Dinner Plain, Victoria, Australia

There are two things I can vividly recall about visiting Dinner Plain as a child - that we drove up on the same night as the last episode of Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush, and how short the distance was between the on-site pub and the house we were staying in. The latter fact, turns out, was a core element of Peter McIntyre’s plan for the holiday village (that is, walkability) alongside another interesting feature: internal reserves. 

The reserves are not easy to deduce from satellite imagery

If you apply the general framework loosely, you could count three in total - a standard internal reserve on Halter Lane, and one with a significant street frontage along the curiously-named Cuff N Collar Lane. The other, on Horsehair Bend, appears like any other open space on Google Maps, but has since had a row of houses built in front of it, making it a good and proper internal reserve - albeit with its centre undeveloped residential land, as opposed to being a designated reserve like the others. 

First, though, some background: Dinner Plain was opened on June 8 in 1986, with a premise unusual in the grand scheme of ski resorts - it was, and may still be today, the only freehold resort in Australia, where the private ownership and construction of homes would be permitted (as opposed to leased chalet-style residences) so long as the purchaser agreed to build a McIntyre-designed house (SMH, March 7, 1989). 

A liquor license application advertised in The Age on April 3, 1986 - six years after the purchase of the land from a local farmer (The Age, March 9, 1982) - includes a neat, albeit low-quality, image of the proposed site:

This eventuated, in part - what exists now is a slightly distorted, and more organic, version, sans the geometric treatment, and a few missing culs-de-sac. What looks to be a large section of open space on the above map is truncated - Halter Lane now cuts through the site, and what remains is surrounded on all sides by private land. This is perhaps the ‘purest’ internal reserve in the resort, which takes on something of a battle-axe shape. It isn’t too much of a stretch to theorise that this land would mostly be used by occupants of the surrounding holiday homes, whether in summer or winter (marketing for the resort emphasises its year-round qualities). The quasi-internal reserve to the south - the aforementioned one on Cuff N Collar Lane - may have been a continuation of this first reserve, but it’s difficult to say. What seems like a third internal reserve, just off Horsehair Bend, appears to be undeveloped private land. 

The Halter Lane reserve is outlined in red; the kind-of-internal reserve on Cuff N Collar Lane in green; and the undeveloped private site in blue below.

An article (or puff piece perhaps) published in the Melbourne Age on 16 July 1987 describes Dinner Plain as a ‘neat colonial-style ski village’ - much more favourable than its characterisation as a potential ‘alpine slum’ by the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Dr. Geoff Mosley (Age, 9 March  1982). This reflected broader anxieties in the community concerning the ecological sensitivity of the site, although these were quickly quashed on the basis of decreased municipal rates and the provision of employment opportunities (the Shire was so enthusiastic about these benefits that a swathe of statutory planning limitations were swiftly resolved in favour of the development - an interesting line of enquiry, but not for this blog). The plan, in its limited footprint, low density, and dispersed arrangement, certainly demonstrates some awareness of the surrounding environment - the retention of snow gums and grasslands indicates this. It also managed, somehow, to embody the rhetoric of decreasing car dependency: with a shuttle bus to Mt. Hotham, visitors to Dinner Plain could set-and-forget their cars, with each house no more than 300 metres from the Dinner Plain Hotel and related facilities (Age, 18 July 1989). 

One could argue these ideas are all conducive to the inclusion of internal reserve(s) and their quasi-internal counterparts - McIntyre’s plan is said to have had ‘the right sort of breeding’  to address the environmental issue, ‘totally without what has come to be known as the Australian ugliness’ (Age, 18 July 1989). McIntyre was awarded the RAIA’s Zelman Cowen Award for the development after all, so there must’ve been something special about it. That being said, the actual reasoning behind these internal reserves is unknown at this point in time, as is the way in which they’re used. That’s all I have to conclude with for now, until I actually visit Dinner Plain.

Victoria Kolankiewicz