Time changes perspective

My book, The Old Town, is set in Jindabyne in the NSW Snowy Mountains. It sits at the southern end of Lake Jindabyne. But this is not the original town. That lies decaying in the mud beneath the waters of the lake.

Old Jindabyne sat on the edge of the Snowy River and was relocated when the river was dammed, and the valley started to flood.

I was twenty years old and at university, when the campaign to stop the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania happened. I remember attending rallies, holding my ‘No Dam’ cardboard sign and yelling with the best of them. We were all outraged at the thought of the destruction of such a special place. Protesters blockaded the roads and river, stopping construction workers from entering the dam site. They were our heroes. In 1983, the Australian Government took the case to the High Court and won, forcing the Tasmanian Government to abandon its project. Around the same time, the wilderness area around the Franklin River was listed as a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site.  

A mere five years later, I spent ten days whitewater rafting down the Franklin, soaking up the beauty of that amazing place. Tannin-stained water, crystal-clear, and cold enough to make your teeth ache. Towering ferns and moss-draped trees and days of misty angel rain that clung to everything. It was hard to believe that anyone would want to destroy such a pristine and stunningly beautiful part of the world.

While writing The Old Town, I read quite a bit about the Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme and was staggered at the sheer scale of the project. It blew me away! Over twenty-five years, more than one hundred thousand workers, mostly new migrants from over 30 different countries, built 8 power stations, 16 dams, 80 kilometres of aqueducts, 145 kilometres of interconnected tunnels, and 1,600 kilometres of roads and railway tracks. What an incredible feat of engineering!

During my research, I was particularly captured by the photos of old Jindabyne and the stories told by some of the original residents, of living there before it disappeared under the rising water.

It made me wonder if the Snowy Scheme had been conceived thirty years later would it too have been the subject of protests and opposition? Was it just timing, that had one project go ahead and the other fail? Australia in the 1940s, when the idea of the Snowy Scheme was born, was a very different place to the Australia of the early eighties, when environmental issues were prominent and ordinary people leapt into action to save important natural sites.

Who can say which is right? Perhaps both were … for their time and place.

To read more on Old Jindabyne and the Snowy Scheme try: Becoming Jindabyne - SnowyMountains