The Snowy: A History

By Siobhán McHugh

This prize-winning account of the remarkable Snowy Scheme is available again for the 70th anniversary. The Snowy Scheme was an extraordinary engineering feat carried out from 1949 to 1974. The Snowy Mountains Scheme was also a site of post-war social engineering that helped create a diverse multicultural nation. McHugh's in-depth interviews 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781742244549

Book preview

Gow.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ANNIVERSARY EDITION

I can clearly remember my first day in Australia, in March 1985. My plane landed in Sydney on a beautiful autumn morning, after an unconscionably long 30-hour flight from Dublin. As soon as we touched down, two Qantas crew members marched in tandem down the aisle, spraying the hapless passengers with insecticide – my first inkling that Australia saw its location at the other end of the world as a badge of honour. None of your European bugs wanted here!

My second surprise, on the way into town, was seeing the bus driver’s legs. In Ireland, people in uniform did not expose tanned calves. As we drove towards Central, past red-roofed houses and big corner pubs called, strangely, hotels, people in the street seemed similarly jaunty, the women in sundresses and lots of men in what I’d come to know as the tradie uniform of stubbies (shorts), T-shirt and elastic-sided Blundstone boots.

At the station, I rang the one person I knew in Sydney, an Irish sound engineer working at the ABC. ‘He’s expecting you’, his wife told me, ‘at the outside broadcast he’s doing with the Sydney Symphony’. She gave me the address: the Sydney Opera House. Disbelieving, I hailed a cab. When we pulled up at the Forecourt, the magnificent curving triangular white shells rising up behind, I expected to be turned away. But I mentioned my friend’s name and the security guard waved us through. ‘No worries – second door from the end.’ An hour later, after hearing the orchestra rehearse, I was drinking champagne in the Green Room, the blue harbour water lapping outside the window. It was all impossibly beautiful and could not have been more different than the grey rain-sodden streets of Dublin I had left behind. I had taken my first steps to a better life.

That phrase, A Better Life, would be uttered again and again by the hundreds of migrants I spoke to, who worked on the Snowy Scheme. It happened with such uncanny frequency, I began to lay bets with myself about when it would arise. Some offered it early in the interview: ‘Europe was a shambles after the war – we wanted to get away, find a better life’. Others took longer to travel the mental miles from the comfortable retirement of today to the moment of adventure, or desperation, that had led them to Australia.

FOR TWO AND A HALF YEARS, I SAT IN THE LOUNGE ROOMS and kitchens of men and women from over 25 European countries, listened to their remarkable life stories and tried to make sense of the backdrop to it all: the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, the biggest such engineering project in the world. In Sydney’s Neutral Bay, Dusca Miloradovic, a Serbian electrical engineer, told me harrowing tales of survival in a forced labour camp in Germany. It was an amazing story, but I had to gently interrupt him because I could smell burning. He jumped up to rescue a charred cheesecake he’d made in my honour.

Rich food was an occupational hazard in the writing of this book. In high country homes from Dalgety to Adaminaby, I was plied with pikelets, served (of course) with cream, by women whose families had had snow leases in these parts for five generations. Their cooking was meant to fuel you against the elements. But sometimes I would be offered four or five such indulgences in a day, as each interview set off a chain of other interviews, with folk ‘just up the road’, who could fill in some vital other part of the Snowy story.

I had set off on my extended field trip to Cooma and the high country in my old Mazda, bought second-hand for $600 not long before. It was pockmarked with rust, which I had treated with fish oil to stop it spreading. The radiator tended to boil over, so the five-hour trip from Sydney was punctuated with interludes of sitting by the highway, waiting for the engine to cool and the steam to subside. The handbrake had also given up, so I had to toggle between the accelerator and the brake on hill starts – not the most sensible circumstances in which to be heading to the highest mountains in Australia, I now realise. But I was young and on a mission. Thus it was that, stinking of fish oil, I patched together stories of derring-do and determination, tragedy and tribulations, mateship and nascent multiculturalism.

The oral histories I recorded then were done without any formal training. I worked off gut instinct, natural curiosity and, as time went on, a raging urge to represent as best I could the recollections with which I had been entrusted. Oral historian Alessandro Portelli uses a lovely phrase to describe the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee that is at the heart of the process: the ‘exchange of gazes’. I might be asking you the questions and processing your responses, but you are sizing me up as we go, deciding how much you like me and how much you will reveal.

It turns out that a 30-year-old Irishwoman interviewing a bewildering range of former engineers, tunnel builders, plant operators, wilderness surveyors and pick and shovel workers more than twice her age in a part of Australia she has never before seen is not the recipe for disaster it might sound. The interviewees comprised a spectrum of personalities from larrikins to loners, effusive natural storytellers to introspective thinkers, farmers and policemen to engineers and administrators. Almost nobody turned me down (one man, who had been involved in a terrible accident, understandably did not want to see me). Most were extraordinarily helpful, going to great lengths to dig out old photos and mementos from the period and answering what must have seemed naive questions (How do you concrete-line a tunnel? What are snow leases? What is a White Russian?) patiently and often in great detail.

Maybe they were just being kind. Maybe in my enthusiasm and curiosity I reminded them of their younger selves. Mostly I think they shared a universal impulse: they wanted to leave something for posterity, have their contribution noted and recorded, make their mark. But also they were proud – proud to have played a part, however small, in a project that was, by any standard, nation building.

It was pure luck that started me researching the Snowy story. I came to Australia on an exchange between the Irish state broadcaster RTÉ, where I was a radio producer, and the ABC. My first project was a major radio documentary series, ‘The Irish in Australia, Past and Present’. If someone suggested to me today that one person – and a blow-in at that – should tackle nothing short of an alternative history of two centuries of Australia, to be completed in about eight months, I would roll my eyes and tell them to get real. But in my rashness and ignorance, I embarked upon this monumental task with gusto. Irishness was everywhere in Australia – the Irish had been there since the First Fleet, as convicts and political prisoners, as administrators and politicians, as settlers and farmers, workers, writers, religious communities, rebels and ratbags.

In fact, the Irish had been the constant ‘Other’ in a colony established in 1788 as part of the British Empire. As late as 1947, census data shows 90 per cent of Australians were of either British or Irish origin. The Irish comprised around a quarter of the nation. The Indigenous population was around 2 per cent, although, shamefully, they would not be included in official census data till 1967. There were small European communities from places like Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia (as it was then known), settlers from China and the Pacific Islands and occasional Afghani, Turkish, Lebanese or other ‘exotic’ migrants. But before the Snowy started in 1949, Australia was overwhelmingly white and English speaking – and my Irishness would prove to be a boon when it came to interviewing the Snowy workers. Neither New nor Old Australian, the Irish migrants on the Snowy fitted in easily to Australia, but not as part of the Anglo establishment. Ireland’s long colonial conflict with Britain had seen it remain neutral in the Second World War, which allowed the Irish to play something of a mediating role in a workforce where Germans, Italians, Poles, Czechoslovakians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Russians, Norwegians, Serbs, Croats, Maltese and Australians, all on opposing sides during the war, were now, a few years later, expected to work side by side. Fittingly then, it was an Irish worker, Ulick O’Boyle, who would capture so much of the heart and soul of the Snowy through the 50 or so songs he wrote and sang with his band, The Settlers – an achievement honoured in 2018 when a memorial to Ulick was erected in Jindabyne.

My initiation into the Snowy Scheme came via the newly formed Social History Unit at ABC Radio. Its boss, Jenny Palmer, heard my series on the Irish and liked its blend of rich oral history, music and crafted storytelling. The unit had been overly focused on stories of Australia at war, she felt, and the Snowy story was crying out to be told. When she outlined the brief, I jumped at it. At the time I had little interest in the engineering aspects but I could sense the human stories behind its epic scale and multicultural nature.

To gauge the scope and see how many ex-workers were still around, we ran a one-hour talkback on the national broadcaster in January 1987. I’d gone down to Cooma, Adaminaby and Jindabyne the month before and gathered some starter interviews. We played excerpts of these and other material, including a terrific interview with Sir Robert Jackson, the colourful Australian who oversaw the early refugee intake organised by the UN at Prime Minister Chifley’s behest. The phones rang hot.

One minute I was talking to a German carpenter, who chuckled over his initial inability to work the Australian wood, much harder than what he was used to; then a ‘Snowy wife’ called in, with memories of raising her family in township after township built to house the workers as they moved around the mountains – you could get knocked out by a frozen nappy on the clothesline, she told me. An Irishman nostalgically described ‘The Game’ – the massive illegal gambling operations in the camps that saw men lose three weeks’ wages for dirty, dangerous work in one careless night. A Pole remembered washing in the snow in winter, soaking meat in a pot in the creek in summer, and cooking it on a shovel over an open fire before packing up kilos of gear and trudging off through the bush with it for miles: the routine of diamond drillers, the first teams to investigate a prospective dam site in the pristine terrain.

By the end of the hour, after a riot of accents that sounded wildly unlike the normal polished tones on the ABC, we had lists of contacts. People were desperate to talk. They wrote in with anecdotes and accolades, describing fallen mates and awful accidents, the carefree swagger of their youthful selves, the huge stakes they took on, saving to bring family out from Europe. I was commissioned to make six half-hour radio documentaries. When the series (called ‘The Snowy: The People Behind the Power’) went to air in November 1987, it was said to be the first time ‘ethnic’ voices outnumbered Australians on the ABC. I still love that rich audio tapestry of accents and life stories, but for me, the radio series was the tip of the iceberg – there was so much more to say, I knew I had to write what turned out to be this book.

I was so fixated on writing the Snowy history that I abandoned my other freelance work and worked on it for months non-stop, accumulating piles of research on my enclosed verandah, each destined to be its own chapter. I also made sporadic applications for funding assistance. One day, crazy as it sounds, I realised I only had $20 left in the world. I went to the bank to withdraw it as I had a friend coming for dinner – and was annoyed to find I could only get $10 as I had two accounts at $13 and $7 and the minimum withdrawal at the ATM was $10. With my $10, I bought a tin of tuna and pasta – an old standby dish from my student bedsit days. But on returning home, I found a letter from the Australia Council. I had been awarded a $20 000 Literary Fellowship: my first-ever grant for my first-ever book.

It was an absolute miracle. I promptly returned to the bank and requested a personal loan (the grant was three months away). When I said I was a writer (unpublished), the manager looked queasy and said I needed a guarantor. I pointed to the signature on the letter – Bob Hawke, Prime Minister – and waltzed out with said loan, straight to the Fish Markets, where I bought a whole coral trout. The tuna stayed in the pantry and my friend and I toasted the Australia Council over a beautiful dinner. When the book later won the NSW Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction, the $15 000 prize would become the deposit on my first home. But I’m getting ahead of myself …

IN THE PRE-INTERNET AGE, FINDING PEOPLE WAS MUCH harder than it is today. Key former workers mentioned by others were by then retired or maybe deceased. To ensure a democratic spread of voices, I wrote to the dozens of ethnic organisations listed in New South Wales and the ACT (my budget restricted travel to these areas, but I calculated, correctly, that many would have remained in the Snowy catchment or adjacent areas). I promoted my quest on SBS Radio, the public broadcaster founded in 1975 at the tail-end of the Snowy Scheme, that communicated in 68 languages with migrant Australians. I wrote to the Letters to the Editor page of various newspapers, seeking contributors. And the responses flowed in.

I personally phoned every contact and talked them through a summary of their experience. I wanted to know how they’d come to be on the Snowy, what their background was beforehand, what their experience of the project was, occupationally, socially and culturally. But I was also listening for people with detailed recall. Anyone could describe working in a tunnel, but only a few could remember the exact amount of rock shifted in a typical eight hours, or recall the sensory thrill and fear of rattling deep underground on the ‘loco’ or man-car.

Bit by bit, I made up a list of ‘primary interviewees’: those who would become my main oral history sources. I chose them so as to cover the diverse work areas: investigation, road construction, dam building, tunnels, scientific studies and administration. I also sought out ancillaries to the scheme: doctors, nurses, police, teachers, traders and the women and children who lived in the townships. And I wrote to local newspapers in the region, seeking residents and property owners affected by the scheme and the inundations: of both water and people.

Besides ‘generic’ Snowy people, I actively pursued certain individuals because of the unique role they had played. Engineer Roy Robinson, for instance, had been sent to Germany in 1950 by the newly established Snowy Mountains Authority (SMA) to personally recruit engineers, surveyors, scientists and tradesmen for the scheme and check their bona fides. It was a tricky job. Special clearances were issued under the Employment of Scientific and Technical Enemy Aliens scheme, which allowed Australia to bring in 127 Germans, including top scientists. More than 40 of those brought in between 1946 and 1951 would later be revealed to have been ‘members of the Nazi party or other Nazi groups’, according to a Sydney Morning Herald investigation (17 August 1999).

Back in 1988, when I phoned Roy Robinson, he was not particularly keen on being involved. He was by then retired and living on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. But I persisted. I wrote him a letter, pointing out the importance of his own role and the need to record as much eyewitness testimony as possible for the sake of generations to come. He agreed to talk – and had much to say, including his suspicion that despite his attempt to ensure ‘no-one with Nazi sympathies’ was hired, postwar diplomatic wheelings and dealings had furnished some people with false security clearances. He estimated maybe ‘ten or 12’ such people had found their way to the Snowy and knew of two who were deported. Years after our interview, previously classified documents analysed by the Sydney Morning Herald would name seven former Nazi Party members as having worked on the Snowy.

I knocked back one man on unashamedly personal grounds. He rang towards the end of a long day. He sounded posh – and a bit drunk. Maybe he was on medication, I thought later. The conversation, after I took his name and phone number, went like this:

Me: Thanks for calling in. Can you describe your work role?

Caller (slurred): I was a surveyor in Investigations.

Me: What was a typical day’s routine? (I asked this of everyone, partly to build up information, partly to check recall.)

Caller: Wait – do I detect an accent? Me: Yes.

Caller: American?

Me: No, Irish.

Caller: Thought so. Thick as a brick!

Me (pause – taking this in): What was a typical day’s routine for you?

Caller: describes work.

Me: Thanks a lot. If I need any more, I’ll be in touch.

I already had the Snowy’s chief surveyor, Wally Wassermann, and a slew of other folk from the Investigations section. I was happy to write this racist out of history. And so I did.

What I did not know then was that Wally Wasserman would be one of those named by the Sydney Morning Herald as having been a ‘member of the Nazi Party, 1941–45’. The other Snowy employees named as having documented associations with the Nazi Party were three other surveyors: Klaus Leppert, Paul Seidel and Erich Stralendorff; surveying engineer Kurt Ebeling; mining engineer Eric Maecke (Macke); and civil engineer Adolf Schilling. All arrived in 1951. The article notes it was ‘not suggesting that those on the list were ardent Nazis and some may have been forced to join the Nazi Party under duress’. It was a sobering revelation nonetheless.

As I was closing off the research phase and settling down to writing, I heard of a final, remarkable source: Nelson Lemmon, the Minister for Works and Housing in Ben Chifley’s Labor government, and the man who made the Snowy Scheme a reality. Following Chifley’s election loss in December 1949, two months after the Snowy started, Lemmon returned to farming. He had one further stint in parliament in 1954/’55, but when he lost that seat (St George in NSW) after the Labor Party split, he withdrew from politics for good. I would later find out he gave an interview to the National Library, but in 1988, he had not been in public life for decades and I presumed he was dead. But I got a tip-off that he was retired and living up the NSW coast, at Port Macquarie. I found his phone number and called, with bated breath. Next to Commissioner Bill Hudson himself (definitely deceased), this was the most crucial interview I could get.

To my delight, an older male voice answered. ‘Is that Nelson Lemmon?’ I asked, quivering with anticipation. ‘Yes – what’s this about?’ he gruffly replied. I explained that I was writing the history of the scheme, had already contacted hundreds of people and would be grateful to hear from him, as such a central figure. He harrumphed a bit and then, to my horror, said ‘no thank you’ and hung up. Crushed, I decided to write him a letter, explaining the project more clearly. I put my heart and soul into it, signed it, and noted in a postscript that my name, ‘Siobhán’ was an Irish/Gaelic name that was pronounced ‘Shivawn’ – many people outside Ireland understandably found it difficult and I did not want it to put him off.

A week went by, then another – no reply. So I called again. This time a woman answered. When I asked to speak to Nelson and said I’d written, she replied: ‘You’re the Irish lady?’ I said yes. ‘Do you know a town called Mullingar?’ she asked abruptly. I did indeed know Mullingar, about an hour west of Dublin. Some instinct stopped me from saying it was the centre of bad country music. ‘It’s a small town, set in rich farming country’, I replied – which was also true. She purred with satisfaction. ‘Good – well my mother came from there and I’ve told Nelson he has to talk to you.’

It turned out that Nelson was deaf and had not had his hearing aids in when I called before. At Ada Lemmon’s bidding – the wife of many decades whom he referred to as ‘Mum’ – he proved a wonderfully rich source. I met the couple at their relatives’ home in western Sydney, where, over a rich fruitcake baked by ‘Mum’, Nelson recalled in cinematic detail the shenanigans of getting the Snowy Scheme past naysayers and rivals. He laughed heartily as he recounted how they outfoxed a Ministerial colleague, Jack Dedman, and cried as he recalled Chifley’s vision. As I left, I knew I had my first chapter. Six months later, Nelson Lemmon was dead. To this day, I thank Ada Lemmon and the role Mullingar played in getting Nelson’s invaluable insight as political architect of the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

THIS BRINGS ME TO A KEY ASPECT OF THIS BOOK: THE interpersonal nature of oral history and its relationship to conventional written history. My research covered two main streams: the first was document-based. It involved combing through diverse public and private archives and reading or consuming everything I could find related to the Scheme. I spent weeks holed up in the head office of the then Snowy Mountains Authority in Cooma, going through corporate reports, files, newsletters, photographs and film footage, breaking only for a replenishing lunchtime bowl of pea and ham soup, the staple at that time of a Lebanese cafe in the main street.

I had installed myself in the Royal Hotel, Cooma for these weeks. This was a great move, as word soon got round that ‘the lady writing the history’ would be at the bar at 6 pm. I found numerous interesting sources that I’d have missed had I stayed in a motel – worth the suffering inflicted by the pub’s saggy bedstead.

Back in Sydney, I pored over migration law and industrial relations history, reacquainted myself with the intricacies of the Second World War, read Australian social history and literature, found there were still people who could recite ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and who then put me on to folk songs such as Don Henderson’s ode to the hydro scheme, ‘Put a Light in Every Country Window’.

These myriad sources would be supplemented by personal memorabilia my interviewees generously loaned me: a ship’s passenger list from Italy to Australia in 1951, noting nationalities on board; a medal won for breaking world records in tunnelling; an invitation to a Snowy Old Hands Reunion; faded newspaper clippings; and, astonishingly, a photo album that recorded Czechoslovakian Jan Klima’s escape through the Black Forest to the West in 1949.

The hardest archives to nail down were the inquests into the 121 official deaths on the scheme. When I first petitioned the New South Wales Archives, the reply came back from the Office of the NSW Attorney General: access denied, on privacy grounds. Shocked, I wrote back, pointing out that far from requiring privacy, relatives and friends of the deceased might want transparency and understanding about the circumstances of the death of their loved one. Further, the fatalities had been reported in the media at the time. Back and forth the correspondence went, to no avail. Finally, over the Christmas holiday period, when I had reached peak frustration, I called the Office, to register on the telephone answering service yet another request for access, hoping that maybe the human voice would prevail where letters had not. To my amazement, someone picked up. ‘John Dowd, Attorney-General’, a crisp voice said. I stammered out the reason for my call and he said he’d look into it. Not long after, I was granted access. Maybe my Irish accent worked in my favour this time: for Dowd was proud of his Irish heritage and was actually admitted to the Irish Bar as well as the New South Wales Bar.

Even with official permission, it was not easy getting through the inquests. Because the fatalities happened in a variety of locations, the files had been stored in numerous courthouses around New South Wales and they had to be brought to the Archives Office at Circular Quay for my perusal. I would line up, day after day, to get a paltry few boxes – there was a limit on how many could be handed over at one time. It was a surreal experience, sitting at a desk, reading graphic details of someone’s awful last moments, making notes (no photocopies or photographs were allowed). Sometimes I was in tears – that truck driver, when the brakes went, was plummeting to certain death on those hairpin bends but he kept it on the road for half a kilometre – WHAT WAS HE THINKING. Sometimes I felt a cold fury. Someone had detonated the explosives although he had not checked all the men were behind the safety point. I would close the file, return the box and queue up again behind the gaggle of genealogists who took up most of the archivists’ time searching out convict relatives.

IN TANDEM WITH THIS RESEARCH, I BEGAN THE INTERVIEWing process. In the three decades since, I have absorbed a lot of illuminating theory on oral history as both a concept and a practice. It is generally agreed that oral history became popular alongside the civil rights movements of the 1960s as a way of capturing marginalised voices, discovering history ‘from the bottom up’ and challenging the power structures of ‘official histories’. The new wave of oral histories sought to reveal the voices of women, of people of colour, of downtrodden workers and excluded minorities. As seminal English sociologist Paul Thompson wrote in 1978 in his classic work, Voice of the Past: ‘Since the nature of most existing records is to reflect the standpoint of authority, it is not surprising that the judgement of history has more often than not vindicated the wisdom of the powers that be. Oral history by contrast makes a much fairer trial possible: witnesses can now be called from the underclasses, the unprivileged and the defeated.’

Traditional historians looked on askance. Australian historian Patrick O’Farrell – ironically a consultant on my own radio series about the Irish in Australia, an area in which he was an authority – stirred things up in a withering 1979 review of an oral history of Australian wharfies (stevedores), Weevils in the Flour, written by Wendy Lowenstein. ‘The basic problem with oral testimony about the past is that its truth (when it is true) is not primarily about what happened or how things were, but about how the past has been recollected … we move straight away into the world of image, selective memory, later overlays and utter subjectivity.’

These arguments, about the unreliability of memory and the innate subjectivity of oral history, were batted back and forth. Scholars pointed out that people who kept historical records were also self-selecting, but with an agenda that was usually unacknowledged – at least with oral history, the interviewer could probe why certain events were clearly recalled and others not. Alessandro Portelli, my now friend and colleague, pointed out that subjectivity was innate, ‘an essential ingredient of our humanity’. I still quote his masterly rejoinder, to my students: ‘To ignore and exorcise subjectivity as if it were only a noxious interference in the pure data is ultimately to distort and falsify the nature of the data themselves’.

So that was subjectivity settled. It is always there in human-centred endeavours – it’s just a question of how much it is overtly revealed. Celebrated authors such as Helen Garner and Anna Funder harness their subjectivity to propel their writing to greater depths. Funder’s award-winning 2004 study of East Germany in the Cold War period, Stasiland, begins in the first person: ‘I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. Several times I miscalculate my width, scraping into a bin, and an advertising bollard. Tomorrow bruises will develop on my skin like a picture from a negative.’

It might seem an unlikely opening for a book that will expose the cruel efficiencies of a surveillance state and the human tragedies at its centre – but it places Anna, as narrator, clearly in the reader’s field of view and invites us to accompany her on a journey of discovery. It also makes Anna vulnerable – that admission, ‘I am hungover’ immediately reveals her as flawed and human. Just like us. From this perspective, she frames her interviewees: she makes us sit up and admire the immense bravery of 16-year-old Miriam, who almost succeeds in scaling the Berlin Wall; she does not disguise her loathing of Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, a popular broadcaster and outspoken Stasi supporter of the day.

I love Stasiland and applaud Funder’s writing. But I chose a different approach with the Snowy people I interviewed. I withheld overt judgment and aimed instead to let their own words and deeds tell the story. I did not pretend objectivity – I am no more immune to subjectivity than anyone else – but I did aspire to balance. Thus, I sought not to quote anyone out of context and not to condemn by implication. I was unsubtle at times – I felt great fondness for some interviewees and was not a fan of others. But I tried to be even-handed.

For instance, by the time I interviewed Charlie Oliver, the ageing secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), I had collected hair-raising stories of unsafe practices on the construction, which sometimes ended in ghastly accidents and fatalities (see Chapter 13). The AWU had huge power on the scheme, as detailed in Chapter 9. But it seemed to me that they had not served their members well in terms of enforcing safety standards. Charlie Oliver was 87 when I visited him, but still voluble and boastful, even bellicose, about his significant role. When I probed his cultural understanding of serving the migrant workforce, he remarked: ‘They had different dialects; half ’em couldn’t understand each other anyhow’. I was amazed. Did he think that a ‘Balt’ (person from the Baltic States), a Croatian, a Hungarian and an Italian all spoke some common language called, in the parlance of the day, ‘wog’? It sounded crass and uninformed to me even then. But in the book, I couched it without inflection: ‘They had different dialects’, he recalled, and added in apparent puzzlement, ‘half ’em couldn’t understand each other anyhow!’ I then added, for context: ‘To be fair to Charlie Oliver, he was probably no more ignorant of European cultures than other unionists of the day’.

In retrospect, with some people, I played too straight a bat. I reported that Tony Sponar, Czechoslovakian refugee and Olympic skier, only became a hydrographer on the Snowy because the ski lodge he had come to teach at burned down just after he arrived. I also noted that while skiing the pristine slopes gathering data, Tony found ‘a valley with long steep runs’, which would in 1957 become Thredbo, the first major downhill ski resort in Australia. His name lives on there at Sponars Lake. But this is selling Tony Sponar short. It gives no indication of his thirst for adventure – for years after our interview, I would receive colourful postcard collages of his travels around the globe – nor does it indicate his idiosyncratic streak and sly sense of humour.

When I arrived at his home in Jindabyne, I was confronted by two enormous pigs in his backyard. Tony introduced them with great formality as ‘Miss Piggy and Piggy Lee’. Then he showed me into an eccentrically fitted out room, complete with a mannequin dressed in a sixties style miniskirt (‘This is Orca’) linked to a miniature cable car arrangement that operated a dumb waiter that dropped to a floor below. He was clearly relishing my dropped jaw. We discussed his time as a hydrographer and his real thrill, skiing at speed through virgin snow – he still skied whenever he could. He came to Australia in early 1951, he told me, with his British wife, Elisabeth, a journalist with Vogue before the war. On cue, the cable car whirred and Orca rumbled towards us, bearing a note. Tony wrote on it, then despatched Orca back to the alcove where she disappeared to the floor below. ‘That was Elisabeth, asking if I would be dining with her tonight’, he grinned. Tony died in 2002. In our interview he uttered a line that would have made a perfect epitaph: ‘I might have always had a little bit more imagination than was healthy’.

The vagaries of memory and the need to fact-check as much as I could were other salient aspects of my work. Some things were easy: dates, names, construction sites were all recorded in one way or another.