Handley is excited businesses are keen to invest in the town of 1300 people, given the point of the trail and the grant is to help the region recover from the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires.
“Containment Lines”, by Batlow artist Robyn Veneer Sweeney, in the fire-affected Bago State Forest. Credit: Catherine Naylor
The disaster left its mark on the streets of Batlow, where 17 homes were lost, on the hills that surround it, where pine forests and orchards were decimated, and on the psyche of those who still live here: the fact Batlow was declared “undefendable”, and its residents told to flee, still haunts many.
But Handley says the visitors drawn to the trail – often high-spending cultural tourists – need food and accommodation, and they could help Batlow find its groove again.
“The idea that we are barely open two years and someone is already investing off the back of the Snowy Valleys Sculpture Trail is great,” Handley says.
“For a lot of the artists who have come to the Snowy Valleys for the trail, Batlow is the town that’s excited them the most. They’ve seen the potential.”
Margaret Sedgwick, second from left, meets with fellow Batlow locals outside the Inconvenience Store, she helped set up, on Pioneer Street.Credit: Catherine Naylor
Just outside of town, cider-maker The Apple Thief is spending $4 million on a new dining and tasting facility. Nearby, luxury accommodation Brindabella Farmstay, which burned down in the fires, has just reopened, while on the main street, a group of locals have banded together to purchase and revive two of Batlow’s old shopfronts.
One shop has morphed into a local produce store after starting life as an art installation linked to the sculpture trail, while the other has been set up as a garden cafe but is yet to attract a tenant.
Margaret Sedgwick, who helped establish the not-for-profit group that bought the shops, says the bushfire that roared into town in January 2020 proved an almost fatal blow for Batlow, which was already struggling after the closure of its fruit and vegetable cannery business 20 years earlier, and the group decided to buy the shops to give the community some colour and joy.
Local produce for sale in The Inconvenience Store in Batlow.
“The devastation was all around you. There were burnt houses in the town, and the landscape [was burnt]. It was almost as if the town went into depression for a time,” she says.
Loading
“If it had been a thriving community beforehand it would have been easier, but we were left with very little to build on.”
Sedgwick refuses to give up on the town that welcomed her so warmly when she moved here from Sydney 1965, after marrying a local orchardist – a pairing that resulted from two conspiring mothers at a CWA meeting.
“It was a wonderful town, it really was,” Sedgwick says, recalling the busy main street and regular dances and musical evenings she attended in the 1960s and 70s. “I loved it. It’s been good to me.
“I feel that in another 10 years, Batlow is going to be a thriving town again … it just needs people with a few enterprising ideas and some money, and you’re home and hosed.”