Road to ruin: Kangaroo Valley fights back after year of devastation

Andy Cichanowski still remembers the first time he turned onto Bunkers Hill Road, just outside Kangaroo Valley, and slowly wound his way up the hill.

He and his partner, Mark Wilkinson, had left Sydney to visit a property for sale and were wondering where the road was taking them when suddenly the landscape just opened up before them.

Amaroo Valley Springs owner Andy Cichanowksi inspects the damage on Bunkers Hill Road.Credit: Meredith Schofield

“We just popped out into this valley. It was a misty, rainy day and the views just took our breath away,” he says. “I still get that ‘wow’ moment every time I drive back in. When you’re away, you feel the valley calling to you.”

That sense of wonder is familiar to many of the 1000 residents of Kangaroo Valley, which is nestled amid mountains between the Southern Highlands and the South Coast.

“There is magic here,” chamber of commerce secretary Natalie Harker says. “Sometimes we like that isolated feeling, that the rest of the world is on the other side of the mountain. It’s just a beautiful place.”

But the mountains that enclose the valley and hide it from the rest of the world, and the rain that makes it so lush, have also proved its downfall this year. Kangaroo Valley recorded 725 millimetres of rain in March, and another 639 millimetres in July.

Kangaroo Valley is trying to recover from the damage wrought by this year’s rain.Credit: Katie Rivers

The downpours triggered 38 major landslips in the Shoalhaven region, mostly in Kangaroo Valley and the surrounding countryside. The slips isolated residents, cut off the village and made access challenging for months.

The main road into town, Moss Vale Road, reopened in July after landslips on either side of the village in March forced residents to join convoys or board shuttle buses to get to Moss Vale or Nowra. Full repair work on the road will take another 18 months to complete.

The destruction from the rain comes on the back of the COVID-19 downturn and the 2019-20 bushfires, which devastated the bush around Kangaroo Valley and came close to the village itself.

Work to repair many local roads is yet to start, and will take at least nine months to complete.

Bunkers Hill Road, on which Cichanowski and Wilkinson live, was one of the worst affected. It suffered five landslips in March and July, then in October the entire road just gave way. Cichanowski says he has been watching it slowly slide down the hill ever since, and is frustrated it is taking so long to fix.

The luxury farm-stay business the couple runs, Amaroo Valley Springs, is largely reliant on the wedding industry in the Southern Highlands and suffered badly from the closure of the Illawarra Highway in the first half of the year.

Now the couple are considering shutting down entirely for three months early next year, while Bunkers Hill Road is repaired.

“We’ve been trying to work out what to do,” Cichanowski says. “Do we just open weekends [when there is less roadwork], or do we encourage people to helicopter in? We’re just trying to be a bit proactive ... it’s our livelihood, the farm and the farm-stay accommodation.

“People who stay with us visit town and go to the pub, the restaurants, and the cafes. We also buy all our provisions locally ... when people can’t come, it trickles down and affects everyone in town. ”

Kangaroo Valley’s roads were first cut into the sides of mountains more than 150 years ago. Shoalhaven City Council says it will take many months to repair the local roads, because of the complexity of the work.

Council project manager Dominic Lucas says: “The challenge is the geology; the fact you’ve got that loose material that’s sitting [on top of volcanic rock], with roads built on it. For a lot of it, it’s fairly well consolidated, but when climatic conditions change, it can collapse.”

Engineers are looking at repairs that include sinking concrete piers down until they find the rock bed, or drilling horizontal rods through the soil and anchoring them into solid ground beyond the road. The work has gone to tender. It is expected to start in March but won’t be finished until next December, if the weather holds.

Harker says some local businesses have recorded an 80 per cent fall in turnover this year on the back of the natural disasters.

With the main road open again, they hope tourists will return this summer but much of the village’s accommodation is still empty, when it is usually fully booked at this time of year.

“On the tourism side of things, it’s pretty much business as usual - everything is back on track,” she says. “But in terms of agriculture and residents, there’s a lot to be done. Unfortunately, there’s a lot to be done across the entire Shoalhaven, and the entire state.

“It’s been super tough on people but there is that country town resilience. Resilience, blah blah blah: we’re told that word over and over again, but there’s a feeling we’ve just got to get on with things.”

Cichanowski agrees. “Everyone’s a bit tired and over it, and we’re sick to death of talking about the road,” he says. “We’re all just hoping next year is going to be a bit brighter, and we can get back to normal.”

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