On 17 October 1949, Australia's governor-general, prime minister and the newly appointed head of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Authority fired the first construction blast at Adaminaby, in the New South Wales high country, launching what would become the largest engineering project ever undertaken in Australia. The Snowy Mountains Scheme set out to do something that sounds almost implausible on paper: capture water from rivers flowing east off the Snowy Mountains toward the Pacific Ocean and redirect it inland instead, through a network of tunnels and dams, to generate hydroelectric power and irrigate the dry farmland of the Murray and Murrumbidgee river valleys. By the time construction officially finished in 1974, twenty-five years after that first blast, the completed scheme included 16 major dams, seven power stations and 145 kilometres of interconnected tunnels. Its unlikely workforce, former wartime enemies now toiling side by side underground, became one of the scheme's quieter legacies, quietly reshaping postwar Australian identity into something more genuinely multicultural than the nation had previously imagined itself.
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