Stuart Rowe was heading to Ballarat for a photography exhibition three years ago when he learned the Victorian border was about to shut and found himself in Batlow instead. It proved a serendipitous detour.
The IT professional from Sydney’s north shore is now the proud owner of a former automotive workshop in the tiny town known for its apples, on the edge of the Snowy Mountains.
Batlow is famous for its apple orchards.Credit: Destination NSW
Rowe and his wife Marie are among a small but growing number of Sydneysiders eager to help Batlow locals resurrect a town devastated by bushfires four years ago, where $500,000 worth of publicly funded art now sits amid the scars of natural disaster and economic decline.
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Rowe – who once bought and restored a 1937 hearse – quips, in between stripping paint from the walls and speaking to locals about what venture will best fit the space.
“The whole region seems to me like a massive opportunity.”
“The Seated Man” by artist Sean Henry, on the Snowy Valleys Sculpture Trail in the Bago State Forest.
Most of Batlow’s former shops sit empty or have been turned into housing over the past 30 years, meaning there are only a handful of places, including a pub and a bakery, to serve the thousands of visitors now coming to the region to see the Snowy Valleys Sculpture Trail, a public art collection opened two years ago that winds it way through Batlow and surrounding towns.
There are only a handful of places, including a pub and a bakery, to serve the thousands of visitors.
David Handley, who founded Sculpture by the Sea, established the trail with a $4 million grant in 2022 and it has since been extended into the Bago State Forest, above Batlow, where sculptures by international artists rest among the blackened trunks of 100-year-old pine trees. Snow fell on the works for the first time this month .
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.
“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.”