18/09/2026
Seven horses came ashore with the First Fleet in 1788, part of Governor Arthur Phillip's official count of the new colony's livestock. Everything that runs wild in the high country today ultimately traces back to horses like them.
Some escaped. Some were deliberately let go when a run failed or a family walked off the land. By the middle of the 1800s there were established wild populations right through the Australian Alps, in country that is now Kosciuszko and the Alpine National Park.
Nobody is certain where the name came from. The most repeated story points to Sergeant James Brumby, a soldier with the New South Wales Corps who left horses behind at his property at Mulgrave Place around 1804 when he was posted to Van Diemen's Land. Locals are said to have taken to calling the strays after him. Another version traces the word to "baroomby," said to be a word for wild in a language of southern Queensland. Its first known appearance in print was in the Melbourne magazine The Australasian in 1880, describing it as Queensland bush slang.
What is not in dispute is what these horses did next.
They carried the mail and the stockmen. They cleared country, worked cattle, hauled timber and got families to town when there was no road. Before engines reached the paddocks, this is how the inland functioned.
Then a generation of them went overseas to war and did not come back. Of the 136,000 Australian horses sent abroad during the First World War, one returned.
They were only reclassified as a problem once national parks were declared across the high country in the twentieth century. The animals did not change. The paperwork did.
That is the part people find hardest to accept. The same horse that helped build the high country is now counted against it.
A working animal for a hundred and fifty years. A pest for the last fifty.
SOURCE: National Museum of Australia; Australian War Memorial, "One Came Home"; The Australasian, 1880; Australian Brumby Alliance.
