Is this the end for skiing in Australia?

What does the future hold for Australia’s ski fields? Picture: Andrew Railton

Will Australia even have a ski industry in a few decades? How contracted, sparse, bouldered will it be? The first weekend in October is traditionally when our lucrative ski haven shut up shop, but the past season has been, well, interesting. I weep for the people who make a living out of this world, because social media shots of Australian ski resorts this year can’t hide the grim reality of a patchy and shrinking vista; a disappearing beauty. Brown and withered grass around chair lifts. Meagre patches of snow. Soil-stained slush. Exposed boulders. Muddy puddles. Snowmaking machines in overdrive. Ice as opposed to powder and brutal injuries because of it. Fake snow, and any thin layer of natural snow has been whipped away by the wind.

A photo of dismal mud at the bottom of Mount Buller’s Wombat chairlift went viral; gloating Kiwis joked that we should ski over there instead. The lament: why are we doing this, here, now? Why not go elsewhere for a snow fix? This year, several Australian resorts gave up the ghost up weeks ahead of time. It just wasn’t worth it and it followed, of course, our warmest winter on record.

Mount Buller’s Wombat chair lift. Picture: Facebook / Kylie Ashdown

I can catalogue the changes by the chains we’ve needed in the past for our car, as it delivered several snow obsessives in our family to friends more enthusiastic than the Chap and I. We’re not ski people, but several of our children are. So every year we stay in Canberra and drive out to the snowfields for a jolly lunch, to deliver our lot to some saintly mates.

The first year we trekked into those glorious mountains of snow gums sinking into the pillowy white, chains were very much required. I can still recall the Chap’s face when informed of this, which mirrored mine. As a kid I’d learnt numerous new swear words from my father as he put chains on for our once-in-a-lifetime skiing holiday, and had assumed the world had progressed in terms of tyres and snow since those distant decades. It had not. The defining image of our trip: the Chap flat on his back on the toboggan, under the car, in his corduroy blazer, trying to detangle the chains that had caught behind the wheel. But we’ve never needed those wretched things again, even though we’ve travelled to the snow at the same time in the school holidays each year.

The Australian ski season is getting warmer. Andrew Hamawy, a Sydney builder, usually visits the snow up to four times a year; he knows this world. Yet he cancelled his mid-August Perisher trip because only one chairlift was operating and the machine-made snow was creating dangerous, icy conditions. He told one news website that in the past, trees would be buried in snow. “[But] now... there’s just not enough to be skiing down. You go to the snow because it’s refreshing, but this is horrible.”

Since the 1950s, climate change has resulted in a long-term decline in the depth and duration of Australia’s snow season. The Bureau of Meteorology’s recent State of the Climate reports states that the largest declines came “during spring and at lower altitudes”. It added: “The number of snowfall days has also decreased. Years with persistent heavy snow cover have become rare.” Resorts in lower altitudes are struggling. Omar Elkadi from climate advocacy group Protect Our Winters says there’s been too few nights to pump out snow, particularly in Australia’s lower altitude areas. “If you look at the snowfall rates say 50 years ago, we used to get a lot more smaller top-ups, which built the base over time.”

And if we’re looking for more predictable snow action somewhere else, well, European ski resorts are suffering too. A recent study found that more than half face a “very high risk” from climate change. Not good here, or there. Also, God help us for summer. What are we doing to this gift of a planet?