The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme was a long time coming. It was a tragic irony that it was only made possible by the devastation of war and the political convenience of then being able to call upon an instant workforce.
Lack of water is a problem that dates back to time immemorial for Australia, the world's driest land. If Australia's total annual run-off was spread evenly over the continent, the water depth would be a mere three centimetres.
Down the length of the eastern side of the continent, most of the water run-off from the Great Dividing Range flows eastwards into the Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea, leaving the vast tracts of land on the western side of he ranges dry and prone to lasting drought. Evaporation in the hinterland is high and in dry seasons many tributaries to the main inland rivers, the Murray, Murrumbidgee, Lachlan and Darling become little more than chains of waterholes.
Time and again lack of water almost wreaked a cruel end to the early settlement of eastern Australia. In the years 1813-15 it was drought and the spectre of famine which added urgency to efforts to find a way over the Blue Mountains from the Sydney area.
Widespread drought struck again from 1824 to 1829, withering the newly discovered plains country. Crops burned, stock died and despite their familiarity with the land's natural resources, many Aboriginals were also reported to have perished through starvation. The familiar visitation of disaster struck again from 1837 to 1840 and even the snow-fed Murrumbidgee was dry in places, allowing settlers in some districts to run horse races on its bed. In 1843 good sheep were selling for three pence a head. The list of bankruptcies grew longer daily. The Bank of Australia failed. James Tyson, the king of the squatters, sold one run for a tot of rum and a second for twelve pounds which he never bothered to collect.
The infant industry resorted to the desperate expedient of boiling down sheep for tallow. The average sheep yielded twelve to fifteen pounds of tallow and tallow was worth five cents a pound -- at least for a while. By the end of 1844 more than two hundred thousand sheep had been boiled down and tallow prices began to fall.
Drought struck again in the late forties and for more than a decade from 1861 to 1870. Some graziers built dams on creeks and guarded them with armed men against reprisals from aggrieved landowners further downstream. In a dry season in 1858 parties of men destroyed or damaged more than twenty-five dams on the Yanko Creek, which runs between the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers.
Still the droughts continued, bringing pain and despair. Rainless seasons continued to strike randomly through to 1878, almost wiping out whole pockets of the sheep and wool industry.
Meanwhile, great volumes of water from the Alps were running off into the sea. Men looked longingly at the potential offered but were a long way from putting their bold ideas into practice.
The first official proposal for an engineering scheme to harness the snow melt was made in 1884 by the New South Wales surveyor-general, Mr P.F. Adams, who proposed a dam about eight kilometres above the junction of the Snowy and Eucumbene Rivers (near today's Island Bend Dam), and construction of a massive canal across a gap in the Great Dividing Range to the westward-flowing Murrumbidgee River.
Adams was the first to hold aloft the key which a future generation, almost a century later, would use to unlock the dream.
The realisation of the need to make better use of water resources was one of the earliest driving forces behind the push to weld Australia's independent colonies into a single nation. But a further half century of argument and wrangling was to elapse before the main colonies and then states, with claim to water from the Alps, could agree to a mutually acceptable plan.
New South Wales wanted to divert the upper reaches of the Snowy River into the Murrumbidgee, solely for irrigation. Victoria wanted the water concentrated into the Murray River -- initially to allow reliable river transport and irrigation and later (as river transport was replaced by rail and roads) for hydro-electricity and irrigation.
One of the main sources of inter-colony and later, inter-state bickering was the fact that the Murray River forms the border between New South Wales and Victoria. South Australia, as the final recipient of the river, also had a vested interest in any moves to exploit the water resource.
The debate raged through a string of inquiries and royal commissions, perpetually divided on whether the water should be used for irrigation in a Snowy-Murrumbidgee scheme, or, as the twentieth century progressed, for hydro-electricity in a Snowy-Murray scheme. The balance began to tilt towards hydro-electricity during the Second World War, when the Commonwealth Government began to worry over the vulnerability of its coastal thermal power stations.
The Commonwealth's involvement soon added both urgency and a degree of objectivity to the long-running saga, resulting for the first time in 1944 in a proposal for a dual-purpose scheme. A Commonwealth and States Snowy River Committee was set up to investigate the proposal in detail. It was pushed vigorously by the Prime Minister of the day, Ben Chifley and his Minister for Works, Nelson Lemmon, a wheat farmer representing the Western Australian electorate of Forrest.
Lemmon's inexhaustable enthusiasm for the scheme also reflected the increased sense of nationhood forged within Australia after its participation in two world wars. Lemmon came from a State and locality that would gain no direct benefit from the scheme.
New South Wales though, continued to argue for irrigation to be the main object of the scheme. A key factor in its argument, which echoes through to the present with Australia's refusal to bind itself to global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, was that the Snowy Scheme would be a threat to the investment already made, and long-term plans for, the state-owned coal-fired power stations. Similarly, New South Wales irrigation interests are standing firm on their rights to the alpine melt at a time when the Snowy Authority wants to release more water back to the south-eastward-flowing Snowy River because of the river's environmental needs.
But in the late 1940s the Commonwealth Government was equally determined, and insisted that hydro-electric power should be the basis of any scheme to utilise the Snowy waters. Irrigation would be a by-product for broadening agriculture away from its traditional concentration on livestock. It argued the economics of the scheme should therefore be based solely on it being a power-producing project, with water discharged from the power stations supplied free for irrigation. (In hindsight this proved to be a mistake. Excessive and wasteful use of water in many areas has led to a catastrophic soil salinity problem and only now is a true cost being placed on the water used, although this is levied by the states, not the Snowy Authority.)P>
As a final measure, the Commonwealth decided its trump card against the New South Wales demand for 'irrigation-only' would be national defence -- the need for power generation in areas secure from enemy attack.
Another argument put by the Commonwealth was that the scheme would geographically lie midway between Sydney and Melbourne and thus be able to serve both cities, which had rapidly increasing demands for electricity, equally.
The final plan, presented in November 1948 consisted of two physically separate projects.
Broadly the northern project would divert water from the Eucumbene, upper Murrumbidgee and upper Tooma rivers into the Tumut River. These waters would be used for electricity generation in the Tumut Valley during their swift fall to the plains. They would then flow via the Tumut River into the Murrumbidgee for irrigation. The main storage for this system would be a reservoir formed by damming the Eucumbene River near Adaminaby.
In the southern project, water would be drawn from the valley of the Snowy River, diverted into the Murray and used to generate power in the course of its fall. The storage for this would be a reservoir created by damming the Snowy River at the bottom end of the Jindabyne Valley.
Yet New South Wales still held out for its own scheme, forcing the Commonwealth to invoke its defence powers and put through legislation giving it total control of the alpine headwaters and the development of the Scheme. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Power Act, operative from 7 July 1949, also encompassed the establishment of a Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority to construct and operate the scheme.
In a broadcast 'Report to the Nation' in May 1949, the Prime Minister, Mr Chifley, declared:
"The Snowy Mountains plan is the greatest single project in our history. It is a plan for the whole nation, belonging to no one State nor to any group or section … . This is a plan for the nation and it needs the nation to back it."
But there was strong resistance from the Federal Opposition -- a Liberal Party/National Party coalition led by Robert Gordon (later Sir Robert) Menzies.
Menzies attacked the Chifley Government for brushing aside the states and for assuming a power which he claimed it did not possess; and for enacting legislation therefore tainted with serious constitutional illegalities. That aside, he admitted the proposed scheme was "bold, comprehensive and well designed".
This question of constitutional validity was to trouble the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority for almost a decade until the New South Wales, Victorian and South Australian Governments finally agreed to validate the scheme in their own State Parliaments. Until then the legal floorboards of the Scheme "creaked ominously".
The construction of the Snowy Mountains Scheme required an engineering feat unparalleled in the world and a workforce that Australian could not possibly provide. Also the Commonwealth Government had promised the states it would not draw off labour they needed themselves for post-War redevelopment.
It thus precipitated one of the greatest experiments in mass migration ever attempted. It reshaped a young Anglo-Saxon-Celtic country into a new nation of diverse nationalities. It sowed the seeds of a free, multi-cultural society in which a rarely seen facet of human nature, ethnic tolerance, slowly became ingrained in a nation's roots ... though not without some early resistance.
Australians were not completely comfortable with the increasing number of non-English speaking newcomers.
Most Australians still regarded themselves as 'British Subjects' rather than 'Australian Citizens' and the dilution of British stock in the population was cause for disquiet.
Migrants took the blame for the first pangs of inflation being felt in the economy and for a perceived increase in crime in Sydney and Melbourne.
Yet without the migrant intake Australia's spectacular industrial development between 1947 and 1955 would simply not have happened. It was migrants who took on the heavy and unpleasant work and work in distant locations which Australians had shunned in a full-employment economy.
Government and business continued vigorously to pursue the immigration program and through press, radio and newsreels did their best to explain, cajole and shock the community into accepting the need for migrants.
It drew on the spread of Communism in Asia to launch the catchcry "populate or perish" and warned that Australia's population needed to increase from its existing 8.6 million to at least twenty million by 1979 if it hoped to be able to defend itself.
The War and its atrocities were certainly still sharply etched into the minds of the young men who flocked to join the Snowy workforce. But in the primitive workcamps high in the Australian Alps, Englishmen, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Poles, Greeks, Dutchmen, Portuguese, Spaniards, Hungarians, Swiss, Swedes, Finns, Czechs, Lebanese, Latvians, Russians, Danes, Cypriots, Ukranians, Americans, Turks, Frenchmen and Norwegians -- more than thirty-three nationalities in all -- shared hard work and laughter, ate from the same cooking pots, drank at the same bars and vowed to keep ethnic hatreds out of this young country which promised them all a new life.
The workers remembered and were often reminded of, the words of the Scheme's first commissioner, William (later Sir William) Hudson, who toured Europe's displaced persons' camps offering work twenty-four thousand kilometres away: "You won't be Balts or Slavs ... you will be men of the Snowy," he told them.
The commissioner, Hudson, was a hard taskmaster to whom budgets and timetables, once set, were inviolate. He pushed administrators, engineers and workers alike with punishing vigour –driven by a burning to silence the political critics who said the scheme was too fantastic and beyond Australia's financial and technical capabilities. Under the contractors being pushed by Hudson's ceaseless urging, tunnelling crews repeatedly broke world records for weekly progress.
Hudson was intolerant towards anyone he didn't consider was pulling their weight. Sackings for less than total commitment to the project were commonplace and written into standing orders to all supervising officers:
However, although regarded by many as tyrannical, Hudson, expected no more of others than he did of himself. He abhorred red tape and any pomp and ceremony accorded to him because of his position.
Hudson was dubbed a Knight of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in June 1955, the year that the first project, the Guthega dam, tunnel and power station, was completed.
At a function marking an advanced stage of construction at the Tumut Pond dam in 1958 the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, who by now had revised his opinion of the project, spoke of the triumph of the scheme, to which he added:
"In a period in which we in Australia are still, I think, handicapped by parochialism, by a slight distrust of big ideas and of big people or of big enterprises ... this Scheme is teaching us and everybody in Australia to think in a big way, to be thankful for big things, to be proud of big enterprises and ... to be thankful for big men."