The rising cost of Australian ski resorts: ‘It was like throwing $100 bills out the window as we drove up the mountain’

Australia experienced a boom in beginner-friendly skiing in the 1980s and 1990s. But have global heating and rising lift prices ended that run?

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Mount Hotham was like a second home to Dan Burke. In the 1980s, his family stayed in the communal lodges, back when the lifts were run by the Schumann family, who lived in Harrietville at the mountain’s base and knew regulars by name. He’d sneak into nightclubs with the teenagers who worked at the resort, doing the Nutbush, spilling out into hotel corridors at 3am. As the 80s ticked over into the 90s, it seemed like a particularly egalitarian time for what has traditionally been an elite pursuit.

First came snowboarding, for which Burke was all-in. “Skiing was pretty daggy in my eyes – tight pants, headbands – but the snowboarders would be rocking around the village in their fat pants, wearing sneakers in their boots,” he says. “Skiers called us knuckle-draggers. My whole crew from the coast started coming up. A lot were from a lower socioeconomic background, but they’d get up there and get a job.”