The Snowy Mountains

We arrived in Sydney, then flew to Canberra and traveled by car toward Cooma. A newly completed cottage waited for our family near the community serving the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The landscape, the accent, and the institutions were unfamiliar, but the purpose of my father's work was clear.^[1]

The Australian government had invited a small group of American engineers with Bureau of Reclamation experience to advise on the project. The scheme joined dams, tunnels, power stations, and the diversion of water through mountains. It was infrastructure on a scale that could change regions, and it depended on thousands of people from many countries.^[2]

My father brought knowledge about concrete and large public works. He and the other advisers were credited with helping the project move ahead of schedule and under budget. I was young, but I understood that expertise mattered. Years of work on earlier projects could become leverage when a new country attempted something ambitious.^[3]

The Snowy Scheme gave our family a reason to cross the world, but it also gave me an enduring image of productive cooperation. People with different backgrounds could solve physical problems together. Water could be redirected, electricity generated, and entire communities formed around work that would outlast the people who performed it.^[4]