Heritage status for nation’s Snowy Mountains ‘dream scheme’

The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme has been added to the National Heritage List.

Former Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme engineer Wally Mills. Picture: Adam Yip

It was a visionary project that helped build the nation, bringing Australians and migrants together after World War II, and now the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme will cement its place in history as it is added to the National Heritage List.

For 77-year-old Wally Mills, who began his career as an electric­al engineer working on the scheme in the 1950s, the listing comes as a timely reminder of how to integrate new arrivals into Australian culture: giving them the chance to contribute to the country while also adding to their own personal success.

About 100,000 people from 30 nations — many of them war-torn — built the “Snowy” over 25 years from 1949 until 1974, living in camps and townships that sprang up across the mountains.

“Sometimes we’d drive in the back of the vehicle, a Land Rover, that took about 10 people to the worksite,” Mr Mills told The Australian during a visit to the project.

“They would be talking in their own languages but they very much bonded together; they ­relied on each other for the safety of their work, everyone trusted one another to work as a team.

“They were given a new identity, called ‘Snowy workers’, losing their own ethnic divisions of the past. Whether it was Italian, Yugo­slav, German, Croatian, Polish, Ukrainian, didn’t matter.”

The scheme becomes the 107th place added to the heritage list, as announced by Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg in Cooma today. The government has assured past and present workers the listing will not affect the daily management of the scheme or its operations.

“It means that work can’t be undertaken to interrupt the site without getting my approval,’’ Mr Frydenberg said. “It provides an extra level of regulatory protection around this heritage-value site. This has immense historical significance to Australia and it was a remarkable engineering feat and for those reasons the site, be it as big as it is, should be protected, preserved, promoted.”

 

The listed area covers a mountainous region of 4600sq km and includes 16 major dams, nine power stations and a pumping ­station, which combine to prod­uce on average 4500 gigawatt hours each year of renewable ­energy — one-third of the supply powering NSW and Victoria.

Snowy Hydro area manager Kent Allen said its assets and contribution to the energy market were “even more relevant” today, despite nearly 70 years having passed since its inception.

“The important thing for us is it’s not seen as an old set of assets, like the old car parked in the ­garage that’s gathering dust,” he said. “Think about it as they built a spaceship back in the 1950s and 1960s ... (and) that spaceship could fly in the modern era.”

Italian migrant Charlie Salvestro was just 16 when he began work on the Snowy in the 1950s and hopes the heritage listing will see the scheme remembered “forever”.

“What happened here is something very unique,” he said. “It’s something that will never happen again ... it was like a dream.”