1955
Snowy Mountains Scheme coasters
Blasting the new Australia
People came from all over Australia to marvel at the Snowy Mountains Scheme, as well they might. This set of coasters is decorated with printed colour transfers adhered to the uppermost side with pictures: ‘Eucumbene Dam, Snowy Mountains Scheme’; ‘Cooma’; ‘Summit Mt Kosciuszko’; ‘Cabramurra’; ‘Eucumbene Tea House’; and ‘Snowy Mountains’. It was made to sell to one of the thousands of tourists who visited the Snowy Mountains Scheme during the late 1950s.
In all, 121 men died blasting the biggest civil engineering project ever undertaken in Australia, one that the American Society of Civil Engineers called an ‘engineering wonder of the world’. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme marked the beginning of a new Australia. Prime Minister John Howard summed up the scheme’s historical and cultural significance in 2006:
There is overwhelming feeling in the community that the Snowy is an icon. It’s part of the great saga of post-World War II development in Australia . . . It conjures many stories of tens of thousands of European migrants coming and blending with each other and in the process of working on the Snowy becoming part of this country.
A network of 16 dams, seven power stations, 80 kilometres of aqueducts and 225 kilometres of tunnels and pipelines trapped the seaward-flowing waters of the Snowy and Eucumbene rivers and drove them westward through long trans-mountain tunnels to flow into the Murrumbidgee and Murray river systems. The water irrigated the dry inland plains while generating electricity for the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Victoria. The scheme has a generating capacity of 3.74 million kW of hydro-electric power and provides an average of 2.36 million megalitres of water for irrigation and other purposes per year.
When the Snowy scheme began, Australia was importing engineers and managers – but by the end of the project, the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation had not only built up a world-class team of engineers but was exporting their expertise internationally.
The Snowy River rises high in the Australian Alps in New South Wales, fed by melting snow and precipitation from the prevailing winter depressions of Antarctica. The water originally flowed onto the river flats of East Gippsland and thence out to sea, but at the end of World War II the governments of New South Wales and Victoria had designs on the flows of the Snowy. New South Wales wanted to irrigate the Riverina and provide drinking water for Sydney, while Victoria wanted a large hydro-electric power scheme and a fillip for the Murray River.
Essentially the waters would be diverted through a series of dams that fed hydro-electric generation before discharging into the Murray and the Murrumbidgee. The creation of the dams involved the drowning and then rebuilding on higher ground the towns of Adaminaby, Jindabyne and Talbingo. The Snowy Authority created the towns of Cabramurra and Khancoban and the lakes themselves became tourist attractions, while the roads built by the authority gave access to the snowfields at Thredbo and Guthega. More than 1600 kilometres of roads were constructed and main camps were established at over 100 locations with community services and amenities.
The Chifley government proposed this ambitious program. To get over interstate squabbles, Ben Chifley designated the project under the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Power Act 1949 as a matter of national defence, despite the strenuous opposition of Robert Menzies’ Liberal Party. Nelson Lemmon, the minister in charge of the scheme, was described as using ‘more energy than tact’ to deal with difficult state premiers.
The Snowy Mountains Scheme was completed on schedule and on budget in 25 years. Much of the credit for its success belongs to engineer Sir William Hudson, who not only oversaw the building of the scheme but also administered a workforce of 100 000 men – of whom as many as 7000 at a time were living away from their families, often in a new country. Hudson provided amenities and reasonable pay, employed a private arbitrator and scheduled regular meetings between management and union representatives to anticipate and avoid strikes.
The first power from the Snowy flowed from Guthega Power Station in February 1955. In April 1966 the first diversion of water was made from the Snowy River to the Murray River, and finally, in August 1974, the last unit in the hydro scheme was brought into service.
Hudson reportedly uttered to his workers the line: ‘You aren’t any longer Czechs or Germans – you are men of the Snowy.’ After so much war in the 20th century, there was a desire to start building a peaceful future, and the Snowy scheme was a manifestation of that.