Hailed Australia’s first hero, explorer Hamilton Hume’s original journey of discovery from Sydney to Melbourne is returning to prominence and acclaim.
In its earliest forms the Old Hume Highway paved the way for decades of development in Australia’s early European history in much the same way as Route 66 became America’s main street, and like that legendary road is being returned to service.
Entrepreneur Frank Burke wants the original route from Sydney to Port Phillip Bay in Victoria re-opened to enable fatigued drivers and tourists to take a break. Duplication of the highway has left many historic towns and villages bypassed by traffic and struggling for survival.
Mr Burke has enlisted the National Trust of Australia and road safety and traffic bodies in two states to help bring the old Hume back into use. Rick Williams, who manages Cooma Cottage at Yass, the former home of Hamilton Hume bequeathed to the National Trust, believes it should be at the heart of the old highway’s resurrection.
The Old Hume Highway will be freshly signed posted, mapped and promoted as a tourist destination, beginning with Cooma Cottage, which sits near a 12-kilometre stretch of the old highway now named Yass Valley Way.
Mr Williams said, “We all know if we drive past a place at night-time and no one is there, people won’t stop. At Cooma Cottage we will have to upgrade it to accept people most of the time, we will have to get a coffee shop there, people can walk down to the [Yass] river, have tours of the house, people who want to spend half an hour, maybe buy a book about Cooma Cottage.”
Mr Burke’s company Old Hume Highway 31 will maintain a website which will set out famous former road stops such as Gundagai’s Niagara Cafe, old pubs, parks and art galleries and forgotten places such as Breadalbane, Bowning, Jugiong and Bookham. Police and road authorities will post traffic updates on the website.
“The professional bus drivers and truck drivers must have log books, but people think they can jump into a car and drive for nine hours,” Mr Burke said. “Now we have cars and people hurtling into service stations owned by multinationals, they fill their petrol tank, grab a pie, go to the toilet and keep going.”
People turning off the dual highway would be directed to locally owned businesses on the old one. “We’ve said to [road safety groups] we can give you 40 towns, a couple of minutes off the freeway. What a perfect break,” Mr Burke said.
Educating children along the way about Australia’s history would begin with Hamilton Hume, who befriended Aboriginals and found a way through the scrub south of Sydney.
“Stunning man,” Mr Burke said. “It took [Hume’s party] 11 weeks to get to Melbourne, they had five weeks worth of food left. He worked another way to come back, got them back in the five weeks and the way he brought them back was the way the Hume Highway pretty much runs today.”
Canberra author Robert Macklin, who helped launch the Highway 31 project in Yass last year, is now writing a book called Australia’s First Hero, which should be completed and published next year. Mr Macklin says it is outrageous so little has been written about Hume. He said the only other biography written, Currency Lad, was privately published by his father-in-law, Robert Webster.
The highway website and mapping are still a work in progress. The Australian Street Rod Federation will stop for a barbecue at Cooma Cottage in March and a period costume ball at Cooma Cottage in October will build momentum for reviving the old highway.