The Snowy

The Snowy: A History tells theextraordinary story of the mostly migrant workforce who built one of theworld’s engineering marvels.

The Snowy Scheme was an extraordinary engineering feat carried out over twenty-five years from 1949 to 1974 one that drove rivers through tunnels built through the Australian Alps, irrigated the dry inland and generated energy for the densely populated east coast. It was also a site of post-war social engineering that helped create a diverse multicultural nation. 

Siobhn McHugh’sThe Snowy 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. Rich and evocative, this prize-winning account of the remarkable Snowy Scheme is available again for the 70th anniversary of this epic nation-building project. 

‘This classicwork is the last word on the extraordinary human, industrial, ethnic and socialevent of the Snowy River Scheme. The tales of the men and women involved weremore diverse than for any other Australian phenomenon, and Siobhan McHughconveys the varied tales of humans spread by it all over the Snowy Mountainregion with a humane historian eye. If you want to have a passing knowledge ofthe making of modern Australia, you should read this tale of an era whenAustralia dared to have a vision.’ - Thomas Keneally 

Author Biography

Siobhán McHugh is an award-winning writer, oral historian and producer of podcasts and audio documentaries. The first edition of The Snowy won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 1990 and was the basis of an ABC radio series and a Film Australia documentary. Her other books include Minefields and Miniskirts, about Australian women’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and Cottoning On, a social history of the Australian cotton industry, shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Awards. Siobhán’s audio documentaries have won awards at the New York Radio Festival. She is an internationally recognised podcast producer, researcher and critic, who co-produced, with The Age newspaper, the award-winning Phoebe’s Fall and its follow-up, Wrong Skin. She is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Wollongong.