In the due course of time and circumstance I found myself living in the Snowy Mountains. Now in summer this region of Australia is a fairly subdued rural area with the quiet country towns with their average country town pubs.
Come winter and this changes, Jindabyne becomes the focal point for for the Ski season's massive influx of punters, the entertainment and the wild nights that accompany the scene. Every night is Saturday night and it's a wild ride. Jindabyne is the last town on the roads up to the Thredbo and Perisher Blue ski fields so it is a thriving winter community of punters, money and partying.
Most of the local people who are not directly involved with the tourism and ski industry keep a pretty low profile in winter and there is a definite undercurrent of resentment between the locals and the punters. Occasionally this spills over to violence and crime so the Pub and Club bouncers and the Police have their hands full.
The media pumps the whole thing along with every major metropolitan TV channel, radio station, magazine and newspaper catering to the twenty something crowd making it clear the snow is the cool place to be in winter. The music scene ties right in to the money with every major band hitting a venue in the Snowy during the Ski season sooner or later.
Despite the prevailing party atmosphere the Snowy can be a cruel and unforgiving place, with the climate itself taking centre stage. Money is everything in the Ski resorts, and this whole industry is geared to cater to the spoilt rich kids of the city fat cats.
With the first snowfall of early winter, every business in the region takes a deep breath and makes sure there is plenty of room in the till for the wads of cash the punters will bring.
During my early years in the Snowy I lived on a farm with friends out behind Jindabyne and I was the contract gasfitter for the main regional supplier of LPG, Elgas. This situation kept me somewhat insulated from the cruel tourist industry and the wild partying of the Ski resorts.
I played Rugby Union for the Jindabyne Bush Pigs rugby club and although we were in a hard competition group having to meet teams such as ADFA and RMC the club did well bagging a few premierships back in those years.
Rugby Union and booze go hand in hand and the weekends could get crazy, but during the week we all had jobs and training which kept us pretty level headed. Life was pretty good.
But that all changed. I secured employment with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service as the Licenced plumber for all of the district.
My work meant I had to be on hand for the monitoring of the gas, water and sewage infrastructure in the National Park and so I moved into the Perisher Valley Ranger Station. The Man from Snowy River Hotel was 50 metres away over the road, and things got pretty messy before long.
Drugs and booze were prolific in Perisher and all the people who lived in the valley were nutters in one form or another. I clearly remember getting lost between the pub and the ranger station in a blizzard and sleeping till it cleared in a snow drift. I went to work pretty much every day in winter with a roaring hangover and things were generally miserable.
This was a dream job in a dream location and the world was my oyster, but the bottle and I had other ideas.
After a couple of seasons I was arrested coming home from Cooma where I had gone shopping, and inevitably, drinking. I was charged for the second time in my young life with drink driving. That was the end of my work with the National Parks, a drivers licence was an essential requirement for the job.
From this point things rapidly deteriorated. My girlfriend at that time, having first hand experience with the hell on earth existence of the addict rightly distanced herself from me. I was badly injured playing Rugby and went into a deep maudlin hole. I ended up living in an old bus on a bit of acreage out the back of Berridale with a handful of dogs and copious quantities of booze for company.
Lacking money in the snowy while sporting a nasty booze and coke habit was not an ideal existence and I became increasingly desperate in those times. It still amazes me to this day the lengths an addict will go to to feed the demons and I was far from innocent during those last few months in the Snowy. I did things that were astoundingly stupid.
Sometimes things would ride smoothly for a week or two when I had the demons restrained. One funny memory from these saner moments was when a great Australian rock band The Baby Animals came to the snow. Near the farm where I lived in the early years was a place called The Station Resort, this was a sprawling place of accommodation, restaurants, bars and staff catering to the lower end of the tourist market during the season and marketing to the regular tourist over the rest of the year with mixed results.
The Station often billed great bands for shows on weekends and I got to see some great Australian acts there over the years. The Baby Animals were billed to play the main auditorium at The Station Resort and I desperately wanted tickets.
When tickets were not forthcoming I hatched a devious and cunning plan. I arrived early on the day The Baby Animals were playing. I hung around in the pub and watched the roadies, resort staff and crew coming and going from the auditorium. Around two hours before the doors were due to open to the public, I approached the side door with my trusty guitar in it's case in hand.
When security stopped me at the door I cheerfully said: "Oh shit guy's sorry I'm late, are the rest of the band here?" Damn, I was in! I hid my guitar under a corner of the stage and mingled unobtrusively with the crew inside till the doors opened. It was a superb show, one I'll never forget. Best free concert I ever attended....
