THE BRIDLE TRACK

THE BRIDLE TRACK: not to be confused with a bridal track, whatever that might be, but it doesn’t sound auspicious. No, a bridle track – and there are or were many in the early days of European settlement in the back blocks of the Australian landscape – refers to the barely passable but essential life-lines to and from fledging villages and remote gold rush sites. Initially, they were pretty much confined to transport by horse (and bridle) but many were amazingly constructed (sometimes, in effect, hewn) through very rough and forbidding country.

There are only a few that retain the simple but history-laden name of Bridle Track. This story is about one of them which, after so many years, still beckons the adventure rider to re-live the challenges of the early gold hunters who swarmed into Hill End and depended on the Bridle Track to get supplies from the regional centre of Bathurst, itself the site of Australia’s first gold discovery and, of course, later the Mount Panorama racing circuit – confined these days to cars but previously home to the Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix from the 1940s until the late