It’s that time of year. We are starting to get the annual magazine started. MJ magazine is an annual magazine that is distributed for free in mountain and valley towns between Melbourne and Canberra. And this year we have a guest editor: Anna Langford.

My name’s Anna, and I’m delighted to be writing to you all as guest editor of the 2025 issue of Mountain Journal magazine. I’m writing to introduce myself, announce the issue’s theme, and put a call out to anyone who would like to contribute.

The theme of Mountain Journal 2025 will be ‘Melting through our fingers: loving winter in the Australian alps’. Please send content by friday March 14.

Check here for  information on word limits and sections of the magazine. If you would like to contribute a piece on this theme, you might be inspired by these guiding questions:

  • Why do we love winter?
  • What about winter makes the alps so magical?
  • What are your early memories of winter in the alps? What has changed since then?
  • How can we as a community of mountain lovers ramp up action to protect these places for generations to come?

Shortening winters already threaten the economic viability of winter tourism, yet resorts optimistically declare they can keep making enough snow to ski on. But is that really all winter is about for us?

I’m a keen backcountry skier and hiker, and the Australian alps have bewitched me since I was very young. For the last year I’ve been travelling overseas, and have frequently found myself waxing lyrical about the alps to people I’ve only just met. When people would ask me about Australia (probably expecting descriptions of golden beaches), it wouldn’t be long before I was showing them photos of those worn old peaks, and close-ups of resplendent snow gums, gushing ‘there is nowhere else like it on Earth.’

I’ve also been involved at Friends of the Earth Melbourne since 2014 in community-led campaigns for environmental protection and action on climate change. My activism is driven by my love of the alps, and my grief at how quickly we are losing winter as we know it while the planet heats up. With the fresh memory of warm winters forcing ski resorts to shut early in 2023 and ‘24, I know I’m not the only one feeling apprehensive about how long the snow will manage to cling to the slopes this year.

Personally, I shudder to think of a future of going to the alps to ski down thin strips of manmade snow, surrounded by bare ground and burnt snow gums. I go there to be enchanted by the whole world of its unique ecosystems that depend on cold winters.

I’m 27, which means that the alps of long, deep winters and phenomena like ice skating at Mt Buffalo only exist as bygone folk tales for me. My generation has never known the alps before they were prickled with snow gum skeletons scorched by too many bushfires. But there remains so much resilience, and so much to love.

To talk about our alpine winters is to lament what we’ve lost, celebrate what we still have, record it for collective memory, and impel each other to step up and take action.

I hope the next edition of this wonderful magazine does all of these things, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Please send submissions to my email address: anna.langford@foe.org.au.

Anna

Note: we use the term ‘Australian alps’ as a catch-all to refer to the Victorian alps, Snowy Mountains and Tasmanian mountains. These are the lands of many First Nations groups and when referring to a specific area, we will name the traditional owner group(s) relevant. All of Australia is First Nations land, and Mountain Journal acknowledges this fact.