Part 5: Alice Manfield

Prior to European settlement, Aboriginal people visited Mount Buffalo and the Victorian Alps in search of the Bogong Moth. Mount Buffalo was named in 1824 by the explorers Hume and Hovell and was reserved as a national park in 1898. Ten years later a road to the mountain was completed and the area was promoted as the ‘Garden of the Gods’.

In 2003 the State Library of Victoria was presented with a wonderful photographic collection documenting the landscape of Victoria’s Mount Buffalo region. The photographs were taken by Alice Manfield, who was also known as ‘Guide Alice’. Manfield’s photographs show early-20th-century tourists enjoying snowball fights, tobogganing and billy boiling.

Alice’s father James pioneered the tourist industry on the Buffalo Plateau and built a family hostel that pre-dated the government-built Mount Buffalo Chalet. Born in 1878, Alice first climbed the mountain in her teens, and frequently accompanied her brothers when they were guiding mountain climbers. She divided her time between conducting alpine tours, writing on local flora and fauna, and serving behind the bar at her mother’s Temperance Hotel. Alice wrote:

I found guiding most fascinating and apart from the pleasant company of distinguished people, I had the study of nature’s illimitable display of plant and bird life. When a party would advise us of their intention to visit the mount the horses would be got ready: packed with bedding and provisions. Sometimes the party would walk, but more often they would ride, making a spectacular sight dodging through the trees and winding in and out of the giant boulders. It was wonderful to see the intelligence of the pack horses as they would manoeuvre their packs through the many narrow rock passages to avoid damage or injury. When ascending the precipitous 'Zig-Zag', many riders would cry out in alarm 'I am sliding over the horse’s back. What shall I do, Guide?' 'Put your arms around his neck' was Guide Alice’s answer. This journey of eight miles would take about six hours to reach the peak.

After her father died in 1910, Alice and her mother ran the family guesthouse. Alice was a no-nonsense woman who dressed in a trouser suit outfit of her own design. This mountaineering suit caused quite a stir when she first wore it. By all accounts she set a cracking pace as she led groups to the Cathedral, Dickson’s Falls, Underground River and other remarkable natural attractions.

In 1924 Alice published a small book about the lyrebirds of the Mount Buffalo region, a copy of which is held in the Library’s collection. The archive of photographs, donated to the Library by her descendants, includes glass lantern slides and photographic negatives of the natural landscape, prominent rock formations, mist-covered valleys and open grassland plains - indeed the magnificent scenery that still draws us to the region today.