Struggle for the Snowy: The Background of the Snowy Mountains Scheme by Lionel Wigmore

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to the corners and edges. Slight sunning to top foredge. Dust jacket has small tears to the top and tail edges and is now enclosed in a protective cover. Interior and binding are still very good.

Australia is the driest continent in the world, and prolonged droughts cause widespread devastation and financial losses across the country. Since the early days of settlement, men of vision have brought forward ideas for making use of the water which is held in natural storage during winter in the great snowfields in the south-east corner of the continent.

Their plans to catch the melting snows and divert them to the dry inland, where they were welcomed, but the problems of reconciling the diverse agricultural, industrial, and political needs of the time, of meeting the growing need for power, and of surmounting the technical difficulties involved took many years of discussion and planning. The ideas and blueprints gradually crystallised into what is now known worldwide as the Snowy Mountain Scheme.

It is today an undertaking far greater than was at first thought possible, and the huge dams and miles of pipeline, which store the waters and divert them through the granite of the mountains to the farms and irrigation settlements, also provide the means of generating great quantities of electricity for use in three of Australia's largest cities, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.

Struggle for the Snowy was written at the request of the Snowy Mountains Authority, the administrators of the Scheme, and those whose imagination has been caught by the vision of the undertaking will find in this book the full story of how the Scheme came into existence. (book flap)