High class

Through the seasons and the years, the High Country and its people move through moods, colours and changing activities.

Story + Photos Andrew Hull

The Australian Alps cover less than 0.2% of the Australian land mass, stretched across 3 states. The High Country really is extremely rare, and its peculiar Australian context also makes it unique.

“It’s a really tiny ecosystem, but it’s an incredibly important ecosystem. It’s full of diversity,” says Dr Michelle Stevenson, curator of the National Alpine Museum of Australia at Mount Buller. “You get species that don’t exist anywhere else.”

Michelle, whose love of the alpine region and skiing ultimately led her to undertake Australia’s first PhD on the history and heritage of skiing, undertook extensive surveys across a broad cross-section of the alpine and skiing community, enquiring what the key values were for the non-scientific community. For example, what would they miss if they couldn’t ski in Australia? “I think about 80% of people said the snow gums,” Michelle says. “And when you compare that to a European or an Asian or North American alpine landscape, you know, they’re full of these trees like pines and birches and things like that. You know, to have this really Australian tree, a gum tree that is up here, in the mountains, battling against the elements, just kind of helps create an incredibly unique setting.”

The strata of High Country elevation is demarcated by the different vegetation. High on the windy summits of the Australian Alps, the granite-studded heath and perennial grasslands reflect their windswept and snow-covered existence, treeless between about 1,200 and 1,800m of elevation, depending on where you are, before the hardy snow gums begin to grapple to the lee side of the hills. Bent and twisted from the weight of snow and the intense buffeting of winds, their springy boughs bear their snowy burdens and gradually reclaim the landscape for the montane forest below, where the pencil-straight mountain ash dominate the slopes.

“When snow blankets the landscape, everything about how you engage with it changes,” Michelle says. “The way you move across the landscape is very different in winter than it is in summer. You have these tracks that have been used for, you know, thousands of years – 20,000, 40,000 years – across Australia’s Alpine regions, going back to the first peoples. They have become roads that we use today. But then you put a blanket of snow over the landscape, and you’re not forced to use existing tracks. You’re on your skis, you’re gliding along – your way of engaging with it totally changes.”