Mount Buffalo remains closed due to manhunt for alleged Porepunkah police shooter Dezi Freeman

Call it the Healing Mountain.

Or perhaps the Sacred Mountain of Druids.

The European explorers Hume and Hovell gave it a less elevated name as they argued their way south along the western edge of the Victorian alps towards Port Phillip Bay in 1824.

Imagining the great hump in the distance resembled a reclining bovine, they called it Mount Buffalo.

Since then, generations of visitors have ensured it has become one of the most loved mountains in Victoria, snow-clad in winter and a bushwalkers’, climbers’ and campers’ wonderland in spring, summer and autumn.

Right now, though, it is a silent mountain.

Closed to all.

In any other year, families aboard SUVs would be crawling up the twisting road, and on the mountain’s high plateau, where for a century mountain cattlemen grazed their herds until they were banned in 1956, the tobogganing slopes of the musically named Dingo Dell would ring to the happy cries of children hurtling downhill.

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Further along, beneath a steeper sledding hillside, children and parents would be building snowmen across the floor of Cresta Valley – a ski resort until its buildings were destroyed by bushfire in December 2006.

The Victorian government decided back then that it would be futile to rebuild the resort. Climate change was making snowfall so unreliable that it was predicted the snowline would no longer reach the relatively modest heights of the mountain within 10 years.

The wicked climate change gods, however, took their leave from the mountain this year.

More snow has fallen in recent weeks on the moody granite hump of Mount Buffalo than in any early springtime for years.

On the night of August 30, heavy snow fell right down to 700 metres, far below the mountain’s highest point, known as The Horn, which rears to 1723 metres, and way further down than the plateau, which spreads across an elevation ranging from about 1300 metres to 1500 metres.

Mount Buffalo shone blinding white on the morning of September 1.

But in the valleys below, no one celebrated.

Ranks of blue-clad searchers trudged about in the alpine chill, and business people in the spookily deserted villages of Porepunkah and Bright despaired, their tourist-dependent incomes trickling away.

Any traveller approaching the entrance to the Mount Buffalo National Park was met with a large sign declaring it closed.

Police stood guard to reassert the message that has led to the despair of the valley folk all around: visitors should stay away.

As anyone with access to a TV, radio, newspaper, internet link or town square surely knows, Mount Buffalo is central to the biggest manhunt in recent Australian history.

On Tuesday, August 26, two policemen were shot dead and another wounded on an isolated property at the foot of the mountain.

The man suspected of firing the weapon, a conspiracy theorist named Dezi Freeman, bolted into the forest and vanished, reportedly heavily armed.

Freeman’s whereabouts since then have become a mystery as deep as the silence of the mountain above.

Day after fruitless day, about 450 police, accompanied by helicopters equipped with heat-imaging cameras and BearCat armoured tactical response vehicles, have searched for him; a reward of $1 million on offer for information leading to his arrest.

Could Freeman have a well-stocked doomsday prepper’s hide-out up there in one of the mountain’s numerous caves, his rifle and its scope readied to repel any comers, many wondered aloud?

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Could he be nestled in an old mineshaft deep in the scrub along the Buckland Valley at the eastern foot of the mountain, others speculated?

In the 1850s, 5000 gold-maddened diggers rushed the Buckland, leaving behind a riverside landscape overgrown by blackberry now, riddled with shafts and the haunting memory of 1857 when Chinese miners were attacked during the most vicious race riots in Victoria’s history.

Or could Freeman have received help from a supporter of his cock-eyed “sovereign citizen” beliefs, granted illegal asylum and be comfortably holed up in a house somewhere in the district, or much further afield?

At the time of writing, no one was saying.

And the mountain retreated to its unconcerned slumber, the manhunt below a mere blip in its sprawling history.

Geologists will tell you Mount Buffalo was formed hundreds of millions of years ago as a single giant bubble of molten rock deep within the Earth, its bulk gradually forced to the surface, there to be weathered by rain, wind and snow until today, where smooth rounded granite tors are scattered like marvellous artworks across its plateau.

Though the mountain is closed, those of us bewitched by the place need only delve into memory to revisit its gifts.

As you begin the long climb to its alpine meadows and snowgum forests, you are treated to the sight of waterfalls cascading down naked 300-metre cliffs, from which hang-gliders regularly soar.

A few minutes into the climb by twisting road, you might stop and wander a bit and find a chilled, natural swimming pool fed by one of those streams.

Here is Ladies Bath Falls, where modest women in the early years of last century broke their slow journey, posted sentries to ensure privacy and bathed away the dust of their trip in the clear waters.

This, however, is not entirely why we might call Mount Buffalo the Healing Mountain.

The healing and the blessings it has proffered go deeper than a swimming pool.

In the years following World War II, many survivors of the Holocaust from central and eastern Europe who had migrated to Australia came to the mountain.

These remnants of Jewish families destroyed in death camps discovered they could take a train from Melbourne or Sydney or even Adelaide and travel into the clouds, where perhaps lay the promise of brief sanctuary from the psychic agony that pursued them.

Among hundreds of other Australians who entered ballots to gain the privilege of a holiday on the mountain, they took rooms in the elegant old Mount Buffalo Chalet, operated by the Victorian Railways Refreshment Service, gathering in groups and in solitary quiet through the summers and winters of the 1950s.

They played bridge, waltzed in the ballroom, strolled the terraced European gardens, donned ice skates for a turn around nearby Lake Catani when it froze solid or rowed boats when the thaw came.

Healing.

The chalet, haunting as a film set from The Shining, stood empty for 17 years until this year, when it reopened for school groups to experience adventure on the mountain, just in time for the hunt for a fugitive to close it again.

But the Sacred Mountain of the Druids?

We need to go back much further, when what we call Mount Buffalo was called Dordordonga or Tubbalunganer, depending on the source.

The mountain was the country of a mysterious Aboriginal people known as the Mogullumbidj, also called by some early recorders the Minjambuttu.

Each summer, the Mogullumbidj were said to enable access to the mountain by related Aboriginal peoples, particularly the Taungurung Dhudhuroa, who came to feast on the abundance of bogong moths hanging in suspended animation in rock crevices, which they pounded into paste and roasted into cakes of pure protein.

According to historian Jacqui Durrant, who has written of the Mogullumbidj in her paper, Mogullumbidj: First People of Mount Buffalo, in the Victorian Historical Journal (June 2020), these were a distinctive people who lived to create sacred songs and dances.

Durrant relates that the early assistant protector and guardian of Aboriginal people, William Thomas, was told in 1843 “in quite unambiguous terms that there was, in the alps, a group of Aboriginal people … who lived in stone houses of their own making and never went out to seek their own food.

“Instead, they ate herbs and relied on what others brought them, focusing solely on creating new sacred songs and dances,” Durrant wrote.

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These holy people of the mountains, thus, became known to the early Europeans as “druids”.

Could their diet of “herbs” have inspired them in similar ways to shamans of other cultures? Durrant mentions that Mount Buffalo is the sole location of Buffalo sallow wattle (Acacia phlebophylla), which is reputedly a natural source of the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT).

Here, then, is the intriguing prospect of an ancient people weaving spells and magic into the mountain’s dreaming clouds, inspired by hallucinogenic “herbs” in rituals similar to those of shamans of other cultures.

The sacred Mountain of Druids?

Here, surely, is another secret of Mount Buffalo that may never be fully revealed.

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