The word that keeps returning in the survey reports is shared. This was never a single people's track. It was a corridor of connection, crossed by other paths running north and south, threaded with campsites every dozen kilometres or so, always near water. People walked it to trade and to teach, to settle disputes and to renew alliances, to honour kinship that stretched across mountain and coast. The idea that Aboriginal people simply wandered is a colonial misreading; they moved with purpose, bound by obligation to specific Country. A journey along the Bundian Way was seasonal and deliberate, woven into a calendar that the moths and the migrating whales helped keep. To follow it was to maintain a world.

Two great gatherings anchored the route at its two ends. In summer, families converged in the alpine high country near the headwaters of the Snowy River, drawn by the bogong moths that sheltered by the millions in the rock. The moths were nourishing food and the occasion for ceremony that lasted through the warm months. At the coast, in spring, people came together at Twofold Bay as whales moved along the shoreline. Both ends of the Way were places of abundance and meeting, and the long thread between them let knowledge, goods, and people travel the full sweep from snow to surf. Few landscapes on Earth let you walk from a continent's roof to its ocean through such different worlds.

When Europeans pushed into this country in the nineteenth century, they did not find their own way through it. They were led. In 1841, surveyor Thomas Townsend was guided down from Omeo by two Aboriginal men along part of the Bundian Way. In 1842, the artist Oswald Brierly travelled inland from Twofold Bay under the guidance of an Aboriginal man named Budgibro, sketching the route as he went. The settlers' large camps, archaeologists later realised, sat exactly where Aboriginal travellers had always stopped. The newcomers followed the old knowledge, then largely wrote its keepers out of the story. The Way carries those layers honestly: the same ground that holds ancient artefacts also holds the survey scars of dispossession.

Between 2010 and 2011, the Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council and naturalist John Blay walked and surveyed the full length of the route, matching oral history against scarred trees, artefact scatters, old yam fields, and the journals of long-dead explorers. What they confirmed is rare: an east-west pathway of south-eastern Australia whose cultural landscape survives largely intact, because so much of it runs through wilderness and national park rather than under highways. Along the coastal stages lie enormous shell middens, the kitchen floors of countless gatherings. Walkers are asked to leave the middens and the artefacts undisturbed. The Way is not a relic. It remains a place of teaching and ceremony for the Aboriginal communities of the Monaro and the South Coast, who carry it forward.