Um, can someone turn the lights on please?
Yep, ah — thanks.
Australia suffered serious power shortages
after World War Two.
With coal unable to meet the nation’s energy needs,
it was time to go renewable in a big way.
Australians love big things.
There’s Goulburn’s Big Merino,
Coffs Harbour’s Big Banana,
Humpty Doo’s Big Boxing Crocodile, and Nyngan’s Big Bogan.
‘G’day.’
But none of them are as big
as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme,
the biggest big thing that Australians have ever built.
It was so big, that we were happy
to give it a little name, the Snowy.
The Snowy was a child of the Second World War.
The fall of Singapore,
followed by Japan’s bombing of Darwin,
and submarine attacks on Sydney
and Newcastle, proved Britain could
no longer protect Australia.
After the war, the Chifley government feared Australia
lacked the population to defend itself from Asian invasion.
Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell,
declared that Australia must ‘populate or perish’.
The war also shifted Australia’s focus
from wheat and wool to manufacturing.
Desperate to maintain this capacity,
arms factories were retooled to produce white goods
and in 1948, Prime Minister Ben Chifley
launched Australia’s first mass-produced car.
But more people and more products meant more power,
and that was in short supply.
Now, water and electricity generally don’t mix,
but Danish expat, Olav Olsen,
recommended Australia’s highest river, the Snowy,
be diverted to the Murray via massive tunnels,
with the descending water
driving turbines to generate electricity.
But state governments couldn’t agree
on how to use the river.
New South Wales wanted it for irrigation,
Victoria wanted it for power,
and South Australia just wanted New South Wales
and Victoria to leave it some water.
As power production
and irrigation were state responsibilities,
the Federal Minister for Works, Nelson Lemmon,
went to Chifley with a novel solution.
‘Put the whole thing under
the Defence Act, and we’ll be the boss.’
‘What?
Your name’s Nelson Lemmon, not Ned Kelly.
You can’t do that.’
But Lemmon’s plan was no pipedream.
He convinced his colleagues
that Australia’s coastal coal stations
were vulnerable to attack, and that an inland
and largely underground power system would secure
Australia’s energy supply in times of war.
Having successfully held up the states
and stolen the river from under them, Lemmon established
the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority.
The man he chose to run it, William Hudson, got a friend
to write his job application on the back of an envelope.
Lemmon was also not one for formalities.
He sought approval for the appointment by handing Chifley
a piece of paper with ‘Hudson’ written on it.
When a Cabinet colleague demanded he submit three names
for consideration, he added, ‘Hudson, Hudson.’
Lemmon had his man, but not the men for his project.
The answer — immigration.
Australia’s then immigration policy
was, like the river, snowy.
In 1947, 89% of Australian residents were Australian-born,
90% were Anglo-Celtic,
and 99.75% of non-Indigenous people
were of European descent.
Calwell couldn’t get the British immigrants he wanted,
so he took predominantly southern
and eastern European war refugees,
and paid the passage of other European migrants
on condition that they work for two years
in whatever jobs the government gave them.
Many of those jobs were on the Snowy,
with migrants from 32 countries comprising two-thirds
of the project’s 100,000-plus workers
between its 1949 launch and its completion in 1974.
Hudson mixed former enemies together
to erode ethnic tensions.
‘You aren’t any longer Czechs or Germans.
You are men of the Snowy.’
It seemed to work.
The Snowy also changed Australian attitudes to immigration.
It was the cradle of a multicultural Australia.
By 1966, one in seven Australians were born overseas,
with Australia having the greatest proportion
of migrants of any country in the world, bar Israel.
Workers on the Snowy set world tunnelling records
and developed new technologies, including rockbolts
to pin unstable rock,
and Snowcom, one of the world’s earliest computers.
While multinationals did the early work on the Snowy,
the project turbocharged Australia’s engineering
and construction industries.
The Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority
diverted four rivers, built seven power stations,
16 dams, 225 kilometres of tunnels and aqueducts,
and 1600 kilometres of roads and railway,
and provided irrigation to support
new fruit-growing and dairy communities.
But if you think that’s big, in 2017,
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull
announced Snowy would be back, bigger
and badder than ever, with, wait for it —
Snowy 2.0!
That’s almost as catchy as the incredibly blokey
Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority anthem.
Take it away, boys!
♪ Give me a man who’s a man among men ♪
♪ Who’ll stow his wife’s collar and put down his pen ♪
♪ We’ll blow down a mountain and build you a dam ♪
♪ Bigger and better than old Uncle Sam ♪
♪ Roll, roll, roll on your way ♪
♪ Snowy River, roll on your way ♪
♪ Roll on your way until Judgement Day ♪
♪ Snowy River, roll ♪