Activity Plan
Aim- For participants to develop an understanding of the Snowy Hydro Scheme, particularly on the influence it had on the cultural development of Australia and to get an idea of what life for the people involved in the construction was like.
Objective- To create an activity that will be easy to understand and engaging for participants. The activity will encourage participants to step inside the shoes of different cultured workers of the scheme as well as to gain an understanding of the enormity of this project. As the activities will be completed in the first two weeks, i am to conduct this activity in the area of a water catchment on Mt Kosciusko.
Teacher Activity
When a desired location to conduct the activity has been chosen, I will give a brief introduction on what the Snowy Hydro Scheme is. I will have a focus on the cultural side of the scheme, as this is a part of it that i am highly interested in, and believe that it should be considered a defining feature of the construction of this Scheme.
Participants will receive a card each. Half of the cards will have a stakeholder of the scheme written on it. The other half will have quotes from the particular stake holders. Participants take turns reading out their card and then they must work together to match the the stakeholder with the correct quote or description.
Resources
Stake Holder cards
Quote or description cards
"Ahead of us lie many years of toil, numerous obstacles to be surmounted, and i have no doubt, many disappointments; but these are what make the achievement of an objective worthwhile. The nation has accepted the Scheme, and if I judge Australians rightly, we will see that it goes through."
- Bill Hudson (head engineer)- First radio broadcast to the public. Bill Hudson was a New Zealander who had left NZ for Australia in 1927. He was 53 at the beginning of the 25-year Scheme and had previously worked on a number of hydroelectric projects in France, NZ, Scotland and Australia.
"Like many others, i had been in a refugee camp in Italy for about three years, when the Australian Commission opened and practically everyone rushed to book for Australia. I can't remember them telling us much; it was a very vague thing, a two-year contract to go and work wherever they sent us. We were so wrapped up in the desire to get away, it wouldn't have mattered. We were prepared to agree to anything."
- Ivan Kobal, Slovenian Chain Man (Surveyors assistant). Approximately 100,000 people worked on the Scheme between 1949and 1974. The complete range of nationalities is not known. The configuration varied on individual jobs, from as low as seven nationalities in a technical office of 25 to as high as 70 nationalities on the overall project. Men and women from this strange new world would outnumber Australians on the Snowy Scheme.
"At the end of the war, apart from the tragic survivors of the concentration camps in Germany, we had 8-million Displaced Persons. 6 Million of them managed to get back to their homes, we took the first 100,000 as they were the absolute cream of the crop."
-Sir Robert Jackson, the Australian Secretary General of the United Nations and Rehabilitation Administration from 1944 to 1948 had a lot to do with the recruitment of skilled overseas workers. In 1950 he was dispatched to Europe with instructions to select surveying talent as well as bulk labour from three areas: Displaced persons from refugee camps of postwar Europe and assisted migrants.
"I remember when I lift my job in the shearing shed and I said I was going to Cooma, to the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the fellas said, 'That’s a great thing you're doing for Australia.' And when I got here, that was the reaction: 'We're doing this for Australia'. I know that sounds very jingoistic now, but that was the way it was and I was mightily impressed with it as a young man"
- Bruce Bashford- Young Australian worker 1963. For those who joined the scheme the Scheme later, there was already a sense of of pride among ordinary Australians.
"We knew that the progress of the Scheme depended on the people being content, being happy and working together as a team, so we used to take great pains to see that people felt at home with us..the whole objective was to make them feel at home in the Snowy and to feel they weren't any longer Czechs or Lithuanians or Germans, they were Snowy People"
-Bill Hudson's (Head Comissioner) policy on New Australian Workers. ‘New Australians’ was the polite term- Reffos, Balts, Wogs, Square-heads, Eyeties and Dagos were some of the other epithets employed. Bill Hudson considered them a ‘splendid team’ and in over 40 years of construction he’s never seen ‘such a good crowd of men’.
"I would say i lived the first 7 years straight in a tent. We did our own cooking, tinned stuff. Cooked enough for four days straight and put it in wet sand in a creek. It was very primative and very hard. We worked mostly 10-12 hour days, 12 days straight and 2 days off. We had to get used to the mountains as well, because we had come from Northern and Eastern Europe where the country was flat. In those mountains they say you need one long and one short leg, which is very true! But though it was very strange and very rough, people looked after themselves and took no risks"
- Kon Martynow, a Russian Displaced person who worked on the Scheme for 23 years first as a Chain man (surveyors assistant and then later on as a Surveyor. Like drilling and hydrography, surveying was physically demanding. It involved hours of hiking through steep country in all weathers, very often carrying food supplies and equipment.
"men were short, time was short, food was short. Try operating a dozer up there at night..working in the biting wind..making order from a chaos, knee-deep in snow..when gumboots, battle-scarred with mud, disappear out of site altogether. when an error of judgment can land you hundreds of feet down the mountainside"
-A Norwegian worker describing the work conditions of the construction of the Guthega Dam, undertaken by a Norwegian Contractor. 450 Norwegians arrived in Australia to assist on construction. The contract stipulated that the Authority would provide the access roads and camps, however with a month before they arrived, the road to Guthega was not through and right up to the day they arrived, one bit of the road was slipping. However it all came together and the Norwegians got into their camps on time.
“Arne Kirkemo was the first Norwegian I ever met and he had them on, timing himself from Guthega to the Chalet. They were light touring skis with a loose heel- you kept your skis on the snow and slid them along”
-Doug Thatcher, an Australian hydrographer and keen skier. In 1953 the Norwegians built a ski-jump at Guthega- the largest in Australia. Compititions were held each year. They also introduced cross-country skiing to the Snowy, and hence to Australia.
“With the 12 machines on the jumbo, you drilled a 12-foot round hole. That took 50 minutes to an hour, then another 20 minutes to load the drill-holes with explosive. They you took the jumbo back from the face and blasted. You left about 5 minutes to clear the smoke and dust and then you started clearing the muck out. The whole cycle would take 4 hours, 2 cycles a shift was the aim”
Tom Doherty, an Irishman who worked in tunnels for over 40 years recalling the routine in the snowy operation. The ‘jumbo’ was a steel framework with 3 levels, on which 12 heavy drills could be mounted so that drilling could take place simultaneously over the whole tunnel face.
“The equipment was all new and well-maintained. There would be 40 men on a shift; working in confined conditions- the tunnel was 6.5 metres wide and 22 feet high. No one was sitting around, everyone had a job to do, it was like a production line in a factory”
- Imans Viesis, a Latvian who had worked in Australian tunnel construction for 2 years. The miners were well paid, receiving about 3 times the average Australian wage, with free food and accommodation too. However the amount of money earned depended on the speed at which the tunnel was constructed. Tunneling went on round the clock, 6 days a week.
“Silvo Antonia died from extensive head injuries and Theo Yannacopoulos died from a compound fracture of the skull, both accidently received in Junction Shaft through being struck by a rock during blasting operations”
-Cooma Coroner. This new US method of tunneling had a very high accident rate. Come 15 miles (24 Km), there’ll be 15 workers dead. And so there was. The common practice was for men to be at least 229 metres from the blast. These two deaths are examples were only 168 metres from the blast.
“I felt quite sorry for a lot of the migrants. I was there by choice. I could turn around and walk out any time. For those people, it was very different. Many of them were married, they couldn’t get any other work and so they were working down there and sending money back to their family. You could see a lot of them were very unhappy- there was just a depressed feeling in the area.”
-Ken White, an Australian who left his job as a graphic artist to earn big money in the snowy tunnels who worked and observed the migrant workers.