The Snowy People

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30058, 16 February 1963, Page 3

The Snowy People

Men of the Snowy Mountains. By Mona Ravenscroft.

Rigby, Adelaide. 252 pp.

Quite a lot has already been written about Australia’s Snowy Mountains project, the gigantic scheme coupling hydro-electric development with a century-old dream of using the Snowy river waters for inland irrigation. Now Miss Ravenscroft, an Australian sociologist, introduces us to some of the people who chose a modem pioneering life because they believed it was the greatest contribution they could make to the future of the country.

Miss Ravenscroft sees the Snowy Mountains Authority as a mighty engineering and construction organisation, looking to every last detail of the job in hand, but paying too little attention to its relations with the men and women who had gone into the mountains to make the project their lives.

Her original plan was to study two of the project's townships, Island Bend and Cabramurra, and make a formal report, but she became so absorbed in the people of many different nationalities she met in the

mountains that she decided to write this book.

The result is a story of deep human interest about the Snowy people who became dwarfed by the mountains and the plans, dams and power stations—as

well as the giant machinery —of the project. She writes about their battles to build some kind of community life in townships that had no future and their struggles to establish human relationships in the temporary population of the Snowy Mountains.

Miss Ravenscroft sees toe Snowy Mountains Authority relentlessly pushing ahead with its project, not noticing toe people it was using and almost disregarding the scars it was leaving on the mountains. Near the end of her book toe points out that the vision of toe Snowy scheme, that arose out of an

ideal, had gradually become obscured by toe way in which the scheme was carried out—by the narrow, embittering emphasis on economics. “Ironically, there is good reason for suspecting

that when the long-range investment in human beings and in mountains are not given their due consideration

the economics will always turn out to be faulty.”