Tali Karng, 1992



Tali Karng from Echo Point, Riggall Spur

Easter 1992. I managed to talk my then girlfriend into joining me on a hike to Tali Karng, a beautiful lake nestled in the Victorian  alps.  She agreed to come along, which was useful as getting there required using her car. It’s a fair drive to the start of the walk and the road was rather dry, dusty and busy and we had to drive with the headlights on to help see through the dust.

The walk starts off across the Wellington Plains past some old graziers huts and numerous cows that were allowed to graze the area at the time. We bypassed the climb over Spion Kopje and continued the easy walking along the fire trail. At Riggals Hut site we came across a family also hiking out to Tali Karng who had decided to set up camp there and do a day trip to the lake the next morning. After a snack, we headed down Gillio’s track, which wiggled steeply down to the lake and our campsite.

Crossing Wellington Plains

The lake was busy – it was Easter – with lots of campers, people fishing and people swimming. Swimming in Tali Karng can be quite odd as it is usually stratified. Stratification is where a lake divides into layers based on water temperature. Water temperature affects its density; water is ‘heaviest’ at 4 degrees, so water at this temperature sinks. In shallow, open lakes, the wind will stir the water around and the temperature will be relatively even  from top to bottom but Tali Karng is deep and in a steep valley so the wind doesn’t get in. The result is the top of the lake is warmed by the sun but sits on a layer of cold, cold water. The layers are quite distinct and the change from cold surface water to really icy cold lower water is very abrupt. When you swim, your hand dips in and out of this icy cold water with each stroke. Treading water is like having everything below your belly button in the fridge. It is a very odd sensation.

When we hiked in twenty years ago, the common belief was, to quote the guidebook, that the lake “was not even known to the aborigines until recent times”. This seemed to be based on the story that when Alfred Howitt came across the lake he reported that his Aboriginal guides were unaware of it. The truth seems to be that this wasn’t their country and that is why they didn’t know of the lake. The Gunai-kurnai people, whose country does include the lake, were aware of it but for them visiting is forbidden. It is in respect of this taboo that camping at the lake has been (or is planned to be) stopped and hikers are asked to camp at Riggalls Hut site or along the Wellington River below the lake. Visiting the lake is still okay; only camping isn’t allowed.

Back in 1992 camping was permitted and we spent  two very pleasant nights at the lake.

Our camp at Tali Karng

After a breakfast of Easter eggs we spent our second day strolling around the perimeter of the lake, checking out the falls on Nigothuruk Creek at the far end. Nigothuruk Creek feeds the lake and it was a natural landslide in the distant past that blocked this creek and created the lake, the only natural lake in Victoria’s alps.

Sitting by the lake

Day three we broke camp and headed up to Echo Point and the hike out, stepping over a lazy Red-bellied Black Snake on the way. The walk was easy – we avoided Spion Kopje again.  I was thinking how it had been a perfect walk until about 500m from the end when I began to wonder if I had remembered to turn the headlights off in my girlfriend’s car. Apparently I hadn’t and the battery was dead flat. However it was Easter and soon someone else wandered back from their hike and helped us get the car going. And my girlfriend married me a couple of years later so it couldn’t have been too bad an experience.