Heart of the Nation: Mount Buller, Victoria

IT was Casey Giulieri’s first trip to the mountains all year, and boy did he pick it.

140816 TWAM EMBARGO FOR TWAM 16 AUG 2014 NO REUSE FEE APPLIES Bumper snow hits the Alps. Crowds flock to Mt Buller after more snow being dumped over the weekend. Snow boarder Casey Diulieri takes a leap of faith from the Summit on Mt Buller in perfect skiing conditions. Picture: David Caird. Picture: Captioned As

IT was Casey Giulieri’s first trip to the mountains all year, and boy did he pick it.

“Best day of the season,” the chairlift guy told him as he took in the overnight dump of gleaming snow, the bright blue sky. Giulieri went to the summit of Mount Buller and looked down the run called Fast One. It’s rated a double-black diamond: that’s scary steep. No one had yet left a mark on the new snow. He spent a minute studying the route, visualising the sequence of carving turns — “If you can see yourself having a good run, that’s what will happen,” he says — then went over the edge with this standing jump, signalling his 100 per cent commitment. He nailed the run.

Giulieri, 23, is in the final year of an aerospace engineering degree at RMIT University in Melbourne — then it’s a bold jump into the fiercely competitive aerospace jobs market. Growing up in Glen Waverley, his interest in the subject was sparked by a TV doco about the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft. He has an enduring fascination, too, with Concorde, which last broke the sound barrier 11 years ago. Guilieri has a big ambition: “I’d love for my name to go down in history as the person who made supersonic air travel economically viable.”

In the meantime, he’s working for his dad’s plumbing and building business. He has juggled studies and working for his father since the age of 14. Lately it’s been a way to fund snowboarding trips to New Zealand, France and the US, and to pay off a HECS debt whose scale he doesn’t even want to think about. Giulieri likes working with his dad but he won’t miss the plumber-horror stuff. One time they were called to a shopping centre to fix a broken waste pipe, and arrived to a lake of sewage. Did he roll up his sleeves? “No, I ran away,” he laughs. “I said, ‘You’ve got this one dad, see you later!’”