Expert Guides and Planning Resources for Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales

Australia's alpine heartland, protecting the continent's highest peaks and unique subalpine ecosystems

Kosciuszko National Park

Kosciuszko National Park represents one of Australia's most distinctive protected landscapes, preserving an environment that contrasts sharply with the predominantly flat and arid character of the continent. The park's high elevation and resulting cool climate support ecosystems found only in this limited alpine zone, making it a critical conservation area for Australia's unique biodiversity. The Snowy Mountains, for which the park is named, form the highest terrestrial terrain on mainland Australia, with Mount Kosciuszko serving as a symbolic and practical apex of the continent's natural landscape. Beyond its ecological significance, the park holds deep cultural meaning, having been used by Aboriginal peoples for thousands of years as a summer gathering place where multiple groups would converge to hunt bogong moths. This history of human connection to the high country predates European exploration, which began in 1835 and culminated in the naming of Mount Kosciuszko by Polish explorer Paweł Edmund Strzelecki in 1840 after the Polish military leader Tadeusz Kościuszko. The park's more recent history includes the infamous cattle-grazing era immortalized in Banjo Paterson's poem The Man From Snowy River, the gold rush at Kiandra that once supported a population of approximately 4,000 people and claims Australia's first skiing activities, and the monumental Snowy Mountains Scheme engineering project that reshaped much of the landscape between 1949 and 1974.