In 1933 a young English schoolteacher living by the river at Woodford Green in Essex wrote a novel that had a quiet impact on our world. James Hilton had never been out of England, but his Lost Horizon described a paradise clinging to the edge of a precipice somewhere in the mountains of Tibet. Tibetans call this sort of place a beyul. Hilton called his Shangri-La.
The dream of an unspoiled paradise has stayed with us, as has Hilton’s fanciful name. Deep in the buttoned-up breasts of modern city dwellers beats the urge to get away—from traffic, from pollution, from people like ourselves. Wilderness calls, and for some, mountains call loudest of all.
In the 1950s I met John Hammond, one of Britain’s so-called ‘hard men’—those who were doing the toughest mountain climbing then. Edmund Hillary, the first to be knighted, reached the top of Everest in 1953, a tremendous feat of endurance, unlike the walk it is today. But John Hammond was the most interesting, quite different from the others, a suave, urbane man you could never quite imagine wielding a piton or struggling through a blizzard up the sheer face of a peak.
It was Hammond who convinced me I had to come to Australia. ‘It may be the flattest and driest country on earth, old boy,’ he said in his languid Oxford drawl, ‘but there’s some excellent trout fishing, and it’s got its own Shangri-La.’
This Shangri-La of Hammond’s had the curious, equally unforgettable name of Suggan Buggan. He told me it was near the Black–Allan line. The line, I was to discover, is that straight stretch of the NSW–Victorian border running from Cape Howe to the nearest source of the Murray. In 1870 Alexander Black from Victoria and Alexander Allan from NSW were hired by their respective governments to survey the disputed border. It took them two arduous years to draw an agreed-upon line through some of the country’s most rugged terrain.
Late in the 1950s I followed Hammond’s advice, and went on several field trips to study the rocks abundant in the area that Black and Allan surveyed. My colleagues and I made detailed geological maps of it, and were astonished by the work the two Alexanders had done. The area was rough and inaccessible. The highways between Melbourne and Sydney were dirt for the most part, and the few roads into the mountains were little more than tracks. Hammond