Tunnelling Through the Snowy Mountains
A Novel of the Hydroelectric Scheme

About this book:

In the mud of a German displaced persons camp, Stefan Radzinsky signs a contract he doesn’t fully understand: two years of hard labor in a country called Australia. By 1949, he is bound for the Snowy Mountains, where thousands of shattered Europeans and restless Australians are carving tunnels through living granite, damming wild rivers, and building the most ambitious engineering scheme the nation has ever seen.

Jim Mitchell leaves the Sydney docks for the same reason: to escape a peace that feels like waiting. In Cooma’s freezing camps and deep beneath the Main Range, he and Stefan discover that old nationalities and war wounds mean nothing when the roof starts to drop. Side by side with Poles, Italians, Germans, and locals, they face cave-ins, blizzards, and the slow, sacred work of turning enemies into mates.

Sixteen dams. Seven power stations. Over a hundred miles of tunnels. A river forced to run backward. *Tunnelling Through the Snowy Mountains* is an epic of nation-building and second chances, where the cost of progress is paid in sweat and blood, and redemption is found in the dark, deep under the snow.