A post-war nation short of power and water decided to reverse a river through a mountain range — and built one of the world's great engineering schemes doing it.
A growing post-war Australia needed reliable electricity and water for irrigation. The rivers ran the wrong way — east, to the sea — while the dry inland went without.
The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme was authorised: collect alpine snowmelt, send it west through the range in tunnels, and generate power on the way down.
16 major dams, 145 km of tunnels and 80 km of aqueducts, largely underground — a quarter-century of drilling through the Snowy Mountains, finished in 1974.
Around 100,000 workers from more than 40 countries built it. The scheme became a symbol of post-war migration as much as of engineering — and reshaped the towns and country around it.
The Snowy gave the country power and water. It also flooded valleys, moved rivers, and cost the lives of more than a hundred workers who built it.
The scheme is rightly remembered as nation-building on an epic scale — and the same water that spins the turbines was taken from ecosystems and communities downstream, with environmental consequences still being managed today. As with every system in this series, the extra above lets you run the machine; the story asks what it cost to build.