Old Pelion Hut, at Pelion Plains in the centre of the Cradle Mountain- Lake St Clair National Park, is one of my favourite huts. It is one of very few standing structures that predate the national park’s declaration in 1922 and has provided shelter to thousands of people over time. It is full of character and has a certain gracefulness and style. Most people are unaware that, originally, the hut was one of two buildings, collectively known as the Pelion Huts, that stood on or near the Old Pelion site from 1917 to 1935. Whereas Old Pelion survived, its partner did not. It was replaced in 1936 by a new hut a kilometre or so across the plain different iterations of which have provided shelter to walkers to the present day. This is their story.

Minerals were first discovered on the Pelion Plains in 1891. A little rush ensued in which claims were pegged across the Plains but nothing of significance was found. There was a bit of a revival in 1897 when low grade copper deposits excited attention but this, too, faded. In 1916 the Mount Pelion Mines No Liability Company formed with significant financial backing determined to find the mineral wealth that had eluded others. One of its first actions was to extend the Forth Valley pack track up to Pelion Plains to provide good access. In early 1917 the company began building infrastructure around their mine site. It built a hut to provide accommodation to workers, a hut to store tools and equipment, a blacksmith’s shop and, in August 1917, a manager’s hut. Unfortunately, despite the investment, no sufficiently rich deposits were found and, within a year or so, the company restructured and shifted its focus to explore, among other things, the wolfram deposits discovered on the slopes of Mount Oakleigh some years earlier. By this time, only two huts remained on the Pelion Plains mine site—the worker's hut and the manager’s hut. Around 1922, when the Cradle Mountain Reserves was created, the company donated both huts to the Government for use by walkers.

The worker’s hut was a large building of two rooms each with its own fireplace while the manager’s hut (Old Pelion) was a single roomed structure with a door at each end. At a time when the only other huts at Pelion Plains were hunter’s camps, the Pelion Huts soon became popular with walking parties. Both Paddy Hartnett and Bert Nichols used them on the trips they guided and, as planning progressed for an overland track from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair, they became to be seen as crucial pieces of visitor infrastructure for the track. The larger, worker’s hut tended to be used the most. In 1932, for example, one walking group described it as a palatial accommodation’ containing 'two rooms, each with its own fireplace and bunks’. Used as base camps for trips in and around Pelion Plains for a decade or more, there is a rich photographic record of the huts.

By 1935, however, the worker’s hut began to deteriorate. In April 1936, Ranger Lionel Connell found that it was not worth doing up as it is like Paddy’s gun’ and proposed building a replacement over on the edge of the forest where there was plenty of firewood. In May that year Connell and sons Oswald, Esrom and Wally returned and spent a few weeks at Pelion Plains to begin the task. One of their first jobs was to renovate Old Pelion. While beautifully built, it was just an empty, single roomed hut with a fireplace and chimney at one end. The Connells divided the building in two sections using a head high partition, built four large bunks capable of sleeping eight people in one end and built a table and shelf in the other end around the fire. They put a window in the end wall where the second door had been and replaced the ornate wooden chimney that had been a feature of the hut when it was originally built.

Having made the hut much more functional, the Connells then used Old Pelion as a base for a week or two while they split the timber for the new Pelion Hut and lived in it again when they came back in late October 1936 to complete the construction of the new hut.

At this point, the worker’s hut disappears from history. We can speculate that the Connells salvaged some materials from it to renovate Old Pelion and perhaps also that the collapsed hut later became a source of firewood. Its foundations remain, however, and are readily evident about fifty metres northwest of Old Pelion.

From 1936 to the present, Old Pelion has played a supporting role to a range of purpose-built, walker’s huts across the plain successively known as New Pelion Hut. There have been a number of them. The Connell’s New Pelion Hut burnt down in 1943 and was replaced in 1950 by a split timber hut built by Tommy McCoy and then by a metal clad building on a metal frame when McCoy’s hut burnt down in 1967. New Pelion, the current large walkers hut, was built in 2001.