The ‘great wall of Jindabyne’ was created to keep the livestock in

Tim the Yowie Man visits the ‘great wall of Jindabyne’ to dispel some myths around its origin story.

Transcript

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.