Flooded Australian town re-emerges after 50 years of drought

Flooded town re-emerges after 50 years
By Nick Squires In Sydney
05/06/2007
Telegraph UK

In pictures: Flooded town re-appears
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Australia's savage drought has sucked dry a huge reservoir and revealed the ghostly remains of a town which was flooded 50 years ago.

The remains of a truck lie exposed on the site of the old town of Adaminaby as it re-emerges out of Lake Eucumbene
Adaminaby, a small farming town nestled in the Snowy Mountains between New South Wales and Victoria, was evacuated and flooded in 1957 to make way for a massive hydro-electricity project.

But the longest "big dry" in a century - widely blamed on climate change - has reduced man-made Lake Eucumbene to a tenth of its normal size, exposing the town's muddy outline to the elements.

The blackened skeletons of trees poke out of the water, still marking the route of a road they once lined in the old town.

The sloping main street, its bitumen cracked and eroded from decades underwater, is now being used by locals as a boat ramp to access the dwindling lake.

advertisementThe re-emergence of Old Adaminaby, as it is now known, has stirred painful memories for its former inhabitants.

"We couldn't believe it when the old streets started to reappear," said Leigh Stewart, a local history buff who grew up in the old town and once ran a shop there.

The town's re-emergence was a striking demonstration of the severity of the drought," Mr Stewart said. "It shows how bad the situation is around here.

"The dam's at about 20 per cent capacity now and it's getting worse. We're all hoping it turns around soon and we get some consistent rains that will fill the lake again."

Shards of pottery, bottles, bits of farming machinery and other remnants of everyday life now bake in the sun.

Local authorities have slapped a conservation order on the site to stop people pilfering heritage items.


Buildings that were submerged have re-appeared on what was the outskirts of Old Adaminaby
A flight of concrete steps leads up to the remains of the old St Mary's Catholic Church, now reduced to a few brick columns and rotten wooden floorboards.

Greg and Mary Russell were sprinkled with confetti at the top of the stairs when they were married 60 years ago.

Greg, 82, said he had mixed feelings wandering the streets where he played as a child.

"It's sad and it makes me a bit nostalgic. We had some good times there and it's strange to see it this way now."

The creation of Lake Eucumbene was one of the largest projects in the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, a huge post-war engineering project designed to harness the power of the Snowy River.

The scheme involved building seven power stations and 16 dams, linked by hundreds of miles of tunnels and viaducts.

More than 100,000 workers were involved in its construction, many of them refugees from war-ravaged European countries.

Their arrival permanently altered Australia's ethnic mix, challenging the dominance of those of British and Irish stock.

Adaminaby, a village of about 700 people, stood in the way of the ambitious nation-building project and policy-makers in Canberra decided it had to be sacrificed.

"A lot of us never wanted to go, my father tried to chase them down the street with a gun," said Anne Kennedy, who was a child when her home was flooded.

"But they said it was for the good of the nation and we had no choice in the matter."


The creation of Lake Eucumbene was part of a huge post-war engineering project
More than 50 buildings from the old town were moved nine kilometres away over a hill to the town that now bears the name Adaminaby.

Some timber houses were simply lifted onto the back of trucks and driven to the new settlement, others such as St John's Church of England were dismantled stone-by-stone and rebuilt.

Some former inhabitants now hope the ruins of the old town will become a tourist attraction.

"Who knows?" said Mrs Kennedy. "At least it would mean something good came from all of this." The drought is expected to wipe one percent from Australia's £400 billion economy. Recent rainfall has brought some hope, but it is still too early to tell if the dry spell is about to come to an end.

"I'm a little bit optimistic about the breaking weather patterns," said Wendy Craik, the head of the Murray-Darling Basin irrigation area, an area the size of France and Spain. "But gee, we need a lot more rain."