The chilly mystery of Kiandra's 'cattle in the snow gums'

The Canberra Times

As snowflakes fall over Kiandra, Tim the Yowie Man traces the stories of a vanished gold rush town and legends of cattle skeletons found high in the wintery treetops.

Transcript

00:00Got a bit of a snow flurry happening here in northern Kosciuszko National Park near Kyandra.

00:08Just fairly light snow. Nothing like the blizzards of 1834 that was so long and so much snow that

00:18the cows had nothing to eat on the ground. So the cows, because the level of snow would increase so

00:24much the cows were in the canopies of the snow gums eating all the leaves. But of course when

00:31they didn't know the leaves there's nothing else for them left to eat and many of them actually died

00:37of starvation in the canopies of the snow gums. And so you can imagine what happened when the snow

00:44began to melt. People began to find cow skeletons in the canopies stuck high in the canopies

00:54of the snow gums around here. Sounds like a far-fetched story, but it has been documented.

01:00I don't think it's going to happen today, but if this snow continues, that might.

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