“Snow Revelry – Official Organ of the Kosciusko Snow Revellers Club” July, 1942.
Mountainwatch | History
This story first appeared in the 2021 issue of Chillfactor magazine. Words by Matt Wiseman
“One envisages several trails worn to the western side of the Range when the world returns to normal.”
Despite the anachronistic language, you’d be forgiven for thinking the above quote is a product of 2021. Particularly, “when the world returns to normal,” which has become a useful phrase to fall back on when committing to plans with those encountered in supermarkets or when speaking of future travel plans. It’s the kind of thing you could reasonably expect to read within the pages of this magazine, but it actually comes from a magazine belonging to a very different era in Australian skiing.
Printed in July, 1942, it’s a quote from Volume 8, Number 7, of ‘Snow Revelry – the Official Organ of the Kosciusko Snow Revellers Club’.
Instead of a pandemic, it was a world war that was making ski travel and ski journalism difficult back then. There are reviews of ‘The 1942 Australian and New Zealand Ski Year Book, which describes it as “coming to us in a very attenuated condition, evidence of the days that produce it; for it is the first wartime edition.”
Now let us be clear that this pandemic obviously hasn’t come at the same cost as World War 2, especially to us here in Australia. But One cannot help but note the similarities between the reviews contained within Snow Revelry and what we’ve assembled here in Chillfactor. There’s a shared, “quiet and ruminative character,” but still the articles are very good and some of them would add distinction to a piping peace time edition.
They note how the Western Faces, “seem to have ‘caught on’ amongst the ski-explorers and tell of tours to the western spurs of Townsend, Carruthers and Twynam…The photographs accompanying the article show something new in Kosciusko Terrain.”
But for all its similarities, just shy of 80 years separate the printing of that title and Chillfactor 2021 . It comes years before the founding of Thredbo in 1955, the invention of twin-tips or man-made snow, and someone landing a quad cork 1920, whatever that looks like.
And still, then, as now, they were praying to be, “well favoured with good snowfalls – big flaky stuff – indescribably beautiful in relief against the green of the snow gums.”
There’s a review of Elyene Mitchell’s book ‘Australian Alps’. A formative Australian ski writer, (she also wrote the children book series The Silver Brumby) Elyene was the first woman to descend the entire western faces of the Snowy Mountains on skis. It was said that Elyene’s writing, “has that liking for the highly polished metaphor which seems to characterise the writing of those who claim kinship to the spirit of the hills.” Within the work, she draws attention, “to a section of terrain which is known to few skiers and totally unheard of by most.” It’s a cause still championed at Chillfactor. It was said, as Elyene’s book “becomes known in other countries it should considerably swell the interest which overseas skiers have for Australian snowfields.”
Yet my favourite quote from Snow Revelry comes from the “virile pen” of someone called ‘Klister’ and an article called ‘Snow Tour – 1941’. Klister wrote, “Those with skis just pointed them down and took it straight – it was as bumpy as a plowed field – and there were some good tosses.”
So, here’s to pointing it straight this season. See you on the western side of the Range.
