PLACE:
The Alpine School
Dinner Plain, Alpine Shire.
Where:
The Alpine School Campus is located at Dinner Plain, on the Great Alpine Road, 13 km from Mount Hotham Alpine Resort in the Victorian Alps.
Latitude: -37.027342 | Longitude: 147.2137832
Elevation: 1560 m
Geography:
Victorian Alps – The High Country
The Alpine School Campus is situated at an altitude of 1560 metres near the Dinner Plain Village in North Eastern Victoria.
The location of the Alpine School Campus allows a tremendous opportunity for exploring and interacting with many iconic locations in the Victorian Alps, including: The Victoria River, Mount Loch, various huts in the High Country, Swindler’s Spur and Mount Hotham.
Seasonal features of the outdoor program at the Alpine School Campus include cross-country and downhill skiing, mountain bike riding along the Dinner Plain trails, caving at Mount Buffalo and paddling on the Ovens River.
History &
Cultural Heritage:
The Alpine School
Situated at 1560 metres above sea level near Dinner Plain Village in the Victorian Alps, the Alpine School Campus, provides an intensive, high quality leadership and enterprise program for small teams of Year 9 students selected from Victorian government schools.
Our school community acknowledges the First Peoples and Traditional Custodians of the Alpine Shire, which encompasses the land, water and sky of Bright and Surrounds, of which Dinner Plain forms a part. We recognise the ancient and continuing presence of The First Peoples on these lands and who have strong connections to their culture and Country stretching back tens of thousands of years.
In ancient times, groups of Indigenous people likely passed through and visited the Alpine area of Victoria’s High Country during the summer months to feast on the Bogong moths.
In more recent history, in 1883 a road across the alps from Omeo to Bright was completed. A weekly horse drawn coach service operated in summer months around 1900. They would stop for a midday meal at Dinner Plain – hence the name.
Opened in April 2000 as an innovative specialist setting for leadership education, The Alpine School is unique within the Department of Education (DET).
Mark Reeves was appointed the inaugural principal in September 1999 and in 2000, the Alpine School, the first of four Victorian campuses now forming the School for Student Leadership (SSL), was officially opened and the first cohort of students took up residence in Term 2, 2000. This first cohort participated in a shortened program of five weeks’ duration with students coming from the Gippsland and Western Metropolitan regions.
Recharge Day: A game of cricket down at the Cobungra Platter Ski Slope, Dinner Plain
The Alpine School and its staff contribute in a considerable way to the social capital and fabric of the local community and play a valuable role in the economy and social life of Dinner Plain. The Alpine School Campus prides itself in generating and establishing unique communities.
Building Design:
ARCHITECT
Cas Bak Builders
YEAR COMPLETED
OFFICIALLY OPENED: 10 June 2000
The Alpine School design and development.
The school is situated adjacent to Dinner Plain, the highest freehold land in Australia and the only freehold land above the snowline. Dinner Plain Village is the first new settlement in Victoria in more than 100 years. Dinner plain was opened in 1986 and was developed by Dinner Plain Pty Ltd and designed by award-winning architect, Peter McIntyre. The village building designs featured characteristics inspired by the old cattleman’s huts.
The Alpine School (as it was then formerly known) was the first campus of the School for Student Leadership sites to open, on June 10th 2000.
The Alpine School was designed and built by Cas Bak builders. The land was donated/gifted by BCR Asset Management somewhere in late 1998 to early 1999. Trevor Castricum of Cas Bak designed the facility at their office in Harrietville.
Being the first (SSL) school, there was no design brief, however the design was inspired in-part of the natural landscape. The colour palette, for example, was meant to mimic those hues found in the Snow Gums and the building height limit was set to the height of the Snow Gums, about 10m. The school was constructed in a record 138 days, most of the construction was undertaken off-site at their workshop in Harrietville and brought up “flat-packed”. The building construction cost was, by current standards, a relatively modest $1.7m.
#Summer – The Alpine School
#Winter: The Alpine School
The construction of the building is of stone, timber and corrugated iron and boasts a fireplace in the dining room and hydronic heating throughout, including each bedroom.
The school has a large multipurpose dining room and teaching space, classrooms and communal common areas.
There are two separate sleeping and bathroom facilities. There are 11 rooms in each of the two accommodation wings. Two students are allocated to each room and there is one triple room if there are an uneven number of participants in the program. The school has staff supervision accommodation in each wing.
Several modifications have occurred to the building since its initial construction. This includes:
- Creation of the “loft with an attic ladder access as there was limited outdoor education gear storage.
- Optimising the residential accommodation to 45.
- Modifying the overnight supervisor rooms for increased privacy for staff with a shared bathroom.
- Building an IT room with servers
- Construction of the vehicle sheds
- Creation of the basketball court
- Increased glass to increase supervision within the kitchen area.
- Removal of urinals and de-genderisation of accommodation wings.
Unique
to Campus:
Unique Campus Offerings
& Onsite Educational Experiences:
The Alpine School Campus – School for Student Leadership
The school is located next to the Alpine National Park and this provides a canvas for every experience and adventure. The students will hike some of Victoria’s highest mountain ranges, explore wildflower draped landscapes during photography sessions and head out on world-class mountain bike trails. In summer they will run wild rapids on white-water rafting trips and in winter cross-country ski through tangled snow gum forests.
EXPO #2 – Winter Edition: Mount Loch.
EXPO #2 – Winter Edition: Mount Loch.
The alpine environment is used for both classes and overnight expeditions. Our emerging leaders use their theoretical classes to help maximise their expeditions ensuring collaboration, connectedness and self-belief is drawn upon.
EXPO #2 – Winter Edition: Mount Loch and Cobungra Valley
EXPO #2 – Summer edition: Students prepare their evening meal in front of Dibbens Hut, their campsite for the night, located in the snow plain and river flat beside the Cobungra River in the Alpine National Park.
Surrounded by the beautiful snow gums of Dinner Plain, the students will experience hiking, mountain biking in both Dinner Plain and the world class Omeo Mountain Bike Tracks, white water rafting and swimming during the summer and skiing during the winter months.
MTB:
RAFT BUILDING: Joops Jetty
Our Local Community:
Building Connectedness
Each term our students build connections with the local community through a variety of activities. One such highlight for them is Community Service where they help with revegetation work with Landcare, visit the local Aged Care facilities, maintain the local mountain bike tracks and help clean the cattlemen huts.
