The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme began in 1949, was 25 years in construction, and remains one of the world's great engineering and social achievements. It harnesses snow melt from the Australian Alps, diverting it westwards under the mountains to irrigate the arid interior for food production, while generating hydro-electricity as the water falls to the level of the plains. Of the workers who poured into that rugged frontier in a strange new land to build new lives, many had been recent enemies in a war that had devastated their European homelands. They created, under extraordinary hardship and isolation, an engineering marvel and sowed the seeds of an entirely new society. A country founded on stolid British stock almost overnight became one of the world's great pancultures. Tens of thousands of workers from more than 30 lands poured into what was the undisturbed pastoral realm of the high country stockman, the southern 'Outback'.
As they drilled and tunnelled into the mountains their energy and skills gave the country a mighty push into the vanguard of the twentieth century. The Snowy put Australia at the forefront of world construction technology - an incredible feat for a young country with an economy then based primarily on agriculture. In 1967 and again in 1997 the American Society of Civil Engineers ranked the Scheme as one of the great engineering achievements of the century.
The mountains still guard the bones of more than one hundred and twenty men who lost their lives in this effort.
The Scheme was the first meal ticket for thousands of new Australians who entered the isolated realm of the Australian high country stockman, the reticent, resolute character embodied in Australia's most cherished legends. It was the strangest melange of humanity flung together since the construction of the pyramids, with the Snowy people demonstrating to a troubled world the capacity that exists for tolerance and harmony ...
Flickering numbers and a burst of light marked the end of the first reel. The workers were watching an early Hollywood re-creation of the evacuation of Dunkirk.
As the projectionist threaded the second reel, a heavily accented voice, unmistakably German, rose above the babble: "What a load of rubbish ... it was nothing like this."
A Cockney voice, coloured with indignation, responded: "How would you know?"
"I was there," said the German.
The Cockney didn't believe him.
I was in the air ... flying a Messerschmitt," explained the German.
"Hell ... I was there too mate ... trying to get into a bloody boat."
The two scraped their chairs together and a life-long friendship was begun as they discussed the respective roles they had played in the French seaside hell."
Numerous similar stories are part of the Snowy saga and such people worked hard to become Australians. In turn, native-born Australians have seen their cultural and social life immeasurably enriched by the contribution of the strangers from strange lands who flooded in to work on the Snowy.
Now as humanity faces an uncertain future from pollution and global warming another legacy, hydro-electricity, is one of the cleanest renewable sources of power.
The Scheme's two main elements, one based on the Murrumbidgee River and the other based on the Murray River, involved the blasting of 12 enormous tunnels deep beneath the mountains, the building of 16 dams and seven power stations - two of them deep underground.
Today almost nothing remains of the settlements where the men and women who built not just these dams and installations but the foundations of a new nation, lived, worked, dreamed and died. Their homes and workplaces have been returned to the bush.
The book, 'SNOWY - The Making of Modern Australia' draws all the Scheme's elements together... its people, its political and industrial dramas, the tragedies, engineering features, and most importantly its role in shaping Australia during the second half of the twentieth century.
As we meet the new millennium the Snowy continues to develop technically and face new challenges - especially in its role as a source of clean, renewable energy. However, the story of the Snowy Mountains Scheme doesn't have an end. It will always be a part of the matrix of modern Australia.
The men and women who built the Snowy became legends in their own lifetimes. With minds writhen in confused knots and hearts still scarred with pain from war and dispossession, many needed the danger, hard breathing from hard work and the wondrous space and beauty of the Snowy Mountains.
A taciturn young Slovene, his mind still tormented by the memory of how he had survived Yugoslavia's post-War "political cleansing" by feigning death among the bodies of murdered friends and neighbours, drew grim smiles of understanding from compatriots in a survey team when in the golden wash of a late afternoon sun he climbed the face of a gorge and cried to the mountains: "I am a man. I am alive."