What is the Snowy Mountains Scheme?

The Snowy Mountains Scheme is one of Australia's most loaded national symbols, an engineering project from the 1950s and 1960s that has come to represent the country's post-war confidence, the integrating power of multicultural migration, and the public ambition to build infrastructure at scale. Schools, museums, Australia Day speeches, and federal budget announcements reach for the Snowy as shorthand for what the country can do when it commits.

Symbolically the Scheme operates on several levels. As a monument to engineering, it stands alongside the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House as a built achievement that Australians point to with pride. As a monument to migration, it represents the moment the country began absorbing tens of thousands of post-war European refugees and displaced persons (Italian, Greek, German, Yugoslav, Polish, Hungarian, Baltic, and many others) into the workforce and the broader community. As a monument to public ambition, it speaks to a period when the Commonwealth, the states, and the workforce together believed they could remake the geography of southern Australia.

The migrant story is the most celebrated symbolic element. The workforce of about 100,000 people came from more than 30 countries, with about 70 per cent drawn from non-English-speaking backgrounds. The image of Italian, Greek, and German workers underground together with British and Australian foremen has become a national parable of cooperation. Multicultural policy adopted in 1973 drew explicitly on the Snowy experience as evidence that integration could work, and the Snowy is often invoked in citizenship ceremonies and Welcome to Australia events.

Living symbolism continues today. The Snowy 2.0 expansion, announced by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in March 2017 and currently under construction, frames the scheme as a continuing national project. The renewable energy transition of the 2020s has placed the Snowy at the centre of public debate again. Cooma, Khancoban, Adaminaby, and Jindabyne all carry the scheme's symbolic geography into present-day Australia. The 121 workers who died during construction are commemorated at Cooma and at the major dam sites. The Snowy Scheme has produced a symbolic vocabulary that continues to shape how Australians imagine large public projects.