Members of the Kiandra Ski Club in the 1890s. Photo: Klaus Hueneke Collection.
Little remains of Kiandra today – a scatter of ruins, a cemetery and the old stone courthouse standing largely alone on the high plain crossed by the Snowy Mountains Highway.
The town that helped give Australia its ski industry is now a ghost town, while the industry it sparked thrives across the Snowy Mountains.
Yet the most unlikely survivor may be the club itself.
This September, 165 years after miners first strapped on skis to get through a Kiandra winter, the club that grew from those early days will mark its anniversary.
The Kiandra Pioneer Ski Club lays claim to being the oldest ski club in the world, with some member families now six generations deep.
Its story begins, like so much of the district’s, with gold.
Gold discovered at Kiandra in November 1859 brought a rush that was over almost as quickly as it began, leaving a much smaller community to face the alpine winter of 1861, including Scandinavian miners who brought snowshoeing with them — the term then used for skiing.
As mining slowed under the snow, the long wooden snowshoes they fashioned from local mountain ash and spotted gum became both a practical way to move through the landscape and a new form of recreation.
Exactly when those informal outings became an organised club would later become central to Kiandra’s claim on skiing history.
The late club historian Norman Clarke spent years prospecting through the archives to authenticate Kiandra’s early skiing history.
His research — documented in his book Kiandra — Gold Fields to Ski Fields, which traces the beginnings of skiing in Australia — helped establish 1861 as the club’s founding year, replacing the 1870 date it had previously used and strengthening its claim to be the world’s oldest ski club.
That pioneering status has since received international recognition, with Norway’s Holmenkollen Ski Museum acknowledging Kiandra as one of the world’s first two ski clubs, both founded in 1861, and the International Ski Federation crediting Kiandra with organising the first alpine ski races in the sport’s history.
The claim is not uncontested.
Norway’s Trysil ski club also dates to 1861, leaving the two separated by months rather than decades.
Whatever the international debate, Kiandra had the Australian title sewn up by decades, with the Kosciuszko Alpine Club not formed until 1909.
By the late 19th century, the club was drawing people well beyond Kiandra, while the snow sports themselves reflected the diversity of the goldfield community.
Its membership included poet and journalist AB “Banjo” Paterson and photographer Charles Kerry, who recorded Kiandra’s snowshoe races on glass-plate negatives in 1896.
Annual snowshoe carnivals on Township Hill attracted men, women and children to increasingly elaborate race programs.
The 1898 carnival included eight children’s races and 10 adult events, staged despite hail, snow and strong winds.
Chinese-Australian skiers were also prominent competitors. Margaret “Maggie” Yan, the Australian-born daughter of Chinese miner and shopkeeper Tommy Ah Yan, was described by the Cooma Express in 1895 as “a perfect artist on the shoes”.
After marrying Jacob Wilson, she went on to become the first recognised Australian woman ski champion in the early 20th century.
The Kiandra Pioneer Ski Club lodge at Kiandra, pictured in an undated postcard. The caption describes it as “the oldest in the world”. Source: Kiandra Pioneer Ski Club.
Her brother Frank was also a successful racer, winning one of Kiandra’s major downhill events in 1896.
By the mid-20th century, Kiandra Pioneer Ski Club was operating from “The Chalet” in Kiandra’s original courthouse, providing skiing tuition and ski tests for visitors.
Prospective members once had to demonstrate not only their skiing ability but knowledge of mountain etiquette and the safe use of rope tows.
Among the club’s standout skiers in that era was Max Baldwin, who had been left disabled by polio and walked with two metal crutches.
A 1953 newspaper report described him as one of the club’s best skiers; in summer, he competed in canoeing.
Members finally had a Kiandra lodge of their own in 1956, but by then the centre of alpine skiing was already shifting towards the developing resorts.
By 1962, the club had decided to follow skiing across the mountains, and four years later it bought the former Tyrol Ski Club lodge at Perisher, carrying the Kiandra name with it.
Sadly, fire later erased much of what was left when the club’s original Kiandra lodge was destroyed in January 1969, while the old courthouse that had housed “The Chalet” survived until the Black Summer bushfires of 2020.
The buildings may have been lost, but the traditions developed around them weren’t.
Today, Kiandra Pioneer Ski Club has about 400 members across NSW, the ACT, Queensland and Victoria, along with about a dozen living overseas.
For some, the connection reaches back well over a century.
Kiandra Pioneer Ski Club secretary and director Skye Mentjox said some members came from families that had belonged to the club since the 1800s, with at least two now into their sixth generation.
She credited the club’s longevity to each generation passing on the same enthusiasm for skiing and the mountains.
“The club was started and grown by immigrants who shared their knowledge and passion for skiing,” Ms Mentjox said.
“Our members see the club as a family, and our shared heritage is a cultural genealogy that everyone is deeply proud of and committed to continuing.”
Ms Mentjox said that was still evident in the way older members introduced younger skiers to the sport.
“We have maintained a strong mentor and junior program that fosters skiing early in life,” she said.
Some children are skiing independently from as young as two or two and a half, with three juniors currently in development programs and five others competing regularly.
Racing also remains part of club life, even though capacity and insurance requirements mean it can no longer stage its own races at Perisher.
“Apart from hanging out in front of the fireplace after a day’s skiing, we still race as a club,” Ms Mentjox said.
And members still regroup in the mountains at least twice a year.
A planned Selwyn weekend for about 200 members was shelved this season because of poor snow, leaving the Perisher Cup on 13 September as the next major gathering.
Kiandra may no longer be the centre of the skiing world it helped create, but 165 years on, its club is still finding its way back to the snow.
