Falling Fast For A Fondue

The Age

Saturday June 4, 2005

Michael Shmith

JUST AS ski fashions have gone from the impractical to the impervious, where it is now possible simultaneously to make an athletic statement and stylistic point while looking like a speeding condom, apres-ski food and wine have become determinedly international. Menus at Australian ski resorts feature everything from risotto to sushi, which means it is only moments until the arrival of the pide or the sumac-encrusted barramundi.

Years ago at the Mount Buffalo Chalet, on my only visit to a snowfield, one queued in the Victorian Railways Dining Room for the sort of slop beloved of the state's utilitarian train system, lovingly transferred up the mountain from Wangaratta in a caravan of steaming, rattling stockpots: brown liquid soup, brown sludge casserole, pale-green vegetable matter, hand-grenade potatoes, swampy custard concealing doughy lumps. Friday was roast-and-movie night: chewing hunks of fibrous meat that gave Mount Buffalo its name and reputation while watching a jerking 16mm print of Two Rode Together with James Stewart and Richard Widmark, was the height of apres-ski sophistication to one so young and impressionable. Tea and coffee, indistinguishable from each other in taste and texture, were dispensed (milk already included) from trembling twin silo-like boilers.

The chalet of 41 years ago bore scant relationship to today's version. Back then, it was straight out of The Shining: a hulking, quasi-alpine construction with long, bare-boarded corridors receding into the far distance and lined with dark-wood doors with dusty transoms above. Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall would have been quite at home.

The rooms had high, monastic single beds, a towering wardrobe jangling with tangled wire hangers, and a solid dressing table with ewer and basin atop. The bathrooms were cavernous, the bath itself fixed in the very centre, with huge faucets which, if unchecked, could have made the chalet part of Lake Eildon within the hour. There were two temperature settings: freezing and Hades.

The assumption at Mount Buffalo was that you would spend the day skiing and the nights in slumber to prepare for the rigours of the next day. To the grim, ever-watchful management, trained by Lutherans and Calvinists to equate a good time with mortal sin, enjoyment was a by-product of Godlessness and laziness. Meal times matched: breakfast at dawn; lunch out; dinner at 5.30pm. After this, the Pride of Erin in the Recreation Room or a burst of whist or Ludo in the Games Room. Bed, as far as one could judge, was a solitary activity. Lengths of cotton thread to be tied across all doors, just to make sure.

There was also the public-address system whose users, presumably on leave from the announcing booths of Alamein or Flinders Street stations, ensured they babbled as much unintelligible information as possible in the longest possible time. Thus it was easy to miss breakfast, miss the bus to the snowfields, miss the Scrabble in the lounge, miss dinner, miss the post-prandial Milo, and miss the warnings of avalanches, blizzards and ice storms.

Actually, the Mount Buffalo experience c.1964 seemed to miss many things. Elsewhere in the world - Gstaad, Chamonix, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Mount Hotham, Falls Creek - bright young things with argyle knits and goggles the diameter of Bentley headlamps swooshed down hills and, almost without stopping or removing their skis, slid into apres-ski mood with glasses of gluhwein and fondue dinners. Indeed, with Swinging London yet to make its impact on the world, gluhwein and fondue were the height of sophistication, as well as being the closest the restaurant industry came to a bring-your-own-food ideal.

There was none of this at Mount Buffalo; it was not a good introduction to skiing. In fact, my debut and final performance on the slopes occurred on the same day, almost at the same time. After a series of lessons that made teach-yourself quantum physics the model of simplicity, I was introduced to a T-bar lift and yanked halfway up a mountain with only one way to go and one way to do it. Charles Addams's cartoon of a puzzled skier examining his tracks which mysteriously bisect a tree was nothing compared with my remarkable lack of steering control which created figure-eights in the snow. I collected another skier on the way down and we both tumbled into a half-melted hole like a couple of slowly collapsing penguins.

Once wrung-out and reclothed, I retreated to the vast interior of the chalet, never to return to the snowfields. By the end of the 10 days, I could achieve the perfect bath temperature and became pretty good at Ludo, even though it was still impossible to tell which was coffee and which was tea.

© 2005 The Age

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