The Great Depression put all thought of major capital works on hold in Australia for the best part of a decade, but even before the end of World War II, engineers and their political masters were again thinking big. The Snowy Mountain Scheme was one important result. Legislation for the project, which captured the water of the Snowy and Eucumbene rivers in massive dams and diverted it for electricity generation and irrigation, was passed in 1947. The project was not fully completed until 1974.
The Snowy was, no question, an epic engineering feat. Its combined storage capacity was equal to that of every dam and reservoir in Australia built before 1940: 160 km of tunnels and 130 km of aqueducts carried the water through a mountain range to the inland plains. The scheme became, and still is, an object of enormous national pride. It is somehow special, almost beyond criticism.[8]
But the Snowy is a white elephant — perhaps Australia’s Great White Elephant. Economically, the scheme cannot be defended. As one analyst delicately put it:
The assessments made in this discussion have been economic and in their light the Snowy Scheme can hardly be regarded as a ‘paying prosposition’ … The primary worth of the Snowy is psychological … Australians … have proved that they do not live by bread alone, although had they realised at the outset that the price of this loaf could be so high they may have hesitated before buying it.[9]
The scheme has also been an environmental disaster. Much of the irrigation water was used unwisely — not least because the cost was massively subsidised — resulting in salinity and land degradation. So much water was diverted, too, that the Snowy River itself was all but destroyed.[10] And, as the governments of Australia, Victoria and New South Wales discovered in 2006 when they tried to flog it off, you can’t even sell the bloody thing.
Australia is, as we all know, experiencing a catastrophic drought. It is not the worst ever in terms of rainfall and land area, but in terms of the numbers of people affected, it can perhaps be called the Great Drought. The water infrastructure of all our cities is under strain: the situation in many rural areas is disastrous. The issue of water, and how it should be managed, is a high national priority. In itself, this is a welcome development. But it is an indictment on our civic culture that the problem was allowed to become so serious.