I have been interested in the Mt Donna Buang region since my first trip to the summit, back in August 1951, as a ten year old schoolboy.This was a day bus excursion organized by the YMCA in Melbourne in the school holidays- there was snow up there, the first time I had ever experienced this!

At that time, there were no visitor facilities at the Summit, and the Lookout Tower was the steel structure built in 1928.

I took two pictures on my Box Brownie camera - I still have that camera and it works well! Those pictures are the ones you see on this page!

I didn't make any further trips to the Mountain until some 54 years later, in 2005,

Since then, I have been up there on many occasions, mainly for bushwalking and photography, and I've  completed all of the formed hiking trails around the summit and nearby.

 

WONDERINGS
In the past few years I've often wondered at the history of the mountain and its environment and over the past few months I've carried out detailed reseach, mainly for my own interest.

Much of the information I found has been fragmentary and  non-cohesive, with old images scattered around the internet and buried in out-of-print publications or in ancient books hidden away in public libraries.

In the past year, the National Library of Australia has made available on the intermet digitized images of many old newspapers as part of its "Trove" archiival system.

This has provem an excellent resouce for my research, as every edition of the Melbourne Argus newspaper is now available in digitized form on-line from its first edition in 1851 to its closure in 1954.

It has been an amazing experiernce to search for "Mt Donna Buang" through those newspapers, with many hundreds of articles, stories, advertisements, maps and photographs available!

I discovered events of which I had little or no prior knowledge at all!

So I decided to publish my work as this Project, which gathers together most everything I have gleaned from my reasearch, into a single on-line reference, for anyone to view and enjoy, supplemented by accounts of my own experiences and images.

There are very few newspaper references to Mt Donna Buang prior to 1911, but from then on, al ost every edition of the Argus had a story about the mountain, which had become very popular when the first track was blazed to the summit in 1911/1912.

I found many references to logging and timber tramways, until the Black Friday bushfires of 1939, after which most commercial logging ceased.

I have included many images of my own, many taken in 2011, and some in the years 2008-2010, which show how places mentioned in my Project look in the present day.

I've incluided background information about Warburton, the Acheron Way, the Rainfirest Gallery, Ben Cairn, the O'Shannassy Aqueduct Trail, Walking Tracks, and the early snow-sporting activities

I hope you enjoy this Project and its virtual tour of the Mountain - if you haven't  been up there recently, this might prompt you into making a visit!

And I'd really like to receive your reactions and feedback on this Project!

Bob Padula
May 2011