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Dinner Plain

Alpine resorts and Council win State Government category in Premiers awards

Spion Kopje, above Falls Creek village

The Premier’s Sustainability Awards are billed as “Victoria’s most prestigious environmental awards ceremony”.

The awards are intended to “recognise and reward Victorian businesses, institutions, communities and individuals that are forging a sustainable Victoria now and for the future”.

At the awards ceremony on October 2, Alpine Shire Council – Dinner Plain Alpine Village, Falls Creek Resort Management, Mt Hotham Resort Management, Mt Buller Mt Stirling Resort Management, North East Victorian Regional Waste Management Group (NevRwaste) and 4SITE Australia Pty Ltd were recognised through being awarded the State government award.

This was for the ‘Living Bin’, a joint initiative between three alpine resorts which is administered by State Government Boards. This program captures organic waste from Falls Creek, Mount Hotham, Mount Buller and Dinner Plain Alpine village, to convert it into commercial fertiliser. A successful trial of organic collection was conducted in 2010, and in 2011 the program was extended into commercial food outlets, club lodges, and private accommodation.

In 2011 this program had several hundred participants and diverted over 70 tonnes of organic waste from landfill. This program empowers resort residents and guests to make a difference in their daily lives.

You can find extra details here.

As an observation about the awards, it does seem rather strange that Hepburn Wind won the overall award last year (Hepburn is within a ‘no go’ zone created by Ted Baillieu, and would not be allowed under his wind energy rules). And at the 2012 awards, a TAFE college won the Tertiary category. Given the slash and burn cutbacks occurring through the TAFE sector, this is a rather ironic decision.  

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Alphutte – still alpine vandals

We have previously pointed out that the Alphutte pizza restaurant at Dinner Plain destroyed all the remnant indigenous groundcover on their property last autumn.

Sadly, they continue their irresponsible behaviour, planting out various exotics, including herbs and succulents, on their property, which have the potential to go wild.

Dinner Plain village is an enclave of private land within the Alpine National Park, about 10 kilometres from Mt Hotham. Despite local Council requiring people to use indigenous species in any plantings, a growing number of residents are choosing to ignore this requirement.

It’s a shame that people who are lucky enough to have access to such a beautiful mountain environment are happy to put potential environmental weeds into the local habitat.

If this concerns you, you may want to avoid Alphutte when you visit Dinner Plain. Local café Mountain Kitchen sells indigenous plants, which are also available via the Alpine Shire.

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Alphutte – alpine vandals

As a sub division within a snow gum woodland, developers at Dinner Plain, near Mt Hotham in the Victorian Alps, have done a good job of keeping as many mature trees as possible, whilst building houses and businesses quite densely. The ‘green’ aspect within the village is aided by the small bushland reserves that break up the housing.

Alphutte at Dinner Plain: bare earth where native veg existed. Introduced tree in background.

Guidelines require people to use indigenous species where they are putting in plants (Council guidelines say ‘only indigenous plant material can be used at Dinner Plain’), and lack of fencing has meant that small pockets of remnant understory also exist between houses. This enhances the feeling of still being in a forest.

However, Dinner Plain could be a very different place in coming years.

There is a disturbing ‘suburban creep’ that is evident, with a reasonable number of land owners now opting to destroy their remnant ground storey species and replace them with lawns.

In one obvious example of this, the people who run the Alphutte pizza restaurant recently completely removed all the remaining remnant understorey at the back of their block.

In spite of the fact that local indigenous species are meant to be planted at DP, Alphutte flout this law and have a large conifer growing as well.

While this was just a small patch of shrubs and flowers, if everyone at Dinner Plain destroyed their remnant vegetation and replaced it with lawn, and planted exotic (and potentially invasive) species on their land, the place would look profoundly different. There would also be substantial loss of biodiversity within the village itself. Dinner Plain is a small enclave of private housing within the Alpine National park, and weed invasion into the park is an obvious and, sadly, growing problem.

Often, these people retain most of the older snow gums on their properties yet don’t seem to understand (or care) that mature trees have to come from seedlings, meaning young trees must be put in to allow them to replace older trees when they do eventually die. The ‘clear the scrub and plant grass’ mentality and absence of new trees being planted will see a profoundly different village in coming years.

If poor environmental management upsets you, you may want to avoid Alphutte the next time you’re in Dinner Plain.

You might want to support Mountain Kitchen, which stocks local indigenous plant species.

Thankfully, the majority of people do seem to appreciate the remarkable landscape they are staying or living in, and do the right thing at Dinner Plain, by protecting or even replacing indigenous species.

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backcountry snowmobile bonanza?

Near Mt McKay, heading to Pretty Valley, Bogong High Plains, VIC

If you’re an Australian skier or boarder, and unless you’ve been living under a log these past few months, you will know that ski legend Steve Lee has been running commercial backcountry ski tours out of Falls Creek resort this winter.

This is great. Getting people out of resorts and into the backcountry is to be supported and encouraged.

What is less great is the emphasis on the use of snowmobiles to get people out there. His tours are geared towards ‘strong’ intermediate skiers and boarders. So if people are fit enough to ski/ board hard terrain, then surely they are fit enough to get on some skis to actually get out there.

In my opinion, this ‘cheap grace’ approach to getting backcountry is a sad development in Victoria. Certainly, the tours are confined to the alpine resort area (even though this is ecologically part of the Bogong High Plains). However, they come with a high annoyance cost to people who are out there under their own steam. It is not clear what ecological assessment, if any, has been made of the tours – for instance, is there an impact on endangered species or vegetation? There is also a bigger picture here: there is the fact that these tours could be a precedent for future snowmobile based developments elsewhere in the alps.

Anyone who has skied backcountry in North America will know the many problems that come with rampant and often uncontrolled snowmobile use. While here in Australia recreational use of snowmobiles is supposedly controlled or banned (for instance in national parks), how often is this actually enforced? As one example, there is growing use within the Alpine national park in the area between Dinner Plain and Mt Hotham and around Dinner Plain village with apparently no intervention from land managers.

Snowmobiles are essential tools in resort management and search and rescue operations. However, the blanket endorsement of commercial use of snowmobiles in the backcountry in almost all Falls Creek promotional materials this winter shows that resorts ‘commitment’ to the environment as being shallow at best and probably a form of green wash.

We should be very cautious about the further introduction of a potentially destructive development in our alpine areas, which appears to have jumped all the approvals ‘hoops’ simply because the proponent of the development is an alpine ‘personality’.
Falls Creek Resort says that it is deeply concerned about good environmental management:
“We are extremely proud of Falls Creek’s reputation as an industry leader in the field of sustainable alpine tourism and development. Our environmental programs reduce our impact on the local environment and acknowledge the importance of maintaining a healthy world beyond our boundary”.

Further information on their approach to the environment is here.

If you have an opinion about the expansion of snowmobiles into the backcountry you may wish to let the resort management know about them.
fcrm@fallscreek.com.au

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