Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Feature - Winter walkabout

Reflections on the travels of Antipodeans and the lure of Whistler

"What are so many Aussies doing here?"

Keeping the wheels of Whistler turning, is what I want to say. I don't, after eight years of being hammered with the same question week after week, for fear of not being able to keep a note of defensiveness out of my voice.

On telling one resort staffer I was trying to find out how many Aussies were working for Whistler-Blackcomb, she quipped, "Too many."

Web bulletin boards contain postings from hill-bound Aussie boarders: Where can I go where I won't be Just Another Frigging Acronym? And the answer to that, my son, is nowhere. In every ski hill in the West, the little cogs that wash the dishes, direct the cars and load the lifts, have a distinguishable broad-accent and a penchant for beer. So I swallow my rant and instead, earnestly try and explain how it is that so many Antipodeans congregate in a Canadian ski town, to feral it out in staff housing, earn minimum wage doing mind-numbing jobs in a climate entirely alien to 98 per cent of them, and pay inflated costs for a pint of beer.

Why do they come? Well, why does anyone come - to ride a BIG hill. Out in Ontario, teaching skiing one day a week at Camp Fortune and moving into an active semi-retirement, my father-in-law tortures himself on a daily basis checking the WB Web-cam: "I'm not doing this anymore. It's -25 today. The HIGH is -17. The hill is 10 turns down sheet ice. I want to be in mountains that scare me. And the skiing inspires. You guys can expect me out there next January."

If a 52-year-old eastern farmer goes to sleep counting the moguls on Shale Slope, then why wouldn't a twenty-something Australian on their world wanderings be drawn here by a cosmic pull? Lisa Weekes, an Australian vet working in the UK, returned this season for the second year in a row - to ride for a few weeks at Red and stop briefly in Whistler to visit mates. She explains the lure of Canada. "I think we feel an affinity with Canadians. We both hate the Yanks and Canadians are just so bloody nice, we love them! And it's beautiful. Big mountains and snow are a big deal for us. We usually know a few people over there, so it's easy to go and wing it."

The Wanderer's Lust

Why then do they come in droves? Australians travel. They live and work overseas in astounding numbers. As of December 2001, 858,866 Australians were working overseas. (This is the equivalent of 4.3 per cent of the resident population. It's also the rough equivalent of the total of winter visitors to Whistler in 2001-02.) A staggering 200,000 of these nomads can be found in London, 100,000 in Athens, 46,000 in Hong Kong. The district serviced by the High Commission in Vancouver has the highest concentration of Australians in North America, at 30,000. The North American cities you're next most likely to stumble upon someone eating a Vegemite sandwich are Los Angeles (25,000), Washington DC (17,000), San Francisco (17,000), and New York (15,000). Money, opportunity, exposure, a central place in the world from which to base one's adventuring. All these things are offered in spades off-shore, compared to what is available in a country with a population of 19 million and a GDP of less than half that of Canada.

The Nomad Ethos

If you look at a map of the world drawn with the south pole at the centre, you realize how far from anywhere Australia is. When you're over 14 hours from everywhere, it makes sense that once you're AWOL and O/S, you'd stay there, and see and do as much as you can. The typical pilgrimage for many Aussies lasts well over 12 months, and takes in stints in North America, Europe and Africa. For professionals who have a higher likelihood of extending their visas with sponsorships from employers, and working in more lucrative positions, the time away is often closer to three or four years. It's a rite of passage that generations imitate.

For Kristy Sowerby, it was a rite of passage whose time had come. She had worked for two years, post-admission, as a lawyer, saving for the big trip O/S. At 27, she was nearing the closing of the visa window: UK visas are no longer available once you've turned 28, and Canadian visas are available only up to age 30. (Presumably after 30, we're all meant to be living more responsible and settled lives.) Canadian working holiday visas are in short supply, with a quota of 6,000 imposed by the Canadian government, and outstripped by demand usually within the first few months of the year.

With her travelling partner, James, they arrived in Dublin in April, where Kristy worked at a law firm for four months, and James worked for Guinness.

"I got paid really well. James didn't get paid as well, but Guinness sponsor everything in Ireland, so our social life was subsidized by James' work. We got free tickets to everything. Earning euros was great. But I think it's better here. The lifestyle's much better. I'm having a much better experience. I'd love to go to Ireland just for a visit, but not to live there. The economy has boomed, but a lot of people have been left behind."

After Ireland, the pair bought a van and camped their way around the Continent, before heading to Whistler at the end of October. They left the van in a campground in Austria while they carried a part for its eventual repair with them back and forth through Customs.

"I'd only ever skied for a day, in New Zealand. It was icy and I didn't really appreciate it," says Sowerby. "But James really wanted to ski. So I thought, Whistler? Yeah. I'll do that. It's always good to learn something new."

Despite the earning power Sowerby had as a lawyer, in Australia and Europe, her attitude typifies the Australian mentality, favouring lifestyle and quality of experience when travelling, over the bottom line.

"We're earning a lot less money here and we're not saving. But the subsidized staff housing, the season pass, the free ski lessons that come with working for the mountain, it all makes you forget about the lack of funds. After a few weeks, we just thought, well, we won't be saving much, but we'll have a good time."

They're maximizing the benefits that come from jobs on the mountain and in retail offering staff discounts and working in the cinema providing free movie tickets.

The Australian government has recognized the working holiday visa scheme for what it's worth. Injecting seasonal workers into the non-professional low-paid workforce, who also create jobs and spend money, has positive repercussions, (the Aussies calculate it at over $1 billion AUD annually). It has also led the Australian government to establish similar memorandums for working holiday arrangements with Canada , Cyprus , Denmark , Finland , Germany , Hong Kong , Ireland , Japan , the Republic of Korea , Malta , the Netherlands , Norway , Sweden and the United Kingdom . Negotiations are on foot with Belgium and Italy.

Australia, in fact, hosts almost triple the number of working holiday makers that it sees off. They bring a freshness and enthusiasm to anesthetizing front-line and low-skill jobs. Their profile marks them as the world's privileged - typically, they have a higher level of educational attainment than the average workforce.

For many Australian holiday makers abroad, their season in Whistler is their first experience in a winter resort, and their goals, according to a 2002 paper prepared by researchers at La Trobe University into the Globalization of the Youth Labour Market, are to ski and ride and to party hard. The work doesn't have to be fulfilling, because it's about subsidizing a mountain experience, getting a free pass, somewhere to live. making the travel experience more authentic.

Global Labour

Australians are the archetype of the global worker. And Graham Jenkins, 26, last seen hiking under the shadow of the Three Sisters on his way to Fernie, fits the profile. After working for two years in London with JacobsGIBB Engineering Consultancy, Jenkins was starting to question his chosen career. With his work visa expiring, and unwilling to commit to the company over the long-haul in order to be sponsored by them, he finally admitted to his boss that the lifestyle was just not suiting him.

"I told him straight up, that it was just a lifestyle decision. He said he wished he'd been smart enough to make a decision like that when he was my age. A couple of the guys in the company said they'd probably follow me."

He'd heard about Mike Dempsey's Whistler program from a friend who'd done it in 1997. Dempsey Tours, and its younger Whistler-based competitor, YES! Improvement, are ski packages marketed at Australians, providing Whistler accommodation, lift passes and instruction with level 4 pros. Clients have the option to sit for their Level 1 or 2 CSIA exams at the end of their course. Dempsey Tours estimate some 200-250 Australians go through the program a season, with one quarter of those taking their level 1 or 2 CSIA course. At any given time, there's somewhere between 20 and 30 people working for WB who came from Dempsey at some point, at all levels in the organization and in various departments.

So here's Graham, back in gritty London, nursing a beer and a serious case of the blues, about to have a Go West Young Man epiphany. His brother hands him another brew and says, "Why don't you just go and do what it is you want to do? What would it be?" In one of those moments of celestial alignment, known to travellers as synchronicity, London was hosting its annual Ski Show. Two weeks later, Graham landed in Vancouver - a former engineer looking to spend a season in Whistler as a ski instructor. Everything went according to plan. He passed his level 2 and secured a job with the ski school. But accommodation proved elusive. He jumped on a bus to Fernie where his cousin had a place.

"At the moment, the lifestyle that was missing is being satisfied. I'm waking up and going, 'yeah, cool.' It will be even better when I'm working, so I can support myself. I did a couple of days at Whistler ski school and really enjoyed it, had a taste of it. But I couldn't find accommodation. That's the only reason I left. I didn't want to pay exorbitant rates when the opportunity was at Fernie," he says.

"Whistler was a cool resort but I found everyone came on as a bit of a salesman, and I'd kind of had enough. I wanted to find my niche, find a little place of my own and it wasn't going to come too easily in Whistler. So I figured, why not get two resorts in one season?"

Jenkins is hardly a bit of exotica in Fernie: "There are heaps of Aussies here. It's surprising. They're dishwashers, labourers, doing cleaning jobs."

True to Whistler style, Graham is sharing a house with six other Antipodean blokes, plus couch surfers. But the distinctive Fernie touch is that it is a five-bedroom place, and his rent is $300/month.

According to Bruce Chatwin's 1987 book , The Songlines , the Australian continent is crossed with a series of invisible pathways, indigenous songs that tell the story of creation.

"It seems the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes. Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the actions of the Ancestor's feet. One phrase would say, 'salt-pan'; another 'creek-bed', 'spinifex', 'sand-hill', 'mulga scrub', 'rock-face' and so forth. An expert song-man, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge - and be able to calculate where, and how far along a Songline he was."

The musical phrase then acts as a map reference - the entire vast continent made navigable.

In a way, Jenkins is marching along an Anglo-Australian songline, linking sacred site to sacred site, watching the landscape unfold, and singing his lifestyle into existence. He's journeyed to the classic destinations: from London to Whistler, to a ski town in the Interior, and from here he'll head to Gallipoli.

Gallipoli might be the one place with as much cultural resonance to white Australia as Uluru has to its indigenes. The date on the Australian calendar with almost universal significance is Anzac Day. Anzac Day, April 25, commemorates generally those killed in war and honours returned servicemen and women. It's held on the anniversary of the fateful beach landings during the First World War that, owing to a British stuff-up, was even more disastrous than anticipated and saw 8,000 Australian soldiers killed, during a war that took the lives of 60,000 Australians. Each year, around the country, and at Anzac Cove in Turkey, Dawn Services are held.

"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them."

For Graham, the significance is personal, as well as cultural. He served in the artillery as a ready reserve for four years until he started work as an engineer. With a former artillery member, Billy Ferriera, as a London flatmate, and a hyper-fit friend managing a posh London gym and training for a marathon, Graham and Billy decided over a few beers that they had to get fit. They needed a goal. As beer-fuelled plans are wont to be, inflated with big dreams and not at all held back by reality, they launched an idea:

"Why don't we walk from Istanbul to Anzac Cove for the Dawn Service next year?"

Ferriera worked in marketing and promotions and had recently been fundraising amongst London's ex-pat business community for the Bali bombing survivors and families. He decided to use those contacts to raise money for the Legacy Foundation for the Returned Serviceman's League, which provides assistance to the families of former servicemen and women.

"When the RSL realized we were true blue, we were on the national RSL conference agenda. And it's kind of snowballed. All these companies want to get involved, and we hadn't even looked at a map to see how far the walk was. Turns out it's 350 km."

Lisa Weekes is moving into her fourth year away from Australia: "I don't know what it is I'm looking for. I think I left partly because I'd had it with my life and I wanted to explore and give Oz the finger. But what I've found is that we really do have an incredible country, possibly the easiest place to live happily and healthily in the world. I'm not proud of our history, or my British roots, but I'm proud of the people we are; we're generally hard-working, friendly, have a good work ethic, self-respect and respect for others; we like to be fit and in the outdoors. I might be biased, as all my friends right now are travellers, so I'm forgetting about all the couch potatoes and right-wing bigots back home. We have possibly one of the best free health-care systems. We give a shit. We're egalitarian. An English client who recently visited Oz told me he loved it because, 'we're a country that is looking to the future, rather that living in the past, like this place.'"

It's hard to say with accuracy how many Australians are working in Whistler. WB, despite being the biggest employer in the valley, and being able to tell you exactly how many hectares of terrain they have and how many cookies and pounds of tofu were sold last winter, can't put an exact figure on the number of Aussies working for them. Regardless, the annual influx of fresh faces glowing at the prospect of spending a few months skiing and riding, rendering them willing and keen - despite their past incarnations as lawyers, engineers, personal trainers - to make you waffles, scan your season's pass and bus your tables, are vital to the resort. They might not seem a novelty to you anymore, but the fact that this winter walkabout is such a novelty to them is a big part of what keeps the town alive.



Comments