Bellara Park

13/09/2026

Save the date and Join us at Beaudesert Formal Gymkhana 💙💛💙💛

🐴 Gates open from 630am — 830am Start

Nominations are ready on Nominate.com.au

See you there 💙💛

20/08/2026

18/08/2026

This story should be in all Australian history books!

Almost every Australian who grew up in the second half of the last century read a book about a wild horse called Thowra.

Very few of them know who wrote it, or who taught her to ride.

Elyne Mitchell was born Sibyl Elyne Chauvel in Melbourne in December 1913. Her father was General Sir Harry Chauvel, who commanded the Desert Mounted Corps in the First World War and gave the order for the charge at Beersheba. He served through Egypt, Gallipoli and Palestine.

He taught her to ride.

In 1935 she married Tom Mitchell, a lawyer, champion skier and later state Attorney-General, and moved to his family property at Towong Hill near Corryong in the high country. She stayed there the rest of her life. She ran the station alone through the Second World War while her husband was a prisoner in Changi, and in 1938 she won the Canadian downhill skiing championship.

The book came out of a practical problem. Her daughter Indi was ten, mad about ponies, and doing school by correspondence a long way from any library. What existed for children was almost entirely British. There was nothing Australian in it.

So Elyne wrote her one. It started as a short story. Indi took to waiting at the typewriter for the next instalment.

The Silver Brumby was published in 1958. She wrote more than thirty books in the end, and the Corryong library carries her name.

Her father commanded the last great cavalry charge in history. She spent her life writing about the wild horses in the mountains behind her house.

Corryong is also where Jack Riley is buried.

SOURCE: National Museum of Australia, Elyne Mitchell collection; National Library of Australia, Papers of Elyne Mitchell; State Library of Victoria, 2026.

18/08/2026

10/08/2026

Love the meaning of this statement! It is similar to: sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me!’ It is so close to : if you’re not part of my family then your comments don’t count!

Robert Irwin has hit back at online critics as he prepares to become the youngest person ever to host the Logies.

The 22-year-old says he ignores online hate and only pays attention to genuine feedback, adding that if someone doesn’t have his number, they probably don’t know him well enough to have a problem with him.

10/08/2026

He was born in Castlebar, County Mayo, and came out at thirteen on a ship called the Rodney.

Jack Riley landed in Sydney in March 1854. He tried tailoring at Omeo and gave it up for the only work he ever really wanted, which was riding. By the 1880s he had a name through the Monaro as a horseman, and in 1884 he took over as manager at Tom Groggin, running twenty thousand acres on the border.

He lived alone in a hut up there. Came into Corryong three or four times a year for supplies and went back up the mountain.

In 1890 a Sydney solicitor and part time poet came through and needed somewhere to sleep. Banjo Paterson stayed the night in Riley's hut, and Riley told him about chasing wild horses through country too steep for anyone sensible to ride.

That is where the poem came from.

Paterson never named him. Other districts have put forward their own men over the years, including Charlie McKeahnie, who was killed in a riding accident near Bredbo in 1895. Paterson himself said only that he had helped round up brumbies as a boy and knew the country.

Riley died in 1914. Friends found him too sick to get up, put him on a sled and started down for the hospital at Corryong. He did not make it.

His grave is a modest one, bordered with logs and filled with loose stones. The headstone reads: in memory of the Man from Snowy River.

He spent his life chasing brumbies through the high country. They are still up there, in the same ranges, and we are still arguing about them.

SOURCE Sources: The Man from Snowy River Museum, Corryong; Upper Murray Tourism; Connaught Telegraph, 2018.