cooma snowy mountains

[Guest kingnatasha]

hi does anyone live in cooma or the surrounding area??

Does anyone work for snowy hydro ????

we are thinking of moving to this area and would love to know more about it

[Quoll]

It's about an hour south of Canberra and is a smallish country town (dunno pop about 10,000?) on the road to the snow fields. A fair bit of its income comes from the snow bunnies going down the highway and the other main employer would be the Snowy Hydro. It's about an hour from the snow fields and about 2 hours to the coast. One long main street in the manner of most country towns. It's big enough to have a couple of primary schools with one govt high school and, AFAIK a Catholic HS as well. It has a small base hospital which services the surrounding area. It's climate is colder than Canberra but not being as high, it isnt as cold as the mountain villages. It's pretty dry at the moment and just out of town still looks quite barren.

 

It's one of those places where everyone knows everyone else. Like other small country towns it's one of those towns where the kids tend to "move on" to the big city - I work with a Cooma girl and though she has fond memories of her country childhood I dont think it is a place she would go back to because it wouldnt be easy for her and her husband to have such good careers but that's because of the career path they have chosen. Her mum still lives there and is quite happy with her big garden and local community support.

 

I did see something really nice there though last year - we drive through regularly and often stop for coffee and in the coffee shop there was a HS teacher and a group of kids - on a Sunday - having coffee and working through their HSC texts. Now whether she did it for money (I doubt) or love (more likely) it was good to see a group of lads all talking English Literature over coffee. (It's that "community" thing I guess)