44all the lichen and moss on the side of the wall.
01:47On the other side, facing north, which gets all the sun,
01:50there's no moss or lichen.
01:52Don't really need this.
02:00Don't really need this.