The sixty-year-old Mount Franklin ski chalet was a major part of the cultural history of the ACT. The chalet was destroyed in a way that might surprise many people.


IAN MCLEOD: The chalet was a major part of our cultural history particularly for the ACT and also nationally because it was the northernmost site of organised skiing in Australia. It was the oldest club built ski accommodation on the Australian mainland.

It did illustrate the sort of expectations that people had 30, 40, 50 years ago - so in that sense something that … a window on the past has gone. It was a place that obviously had been lived in, obviously lived in. You could see the seats that people had sat on, getting to be well polished; the stair rail was smoothed by thousands of hands sliding down it; doing their skis, getting their skis ready at the beginning of the day so it was in that sense a place that was still alive.

BRETT MCNAMARA: I guess it all goes back to a Wednesday, the 8th of January which was like a fairly normal Wednesday in terms of the park, in fact it was an afternoon where we had a farewell for one of our rangers that was leaving the park -the lightning storm came through that afternoon and basically that was the start of the fires here in the Brindabellas.

From that date through to about the 18th, our world, from the park's point of view went completely upside down. We had people working incredibly long shifts in terms of trying to fight those fires. What we have here in the Brindabellas is basically a tragic story of Franklin Chalet being lost to those fires.

It was something that I guess a few of us had in the back of our minds as a sort of worst fear that we would lose something like the Franklin Chalet but unfortunately on Saturday, the 18th of January some of those fears certainly came true.

IAN MCLEOD: Well we weren't surprised when the phone call came to say that it had been destroyed after Saturday, so in a sense that was expected. Getting up there and just seeing the ferocity of the fire, that part of the range was probably one of the most severely burned parts - all the way from Piccadilly Circus southwards - the trees are destroyed, the chalet itself there is virtually nothing there, there's not a great deal of ash - it's just been completely destroyed.