When Bruce Elliott started on the Snowy Hydro scheme at the remote Geehi camp in 1954, his only protective clothing was a borrowed raincoat and gumboots that had to be returned. Discarded army or air force woollen coats and other gear could be bought.
Toiling in the often bitterly cold high country, some of the mostly European migrants reputedly took to wrapping newspaper under clothing to avoid freezing. One group declared they were being “sent to Siberia for forced labour”, a name that still turns up on maps.
Nor were fires allowed in Elliott’s tiny hut lest it ignite. Bulldozers and graders, too, lacked heating, not to mention reliable brakes and steering.
“We just accepted that’s what the job constituted,” Elliott, now 86, says from his brick house near Canberra. “If you didn’t like the bush, you wouldn’t stay long.”
Those rugged adventurers are sure to be highlighted later this year when Snowy Hydro marks the 75th year of construction starting on its vast network of 145km of tunnels linking 16 dams with 7,000 gigalitres of storage, capable of generating 4,500GWh a year of carbon-free electricity.
Much of the Murray-Darling Basin’s food bowl, too, draws for its irrigation from what Snowy Hydro says is “recognised as one of the greatest engineering wonders of the modern world”.
‘Fortunately, I managed to survive’
The project seems a world away from Snowy Hydro’s $12bn 2.0 project, which is about halfway to being complete. Its crews fly in from as far as Perth and work a fortnight of 12-hour shifts before taking a week off. In their well-equipped messes, they can order steaks to their liking or fire up pizza ovens if they want a hot lunch.
Denis Woodhams has a different memory of the fare offered after he joined the scheme as an engineering geologist from London in early 1956.
Depending on who loaded the horses with provisions, the bread could get “a bit bloodied” and squashed if placed under meat. “If they put the cans of kerosene on top of that and they weren’t properly sealed, [there was a] wrong taste,” he says. At least the sacks were handy to fill whatever mattresses they had on hand.
Still, “many people from Europe enjoyed coming to an area of freedom where they could work well and do a good job [and they] got paid well”, Woodhams, 91, says from his unit near Weston in Canberra. More than 30 nationalities took part.
Indeed, in one camp, not one person was Australian-born. “Some of them … shunned working in the bush because they knew they’d have to work hard,” he says. “They’d got a good job back in town and good conditions, and they left it to the new Australians coming from Europe to do the dirty work.”
Snowy 2.0 is searching for overseas help but at much more modest levels. A campaign in the UK and Ireland, for instance, aims to lure 500 staff over five years.
Technology on the original scheme was often rudimentary. Woodhams was handed maps compiled by families shepherding flocks into the high country for summer grazing. “The heights [in the maps] were in feet up to around 7,000, so they were never more than 1,500 feet out in error,” he says wryly.
Contrast that with the live feed engineers at the major works site of Snowy 2.0 receive on their mobile phones. They can view the precise progress of giant tunnel boring machines weighing as much as 2,500 tonnes each, scratching away rock and conveying it to waiting dump trucks sometimes kilometres away.
Giant computer projections also give managers “clash detection” to help them build a 22-storey-equivalent power station almost 1km underground.
“A lot of projects have struggled with it previously before we did it in 3D,” Dave Evans, the project director, told a media tour in February while standing in front of a colourful interactive graphic. “To be honest, there [were] always mistakes.”
Errors tend not to be fatal these days, given the much greater emphasis placed on safety. Snowy 2.0 has so far counted one death – of a truck driver who lost control of his vehicle midway between Cooma and the works site – compared with 121 who died building the original scheme over 25 years.
“Fortunately, I managed to survive,” Woodhams says. “Looking back, some of the work practices – the ladders and so on that were used around construction sites – anything but what should have been used.”
Notable technological gains
By contrast, Snowy 2.0 staff and visitors alike endure multiple safety briefings, breath tests for drugs and alcohol, and are kitted out with special oxygen kits, reflective clothing and hard hats with torches. Facial hair restrictions even apply to ensure anti-dust masks work effectively.
Snowy Hydro limits facial hair of its (mainly male) construction workforce to limit dust exposure… a far cry from working conditions on the original scheme. pic.twitter.com/LZHVaTWBCA
— @phannam@mastodon.green (@p_hannam) February 23, 2024
Many of the fatalities in the original scheme resulted from workers failing to get at least 256 metres from explosives. Nowadays, work sites will be mostly evacuated before blasts proceed.
While tragic, those early losses were deemed to be successfully small. As Siobhán McHugh noted in her 1995 book, The Snowy: A History, the “axiom” fatality rate was “a man a mile in tunnelling”.
Switzerland’s Saint Bernard and Mont Blanc tunnels, built in the same era, had 3.0 and 1.4 deaths per mile, respectively, compared with the Snowy tunnels’ 0.6 rate.
Still, the much-publicised woes of the $100m-plus “Florence” tunnel boring machine that was recently stuck for a year serve as a reminder that present-day technology is not all-conquering. Since resuming drilling in December, Florence is now averaging about 6 metres a day, or half the pace it must reach if the critical 16km headrace tunnel is to be completed on time.
Seven decades ago, tunnellers were setting world records “time and time again”, exceeding 20 metres a day, McHugh notes. “The Eucumbene-Tumut tunnel, at just over 22km the longest ever built in Australia, was completed in June 1959, four months ahead of schedule.”
Martha Sear, a senior curator at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, says the original scheme produced many notable technological gains. Trying to measure and understand the water flows that would feed the generators and provide irrigation delivered important advances in hydrology.
“But they had such a large amount of data that they had to invest in one of the world’s first computers,” Sear says. The result was Snocom, built by the University of Sydney in 196o, and now part of the museum’s collection.
“It’s a huge grey box with a very forbidding-looking typewriter sitting on it, and it processed data using paper tape,” she says.
“Nonetheless, it was one of only [a] dozen computers in use in the world, so that was a very significant contribution.” Even if, Sear reflects, “it’s got less computing power than the phone you’ve got in your pocket”.
Ecology as a field also made big gains as scientists such Alec Costin raced to understand how the geology and delicate alpine vegetation interacted. “It became clear from that work that snow gums contributed an additional 10% of water every year to the mountains; that the bogs and the grasses captured it and held it and then released it,” Sear says.
“[If] you had large amounts of grazing animals destroying the critical part of the sponge, then there wouldn’t be sufficient water in the system to run the hydroelectric scheme or the irrigation scheme at its optimum, which led to the creation of the Kosciuszko national park,” she says. Alpine stock grazing was banned as a result.
However, diverting westwards all but a trickle of the flows of the Snowy River had its own ecological implications. While the Snowy withered, the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers received water when irrigators needed it.
Natural seasonal pulses were upended, putting the Murray cod and other native species under stress or endangerment, affecting Indigenous communities among others, Sear says.
Snowy’s scientific prowess, meanwhile, was sought far and wide. Woodhams would go on to help Melbourne develop its biggest water source, the Thomson Dam, and work on hydro or irrigation schemes in Queensland, Thailand and elsewhere.
Elliott worked in Thailand as part of the Colombo Plan before a road accident put him in hospital and killed another Snowy colleague, Don Puxty.
Both Woodhams and Elliott, along with other Snowy originals and the “Snowy kids” who grew up in Cooma and other settlements, continue to meet every month in Canberra to stay in touch.
For its part, Snowy Hydro has yet to finalise how it will mark the 75th anniversary.
Speaking to journalists beside a copper and bronze monument “dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives whilst engaged on the construction” of the scheme, Snowy’s chief executive, Dennis Barnes, says 2.0 should really be called the “Snowy extension”.
“It’s absolutely an extension of our existing business … You can see in Cooma, there are hundreds of people involved in maintenance and operations,” he says. “We have people who have been thinking about fluid dynamics and hydraulics for 70 years.”
The main focus of celebrations, though, may be in the cities. “They love us in the mountains,” Barnes says. A big event there would be “preaching to the converted”.
