Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Siobhán McHugh, NewSouth, $34.99.
This is an extraordinary tome. Prolific Australian novelist, playwright and essayist Thomas Keneally gives the following able and compendious review:
“This classic work is the last word on the extraordinary human, industrial, ethnic and social event of the Snowy River Scheme. The tales of the men and women involved were more diverse than for any other Australian phenomenon, and Siobhan McHugh conveys the varied tales of humans spread by it all over the Snowy Mountain region with a humane historian eye. If you want to have a passing knowledge of the making of modern Australia, you should read this tale of an era when Australia dared to have a vision.”
It tells the extraordinary story of the mostly migrant workforce who built one of the world’s engineering marvels. The Snowy Scheme was an extraordinary engineering feat carried out over 25 years from 1949 to 1974 – one that drove rivers through tunnels built through the Australian Alps, irrigated the dry inland and generated energy for the densely populated east coast. It was also a site of post-war social engineering that helped create a diverse multicultural nation.
Siobhán McHugh’s prize-winning account of the remarkable the Snowy Scheme reveals the human stories of migrant workers, high country locals, politicians and engineers. It also examines the difficult and dangerous aspects of such a major construction in which 121 men lost their lives. Rich and evocative, The Snowy is
available again for the 70th anniversary of this epic nation-building project.
This book is based on diverse interactions McHugh has had with about 400 people who were in some way connected with the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Other sources include publications of the Snowy Mountains Authority, coronial records of NSW, ABC radio archives and contemporary newspaper accounts provide most of the other sources.
Siobhán received a $20,000 Literary Fellowship from the Australia Council to write a history of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The grant enabled her to do justice to the stories of the men and women who pioneered the Snowy.
“Now, this new, updated and expanded edition has given me the chance to reflect on that process, and muse on fresh insights I have gained in the three decades since, into what we do when we record and interpret oral history, into the complex inter-subjective dialogues at its core, and into how my own naivete, passion and curiosity, along with a raging urge to faithfully represent the life experiences entrusted to me, helped deliver this book.”
