Australian
Screen

The completion of the Snowy-Murray Development in 1969 represented a major achievement for the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The film uses voice-over, graphics, working models, aerials and footage shot on-site throughout the construction period, to effectively explain each project along the development, from the snow melt of the Australian Alps to its finish at Khancoban Reservoir.

There’s no exciting dramatic structure here, but to watch it is to gain an insight into the size and complexity of such a large-scale civil engineering venture. Ninety-eight per cent of the engineering features of the scheme exist underground, so it’s not until construction of each feature is viewed, and its function understood, that the magnitude and ambition of the project become clear. Today it’s almost impossible to comprehend the audacity of an attempt to meet both the power generation and irrigation needs of a large region of the country, to endeavour to realise the long-held national fantasy of turning the coastal rivers inland. But films like this are testimony to how – for a brief period of modernity – innovations in science and technology, fast-tracked and refined by two world wars, drove the 20th century development credo that all nature could be conquered, all its resources harnessed and all our problems solved.