Adaminaby, Australia: The Town Moved for the Snowy Scheme

Summary

Old Adaminaby was a high-country town on the Monaro tablelands of New South Wales, settled in the gold-and-grazing era from the 1830s and serving the surrounding pastoral district for more than a century. In the 1950s it stood directly in the path of Lake Eucumbene, the central storage reservoir of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme — one of the largest engineering projects in Australian history. As the Eucumbene Dam rose, the town was condemned, and rather than simply abandoning it, authorities undertook one of the country's most ambitious town relocations.

In a 1954 referendum residents chose a new site, and from 1956 the population of around 700 to 800 was resettled while roughly 100 houses and two churches were jacked up, loaded onto trucks and hauled some 9 kilometres to a new townsite that kept the name Adaminaby. Moving a single house could take six days to travel barely 10 kilometres. The original town was then submerged beneath the rising waters in 1957. The move preserved many individual structures but scattered the community across a new layout, severing the link between buildings, streets and the river flats that had given the old town its character.

Unlike many drowned settlements, Old Adaminaby was never permanently lost from view. Lake Eucumbene is a deep working storage that fluctuates dramatically with rainfall and the demands of the hydro scheme, and in dry years the lake retreats far enough to expose the bones of the old town. The severe drought of the mid-2000s, peaking in July 2007 when the lake fell to about 8.7 percent of capacity — its lowest level since filling — laid bare foundations, fences, road alignments, tree stumps, fire hydrants and the footprints of the school and houses.

The re-emergence turned the lost town into a periodic attraction and a focus of heritage interest, with former residents and descendants walking streets they had not seen in fifty years. The influx of sightseers also brought souvenir-hunting, prompting a conservation order over the site in 2007. New Adaminaby, with its relocated churches and houses, remains a living settlement, making this a rare case of a community physically carried away from its drowning rather than merely dispersed by it.

Timeline

Before the Flood

Adaminaby grew on the Monaro high plains as a service town for the surrounding sheep- and cattle-grazing country, with European settlement from the 1830s tied to the pastoral expansion of the era. By the mid-twentieth century it had a main street of shops, several churches, a school, hotels and homes housing roughly 700 to 800 people, the commercial heart of a sparsely populated alpine district that had developed over a century from a handful of huts.

The town sat on relatively low ground near the Eucumbene River, a tributary of the Snowy. That position, which had once made it a convenient river-flats settlement, became its undoing: the same flat valley floor that suited grazing and trade was exactly the basin engineers wanted to fill. Adaminaby's altitude and cold winters had long shaped a hardy rural culture, and the surrounding region also drew anglers and graziers who would later become the new lake's recreational users.

By the mid-twentieth century the town carried more than a hundred years of accumulated life — businesses, transport routes, social institutions and the graves of pioneer families — and heritage authorities later read the site as evidence of the rise of the wealthy pastoral industry of the Eucumbene valley. That deep-rooted continuity, built up over a century and then abruptly halted in 1957, is part of what made the loss so keenly felt by residents who had known no other home, even when their houses themselves were carried to the new town.

The Flooding

The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, begun on 17 October 1949, was conceived to divert the waters of the Snowy River inland for irrigation and to generate hydroelectricity through a network of dams, tunnels and power stations. Lake Eucumbene was designed as the scheme's principal storage — a reservoir of about 4,798 gigalitres, roughly nine times the volume of Sydney Harbour — which meant the Eucumbene valley, and the town within it, had to be flooded.

Rather than abandon the buildings, the Snowy Mountains Authority organised a wholesale relocation. Construction of the 116-metre Eucumbene Dam ran from May 1956 to May 1958. From 1956 around 100 houses and two churches were lifted from their foundations and trucked roughly 9 kilometres to the new townsite, while residents were resettled. The dam impounded the river and the waters closed over the original town in 1957. Because new Adaminaby kept the name and many of the same buildings, the displacement was framed at the time as an orderly transplant rather than a loss, though some residents felt unfairly treated and the social fabric of the old town did not survive the move intact.

Contributing Factors

What Surfaces

When Lake Eucumbene falls during drought, the skeleton of Old Adaminaby returns to view along the retreating shoreline: building foundations, fence lines, road alignments, fire hydrants, dead tree stumps and rusted farm machinery emerge from the cracked black mud. The drawdown of July 2007, when the lake hit roughly 8.7 percent of capacity, was dramatic enough to make much of the townsite walkable for the first time in fifty years.

Among the most evocative finds in 2007 were the remains of an old truck standing on what had once been a street, ringed by house foundations under cracked black mud, with bottles, cans and rusted farm machinery scattered along the receding shoreline. These re-emergences draw sightseers, anglers and former residents who trace the streets of their childhood, and the influx of outsiders carrying off pieces of memorabilia prompted a conservation order placed over the site on World Environment Day in 2007.

The relocated new Adaminaby, meanwhile, preserves many of the original moved buildings and keeps the town's name alive as a functioning settlement, while a small tourist village has grown up at the lakeside around the handful of structures that were never relocated. The community therefore exists in two places at once — one above the water on higher ground, and one beneath it that surfaces whenever the lake retreats — a doubling that has made Old Adaminaby a recurring subject of news coverage and Atlantis-style comparisons each time the waters fall.

Lessons

References

• Old Adaminaby and Lake Eucumbene Wikipedia
• Eucumbene Dam Wikipedia
• Snowy Mountains Scheme Wikipedia