Old Adaminaby was moved for Australia's Snowy Scheme in 1956–57; 102 buildings were relocated, but flooding and lost jobs eventually drove away about half the district

The residents of a small pastoral town in Australia were warned by a government engineer to get rid of a whole building, just in time, a few months before it was drowned by a wall of water. It was no rogue attack or plot from a disaster movie, but this was what happened to a town called Adaminaby nestled in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, in the middle of the 1950s. Over one hundred buildings, two of which were churches, were physically moved up a hill and reconstructed, one brick at a time, to keep a community alive as their valley flooded. According to Heritage NSW's records, 102 buildings were moved between 1956 and 1957, prior to the damming of the Eucumbene River forming Lake Eucumbene. It is like a legend, but unfortunately, it is all true.

A dam that was so big that a whole new town was needed

The move was not a local initiative by a few individuals. It was a by-product of one of the greatest engineering schemes of the 20th century, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. As per the National Museum of Australia's Defining Moments archive, the scheme was constructed between 1949 and 1972, and saw about 100,000 workers from over 30 countries producing 16 dams and seven power stations. Eucumbene Dam, built across the Eucumbene River, was the largest of those dams and created Lake Eucumbene, the biggest and thirstiest reservoir in the whole scheme, and Old Adaminaby sat right in the middle of where that reservoir would fill in.

The occupants of the town had been consulted and, counter-intuitively, a vote taken in a referendum in 1954 as to where the new town should be built, with the winner being a site on the main highway, as it would be warmer and closer to trade routes. But the real transfer came when weatherboard houses were hauled on trucks across the countryside, often bogged down in snow and rain, as families who never owed anybody a cent might've had to suddenly borrow more to acquire larger and better-wired houses they hadn't requested. If a building was considered too fragile to survive the move, it was bulldozed instead, and heritage groups later lamented that little had been documented before that happened.

The bill no one expected would come up

The old town consisted of three or four hectare plots of land, which would be sufficient for one cow, or one horse. The new ones were quarter-acre suburban lots. Heritage NSW listed the loss of good grazing lands and jobs, as well as the loss of about half of the population of the town and district that departed in the long term because there was simply not enough work left. That's the part worth sitting with: residents got a genuine say in where the replacement town would go, but no say at all in whether the dam happened in the first place, the vote in 1954 decided a location, not a fate that had already been settled somewhere else. That is not a footnote: the reality of "progress," and the "progress" that came at an exorbitant cost, and one borne disproportionately by people who never had a vote on the dam itself, just a vote on where to land once it hit them.

In a catastrophic twist, a severe drought was experienced from 2006 to 2008 that reduced Lake Eucumbene to only 10%, revealing church steps, shop foundations, and even a rare Canadian-built steam engine that had been underwater for fifty years. Now, heirs of the dispossessed were able to stroll the streets, the very same streets that had been abandoned by their grandparents. This may have been more haunting than really a homecoming.

Sounds familiar?

In the 1930s and '40s, the Tennessee Valley Authority faced its own version throughout Appalachia in the interest of national development, drowning towns for water and flood control. This is not unique to Australia or the U.S., either. As stated in the 2000 World Commission on Dams report, “Dams and Development,” tens of millions of people have been displaced by large dams around the world, and the resettlement programs have historically moved people, but not their livelihoods. Adaminaby is far from being a one-off disaster; it may be viewed as a textbook example of a pattern that continues to repeat wherever a river flows to a nation's cheap-power thirst. The Snowy Scheme still lives on, and it's well deserving of this; it lit up an area and is still an engineering feat. However, the flooded foundations of Old Adaminaby are a reminder that "the greater good" always has a return address, and it's rarely the boardroom.