Mountain highs

HOW snow brings out the child in all of us.

Heart of the nation

PEOPLE can react in funny ways to the sight of snow. Whether one's inner child is full of joy, or wonder, or simply full of beans, the white stuff will bring it out.

And that always makes a good subject matter, says photographer Matthew Newton, who on a freezing afternoon last June drove up to the summit of Mount Wellington, outside Hobart, after a fresh fall.

Among the usual tourists and locals larking about, throwing snowballs and building snowmen, was a party of men from the Middle East who were in town for an engineers’ conference. They’d come up the 1271m mountain in the middle of winter in their suits and ties. None of them had ever seen snow before. Their reaction was one of quiet curiosity: they spent the whole time touching the stuff and taking photos on their mobile phones of each other posing among it, says Newton, who captured this quirky shot of two of them reviewing their pictures.

Mount Wellington – known in Hobart simply as The Mountain, such is its dominating presence over the city – doesn’t get snowed on only in the colder months. Even at Christmas it’s not uncommon for a front to blow through and leave a dusting of snow in its wake. It doesn’t last long – maybe half a day – but in that brief window it becomes a magnet for tourists and locals.

You see some funny things. “People will often build a snowman on the bonnet of their car,” says Newton, “and then they’ll try to drive all the way down the mountain with it in place. Most of the time it’ll slide off as they go around a bend, but every so often they make it back to Hobart. It’s quite a sight, seeing them driving triumphantly through the middle of the city with a snowman on their bonnet.”