Tunnelling Through the Snowy Mountains

• Chapter 1 Post-War Horizons
• Chapter 2 Arrival in Cooma
• Chapter 3 Men of Many Tongues
• Chapter 4 Camp on the Eucumbene
• Chapter 5 The First Blast
• Chapter 6 Into the Granite
• Chapter 7 Shift at Midnight
• Chapter 8 Letters from the Old World
• Chapter 9 Mud and Steel
• Chapter 10 The Italian's Accordion
• Chapter 11 Winter on the Main Range
• Chapter 12 Cave-In
• Chapter 13 The Cost of Progress
• Chapter 14 River Diversion
• Chapter 15 Shadows in the Tunnel
• Chapter 16 A Snowy Christmas
• Chapter 17 The Engineer’s Vision
• Chapter 18 High Pressure Line
• Chapter 19 Echoes in the Dark
• Chapter 20 Breakthrough at Guthega
• Chapter 21 The Rising Reservoir
• Chapter 22 Bonds in the Rock
• Chapter 23 The Turbines Turn
• Chapter 24 Power to the Nation
• Chapter 25 A Changing Country
• Chapter 26 Where the Rivers Flow Backward

The mud in the Displaced Persons camp outside Fallingbostel had a particular grey consistency that Stefan Radzinsky thought might endure long after the tents and timber huts had rotted into dust. It was early 1949, and winter in northern Germany refused to yield to the sun. The wind blew across the flat plains from the Baltic, carrying the stench of wet coal, damp wool, and the lingering, invisible ash of destroyed cities.

Stefan stood in the queue outside the wooden administration hut, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of a British army surplus greatcoat that was two sizes too large across the shoulders. He was twenty-six, though the skin around his eyes was etched with fine lines that belonged to an older man. Before the war, he had completed three years of civil engineering studies at the Warsaw University of Technology. Now, his entire life was compressed into a faded canvas kitbag slung over his shoulder and a folded piece of paper bearing the stamp of the International Refugee Organization.

In front of him, a man in a greasy cap turned around and spat into the slush.

"They say they’re looking for men who can handle a shovel," the man said in Polish. His name was Jan, a former mechanic from Łódź whose family had vanished into the eastern forest six years earlier. "Or men who don't mind dying under a rock. It’s all the same to them."

"It’s not Europe," Stefan said, his voice quiet, raspy from cheap tobacco. "That’s all that matters."

"Australia," Jan snorted, wrapping his thin wool collar tighter around his throat. "Do you even know where that is, Stefan? It’s the bottom of the world. Snakes, bush, heat that cooks your brain, and British bastards telling you what to do in a different language."

"It’s five thousand miles from Warsaw," Stefan replied. "And eight thousand miles from Moscow. That makes it the best place on earth."

Inside the hut, the atmosphere was thick with the smoke of state-issue cigarettes and the smell of wet wool. Two men sat behind a folding card table. One was a British officer in a creased uniform; the other was an Australian—a broad-shouldered man with sun-reddened skin, wearing a sharply pressed suit that looked entirely out of place in the bleakness of Lower Saxony. His name tag read Mr. Knox, Department of Immigration.

When Stefan stepped up to the table, Knox looked up from a stack of forms, his blue eyes sharp and unblinking. He didn't look tired, which was a novelty in Europe. He looked as though he had arrived from a country where people slept eight hours a night and ate three square meals a day.

"Name?" Knox asked, speaking in clear, slow English.

"Stefan Radzinsky."

"Age?"

"Twenty-six."

Knox turned a page on the clipboard. "Occupation before forty-five?"

"Engineering student. University of Warsaw. Hydraulic structural design."

Knox paused, looking up from his paper. He eyed Stefan's lean frame, taking in the rough hands and the quiet, steady posture. "We’re not hiring engineers right now, son. Not from over here. Your degrees don't mean a bloody thing to the unions back home, and the professional boards won't recognize 'em without years of recertification."

Stefan felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. "I can work," he said quickly, his English carefully parsed. "I have worked in quarry gangs for two years in Hamburg. I can lift. I can clear timber. I can read structural blueprints."

Knox leaned back, the wooden chair creaking under his weight. He picked up a rubber stamp, held it an inch above the paper, and looked Stefan in the eye. "Australia is building something big," he said, his tone turning crisp and pragmatic. "Bigger than anything this side of the equator’s ever seen. We’re turning rivers around. We’re drilling through mountains. But to get there, you sign a contract. Two years of directed labor. Wherever the government puts you, that’s where you sleep, that’s where you work, and that’s where you dig. No arguing, no changing jobs, no pulling out early. You give us two years of hard bloody yakka, and we give you a fresh start. Fair dinkum?"

Stefan didn't hesitate. He didn't know what yakka meant, but he knew what two years meant. It meant two years of hard work with an end date, unlike the endless, indeterminate waiting of the camps.

"Where do I sign?" Stefan asked.

Knox brought the stamp down with a sharp thwack. "Welcome aboard, mate. Next!"

Sixteen thousand miles away, in the muggy autumn heat of Sydney, Jim Mitchell sat on a wooden crate at the end of Pyrmont Pier, watching the tugboats push a rusty freighter into the berth. The salt air was thick with the smell of diesel smoke, dead fish, and coal dust from the railway yards behind the docks.

Jim was twenty-eight, home three years from the Pacific, and thoroughly bored. He wore a faded khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, showing forearms tanned dark by the Australian sun and tattooed with an anchor that he had come to regret almost as soon as the ink had dried in Brisbane back in '43.

He had tried going back to his old job at the flour mill in Leichhardt, but the walls felt too tight, the days too predictable. The war had taken four years of his youth and left him with a restless twitch in his right hand and a deep suspicion of men who wore suits and sat behind desks. Australia in 1949 was a country waking up from a long, bad dream, rubbing its eyes and realizing it was terrifyingly small, terribly isolated, and dangerously empty.

A rolled-up newspaper sat on the crate beside him—the Sydney Morning Herald. The headline on the front page screamed in thick black type: SNOWY SCHEME APPROVED BY CABINET. GRAND PLAN TO POWER NATION AND WATER THE WEST.

Jim picked up the paper, squinting against the glare of the harbour. The Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, had been talking about it on the radio for months. It sounded like something out of an American science-fiction magazine: block the rivers that ran east into the sea, cut massive tunnels right through the granite spine of the Great Dividing Range, and drop the water down the western slopes into the dry plains of the Murray and Murrumbidgee, spinning massive underground generators along the way. Power for the cities, water for the farms.

His mate, Bluey Williams, came ambling down the pier, holding two sweating bottles of Tooth's KB Lager by the necks. Bluey was a short, stocky bloke with hair the color of a bruised copper kettle and a face that had taken one too many fists in the amateur boxing rings of Balmain.

"You're staring at that paper again, Jimbo," Bluey said, handing over a bottle. He pulled the cap off his own against the edge of an iron bollard with a quick, practiced flick. "You’re going to give yourself a headache reading all them big words."

Jim took a long swig of the cold, bitter beer, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "They're starting work up near Cooma in a few months. The Authority's setting up shop."

"Cooma?" Bluey scoffed, sitting down on an empty oil drum. "That's up in the high country, mate. Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey in winter, and full of snakes in the summer. Why the hell would you want to go up there? We've got work right here on the docks. Good money, too, if the union stays happy."

"It’s five quid a week more than the mill," Jim said, tapping the paper. "Plus overtime. And they’re offering board. Real work, Bluey. Not just shunting bags of flour around a dark warehouse."

"Real work?" Bluey laughed, though there was no malice in it. "It’s hard bloody labor, mate. Pick and shovel stuff. My cousin’s husband went up to the preliminary survey camps near Guthega last month. Said the bush is so thick you need a machete to go for a piss, and the mud's up to your knees. And the blokes they're bringing in... Jesus, Jim. Thousands of 'em. DPs from Europe. Dagos, Balts, Poles, Krauts. Men who don't speak a word of English. It’s going to be a bloody circus."

Jim looked out across the water. A line of cargo ships lay anchored in the bay, waiting for berths. Australia was expanding, straining at its seams. The country had spent a century feeling like an isolated British outpost at the edge of the map; now it was trying to build an empire out of concrete and steel, virtually overnight.

"They're just blokes looking for a feed, Bluey," Jim said softly. "Same as us."

"Maybe," Bluey said, taking another pull from his bottle. "But they don't know the bush. They don't know what it's like when the snow comes down off Mt. Kosciuszko and the wind starts howling through the gorges. You can't drill a tunnel through granite with a polish dictionary, mate."

"No," Jim said, standing up and tossing his empty bottle into a timber waste crate. "You drill it with dynamite and muscle. And they've got muscle, same as we do. I'm going down to the recruiting office in Martin Place tomorrow morning."

Bluey shook his head, though he didn't sound entirely surprised. "You're bloody mad, Jim Mitchell. Absolutely bloody mad."

"Maybe I am," Jim said, looking south toward the blue, hazy horizon where the mountains lay hidden beyond the coast. "But at least I won't be bored."

By May, the SS Castelbianco, an old Italian passenger liner converted into a migrant transport, was creaking its way through the Great Australian Bight. The ship smelled of stale salt, cheap engine oil, and the sweat of fifteen hundred men, women, and children crammed into cramped, multi-tiered bunks below deck.

Stefan stood at the stern, watching the white wake churn and dissolve into the vast, slate-grey expanse of the Southern Ocean. The sea here was wilder than the Mediterranean, rolling in long, terrifying swells that lifted the ship high into the cold air before dropping it into deep troughs with a shudder that vibrated through every iron rivet in the hull.

Beside him stood a short, barrel-chested Italian named Giuseppe, who had spent the last three weeks leaning over the railing, violently seasick, yet refusing to go below deck.

"Look at it," Giuseppe muttered, gesturing with a trembling hand at the empty horizon. "Nothing. Three weeks of nothing. Where is this country? Maybe it doesn't exist. Maybe the Australians made it up to get rid of us."

Stefan smiled slightly. He had come to respect Giuseppe. The Italian was a stone-cutter from Abruzzo who had lost his home to Allied bombs and his brother to the mountain fighting in ’44. Despite his constant stomach troubles, Giuseppe possessed a stubborn, cheerful resilience that was hard to sour.

"It exists," Stefan said. "The captain said we sight Land's End tomorrow. Melbourne first, then Sydney."

"And then?" Giuseppe asked, pulling a thin, crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and wiping his nose. "Then they take us to the mountains, yes? The Snowy Mountains."

"That’s what the contracts say."

"My grandfather cut marble in Carrara," Giuseppe said, his voice lifting with a sudden, proud cadence. "He told me stone is like a woman. You must talk to it. You must know where it wants to break. If you fight it, it will crush you. Do you think Australian granite is the same as Italian marble, Stefan?"

"Granite doesn't talk," Stefan said, his eyes fixed on the grey water. "Granite just resists. You blast it, you haul it away, and then you pray the roof doesn't fall in on you before you get the timber supports up."

Giuseppe looked at him sideways. "You talk like a man who has buried friends under stone."

Stefan didn't answer. He turned his face into the sharp, salty gale. He thought of the basement in Warsaw where he had spent three weeks during the uprising, listening to the heavy artillery pounding the street above, the ceilings raining pulverized plaster onto their heads until the light went out entirely. He had promised himself then that if he ever survived the war, he would never live underground again. Yet here he was, halfway across the globe, having volunteered to spend two years digging deep into the earth of a continent he had only ever seen on a map in a high school classroom.

Below them, the deck officer called out in broken German and Italian, ordering the passengers inside for the evening roll call and dinner. The men moved slowly, a motley collection of Europe’s shattered remnants: Estonians with pale, haunted faces; Latvians who kept their lips pressed tight; Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans, and Poles. Most of them spoke no English. Few knew anything of Australia beyond the promotional pamphlets distributed at the DP camps—pamphlets that showed sunny beaches, bountiful orchards, and smiling families in neat suburban houses.

None of those pamphlets had shown pictures of the high country in winter: the sheer, ice-coated ravines of the Eucumbene Valley, the jagged rock faces of the Main Range, or the primitive timber huts waiting for them under the snow.

In Sydney, the damp autumn heat gave way to the crisp dryness of early June. The city was bursting at its seams. Housing was almost impossible to find; families were doubled up in suburban bungalows, and veterans were sleeping in converted army barracks at Herne Bay.

Jim Mitchell spent his final week in the city buying gear. He had spent half his saved pay at an army surplus depot in Haymarket: heavy woollen socks, two pairs of thick canvas trousers, a heavy leather belt, and a pair of double-soled work boots with iron-capped toes.

He met his father at the pub near the Redfern railway workshops on his last night in town. Old George Mitchell was a blacksmith by trade, his skin cured like leather from forty years of standing in front of coal fires, his lungs ruined by iron dust. He set down two pint glasses of dark ale on the sticky wooden table between them.

"Your mother’s worried sick, Jim," George said, his voice like gravel being turned over with a shovel. "She thinks you’re going off to live in a tent in the middle of nowhere."

"It is a tent in the middle of nowhere, Dad," Jim said with a slight grin. "At least for now. But they're building towns up there. Cabins, messes, workshops."

"It’s reckless," George growled, though his eyes lacked real anger. "You had a good trade lined up at the workshops. Safe. Civilized. You could have built a house out at Bankstown. Settled down with a nice girl."

"I don't want a house in Bankstown, Dad," Jim said gently. "Not yet. You should see the plans for this thing. It’s not just a dam. It’s sixteen dams. Seven power stations. Over a hundred miles of tunnels. They’re going to run the Snowy River backward. Think about that. A river that’s run into the sea for a million years, and we're going to make it turn around and flow into the dry country."

George stared down into his beer, his thumb tracing the wet ring on the counter. "Nature doesn't like being played with, son. The mountains have been up there a long time. They don't give up easy."

"We’ve got dynamite," Jim said. "And we’ve got thousands of blokes coming over from Europe who know how to use it."

George’s eyebrows pulled together. "That’s another thing. These foreigners. The paper says half the workforce is going to be New Australians. You can't trust blokes you can't talk to, Jim. We just fought a war against half of 'em."

Jim took a slow drink of his ale. He thought of the men he’d seen in the Pacific—the quiet, exhausted blokes from his battalion, and the prisoners they'd taken who looked just as frightened and half-starved as anyone else when the shelling stopped.

"The war's over, Dad," Jim said softly. "Down here, everyone’s starting from zero. It doesn't matter where a bloke came from. It only matters if he holds his end of the timber when the roof starts to drop."

George looked at his son for a long moment, seeing the hardness in Jim's jaw, the determination that had replaced the aimless drift of the last three years. He sighed, raised his glass, and tipped it toward Jim.

"Well," the old man said, "don't let the mountain drop on you then."

The train out of Sydney’s Central Station left at six o'clock on a freezing, overcast morning. The carriage was packed tightly with young men. Half were Australians like Jim—ex-servicemen, bush workers, farmhands looking for high wages, and restless lads from the city suburbs. The other half were the first wave of Displaced Persons, straight off the transport ships from Melbourne and Sydney docks.

Stefan Radzinsky sat by the fogged-up window of the carriage, his coat pulled tight around him. Opposite him sat an Australian bloke with broad shoulders and a quiet, watchful face—Jim Mitchell.

For the first three hours of the journey, as the steam train puffed its way south through the rolling green hills of the Southern Highlands, neither man spoke. The language barrier sat between the passengers like an invisible brick wall. On one side of the aisle, the Australians talked loudly about rugby league, cold beer, and horse racing, using slang that sounded to Stefan like a completely foreign tongue. On the other side, the migrants spoke in hushed, nervous murmurs—snippets of Polish, Italian, German, and Lithuanian rising and falling over the rhythm of the iron wheels on the rails.

Near Goulburn, the sun broke through the grey cloud deck, casting a sharp, yellow light across the flat, sheep-dotted paddocks.

Giuseppe, sitting next to Stefan, leaned forward and stared out the window. "Look," he whispered in Italian. "No houses. No fences. No people. Nothing for miles."

Stefan looked out at the vast, pale landscape. The trees were different from anything in Europe—twisted, grey-green eucalyptus trees with bark hanging in ragged ribbons from their trunks, standing isolated in fields of dry, silver grass. It looked ancient, indifferent, and unimaginably large.

Across the aisle, Jim Mitchell noticed the migrants staring out the window. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a metal tin of Log Cabin tobacco and a packet of Zig-Zag rolling papers. He expertly rolled a cigarette with one hand, lick-sealed the edge, and popped it into his mouth. Then he hesitated, looked at Stefan, and offered the tin across the narrow aisle.

"Smoko?" Jim asked.

Stefan looked at the tin, then at the Australian. He recognized the gesture of truce.

"Thank you," Stefan said, his accent heavy but clear. He took a paper and a pinch of the dark, sweet-smelling tobacco, rolling it carefully between his fingers.

Jim struck a match on the bottom of his boot and held the flame across the gap. Stefan leaned in, lit the cigarette, and took a long drag. The tobacco was strong and bit the back of his throat, but it was rich and warm.

"Stefan," he said, touching his chest.

"Jim," the Australian replied, pointing to himself. He nodded toward the window, where the flat country was slowly beginning to rise into rolling, rugged foothills. "Cooma’s next stop. Then the hills."

Stefan looked at the horizon. Far in the distance, rising above the grey-green woodland, he could see the faint, white-capped ridges of the Great Dividing Range resting against the winter sky like a wall of pale iron.

"The mountains," Stefan said softly.

"Yeah," Jim said, his blue eyes turning toward the distant peaks as the train gave a long, mournful whistle that echoed across the empty plain. "The mountains. That’s where the fun begins."

The train groaned to a halt at the Cooma railway station as the sun began to dip behind the western ridges, casting long, bruised-violet shadows across the platform. The air hit Stefan the moment he stepped down from the wooden carriage—it was a cold so sharp and clean it felt like breathing crushed glass. It lacked the damp, rot-scented chill of Lower Saxony, carrying instead the pungent, resinous tang of crushed eucalyptus and cold dust.

All along the length of the train, heavy doors slammed open, and hundreds of men spilled onto the gravel. They tumbled out into the dusk carrying canvas kitbags, battered leather valises, and cardboard boxes bound with hemp twine. The platform instantly erupted into a chaotic sea of sound. Australian railway workers in heavy woollen coats shouted instructions that were swallowed by the loud, competing dialects of half a continent—Polish, Italian, German, Ukrainian, and Serbo-Croatian all mingling with the hiss of escaping steam from the locomotive.

Jim Mitchell dropped down from the carriage step right behind Stefan, landing with a heavy thud of his iron-toed boots. He pulled his collar up around his neck and blew a cloud of white vapor into the freezing air.

"Welcome to the end of the line, mate," Jim said, looking around at the milling crowd. "Looks like half of Sydney and the whole of Europe fell off the train at once."

A tall Australian officer wearing a wide-brimmed slouch hat climbed atop a wooden freight crate near the stationmaster's office. He held a brass megaphone to his mouth, his voice booming out over the din of the crowd with the flat, loud authority of an army sergeant major.

"Alright, settle down! Listen up! DPs to the left side of the yard! Sign on at the tables by the shed! Local hires and tradesmen, over to the right! Have your papers ready in your hand—not in your bags, in your hand! Move along now!"

An interpreter standing beside him—a stocky man in a leather jacket—began translating the orders into German and Polish, his voice strained as he shouted over the noise.

Stefan turned to Jim, offering a brief, tight nod. "I go to the left," he said, gesturing toward the long queues forming outside the timber goods shed.

Jim held out his hand. "Good luck, Stefan. Hope they give you a dry tent."

Stefan shook the offered hand. The Australian’s grip was hard and solid. "Good luck to you, Jim."

They parted ways in the swirling dusk. Stefan found Giuseppe in the crowd, the small Italian shivering violently inside a coat that was far too thin for the mountain air. Together, they joined the long line of migrants shuffling toward the tables set up under the harsh, yellow glow of unshaded electric globes hung from the shed eaves.

The town of Cooma was changing before their eyes. Once a sleepy country center of two thousand souls—a place of quiet wool stores, stone churches, and broad streets where drovers brought sheep down from the high country—it was being rapidly transformed into the boomtown heart of the Hydroelectric Scheme. Beyond the station fence, Stefan could see rows of newly erected iron huts, heavy transport trucks idling in the dirt roads with their headlights cutting through the rising dust, and pub verandas crammed with men in heavy flannel shirts.

At the processing table, an official checked Stefan’s IRO papers, cross-referenced his name against a ledger, and handed him a metal mess tin, two grey woollen blankets that smelled strongly of mothballs, and a cardboard tag printed with a number: Camp North— Hut 14.

"Up the hill, mate," the clerk said without looking up, stamping the record card. "Bussing out to North Cooma camp. Next!"

The North Cooma camp was a vast city of galvanized iron and olive-drab canvas sprawling across a bare, wind-swept ridge two miles outside the main township. As the wooden-bodied bus rattled along the corrugated dirt track, Stefan pressed his face against the glass. In the moonlight, the camp looked like a military staging ground. Long, low rows of Nissen huts stood lined up like iron caterpillars in the red dirt, interspersed with timber mess halls and lines of wall tents supported by wooden frames.

They were dumped in the central parade ground, where the wind whipped off the plain, carrying a fine spray of freezing dust that stung the eyes. A camp manager with an clipboard directed them toward their quartering.

"Eight men to a hut," the manager barked in basic, loud English. "Bunks are allocated. You get your hot meal at the main mess until nineteen hundred hours. Breakfast at six. Work allocations start on Monday morning. Don't go wandering into town without a pass, and keep your quarters clean. The Authority doesn't pay you to sleep in a pigsty."

Stefan and Giuseppe pushed open the wooden door of Hut 14. The air inside was stiflingly dry, heated by a small, pot-bellied cast-iron stove sitting in the center of the room on a sheet of tin. Eight narrow iron cots lined the corrugated walls, each fitted with a thin mattress stuffed with straw.

Four men were already inside, sitting on their bunks under the bare light bulb that dangled from an exposed roof rafter. Two were young Latvians who spoke only in hushed whispers; another was an older, grey-haired Pole named Tadeusz who sat motionless, staring at a small framed photograph of a woman and two young girls resting on his knee. The fourth was a thick-set German named Hans, who was methodically cleaning his boots with a rag.

The silence in the hut was thick and heavy, loaded with the tension of men who had spent years learning that strangers were dangerous.

Giuseppe dropped his kitbag onto a vacant cot near the stove with a loud sigh. "Warm," he muttered in Italian, rubbing his chapped hands together over the iron stove. "At least it is warm."

Hans looked up from his boots, his face impassive. He gave a slight nod to Giuseppe, then to Stefan, but said nothing. War had ended only four years ago; the invisible wounds were still fresh enough that men measured each other by their silence rather than their words. Stefan laid his kitbag on the remaining empty bunk, unfolded his rough woollen blankets, and smoothed them over the straw mattress.

He walked out to the doorway and looked back toward the township. In the valley below, the lights of Cooma flickered against the vast, empty dark of the Australian night. Above, the stars were terrifyingly bright and completely unfamiliar—the Southern Cross tilted on its side, a strange geometry in a sky that felt too high and too open.

Two miles away, in the public bar of the Royal Hotel in downtown Cooma, Jim Mitchell was discovering that the local population wasn't entirely thrilled by the sudden invasion.

, The pub was packed to the doors, hot and reeking of spilled beer, wet wool, and pipe tobacco. A thick layer of smoke hung beneath the high tin ceiling. Behind the long mahogany bar, three publicans were pouring pints of beer as fast as the pumps would draw.

Jim elbowed his way to the bar beside Bluey Williams, who had arrived on an earlier train from Sydney.

"Look at this place," Bluey said, grinning as he slid a full glass over to Jim. "It’s like a gold rush town. You can't even get room to turn your elbows."

"Did you get a bed?" Jim asked, taking a long drink.

"Got a canvas cot in a tent out at the main contractor’s camp," Bluey said. "Four bob a night. Mud’s a foot deep outside the tent flap, but at least the beer’s cold."

A few feet down the counter, a local grazing hand in an oilskin coat and a battered felt hat slammed his glass onto the timber. He was speaking loudly to the bartender, his voice carrying over the rumble of conversation.

"It’s bloody ridiculous, Arthur," the grazier complained, gesturing with his thumb toward the street. "You can't walk down Sharp Street without bumping into some bloke talking double-dutch. They’re taking over the whole bloody town. The stores are out of everything, and you can't get a drink in your own local without queuing up behind twenty Baltics."

The bartender wiped the counter with a greasy rag. "Money’s good, though, Fred. Authority’s paying top dollar for everything."

"Money don't mean a thing if the place don't feel like home no more," the grazier grumbled, shooting a hard look sideways at Jim and Bluey. "Half of 'em were shooting at our boys four years ago. Now we’re giving 'em jobs and feeding 'em steak."

Bluey stiffened, setting his glass down with a dull clink. He made to step toward the grazier, but Jim caught him by the sleeve, his grip firm.

"Leave it, Bluey," Jim said quietly.

"He’s talking rubbish, Jim," Bluey muttered, his face reddening. "The blokes out at the camp are just trying to get a crust."

"He’s just an old cocky worried about his sheep," Jim replied, pulling his mate back toward the bar. "He’ll get used to it. Everyone’s going to have to get used to it."

Jim looked around the room. Scattered throughout the bar were smaller groups of new migrants—men sitting quietly in corners, speaking in low voices, drinking carefully, and trying not to draw attention to themselves. They wore heavy European coats that marked them out instantly as outsiders. The division in the room was clear: the locals and Australian workers anchored to the main bar, loud and expansive; the newcomers clustered around the edges, watchful and cautious.

Yet, despite the tension, there was a strange, electrical energy in the air. Cooma was no longer just a remote country town in the Monaro region. It had become the staging post for the biggest engineering project in the nation’s history. Outside the pub windows, heavy diesels rumbled past constantly—GMC trucks loaded with timber sleepers, mobile generators, and steel pipes heading south toward the mountains where the real work was about to begin.

The next morning broke clear and ice-cold. A thick frost covered the ground around the North Cooma camp, turning the red dust into a hard, sparkling crust that crunched underfoot.

Stefan stood in the breakfast line outside the timber mess hall, holding his metal tin. The queue moved quickly, driven by the sharp wind that swept off the ridge. Inside, long wooden trestle tables were filled with hundreds of men eating in a deafening clatter of cutlery.

The food was bountiful, a stark contrast to the miserable rations of the European camps. Australian cooks in white aprons slammed heavy ladles of thick oatmeal porridge, fried eggs, and slab-cut bacon onto the metal plates. Tea was served out of large galvanized buckets into enamel mugs.

Stefan sat down at a table next to Giuseppe and an older Polish man who had been in the camp for two weeks. The man’s face was weathered, his hands scarred from years of manual labor. His name was Bronislaw.

"Eat all you can," Bronislaw said in Polish, nodding toward Stefan's plate. "Up in the mountains, you burn it fast. The work is hard."

"Where are they sending us?" Stefan asked, mixing a spoonful of coarse brown sugar into his porridge.

"Depends on your trade," Bronislaw replied, blowing on his hot tea. "Some go to Adaminaby to build the main storage camp. Some to Guthega to clear the river bed. The surveyors are already out in the high country putting up timber markers. They’re cutting roads through the bush where even horses couldn't go last year."

"And the tunnels?" Stefan asked.

Bronislaw gave a short, dry laugh. "The tunnels haven't started yet. First, we build the roads to get the machines into the gorges. We build the camps so we don't freeze to death. We cut down the trees. Then we start digging into the rock."

He looked at Stefan’s hands—calloused from the Hamburg quarries, but long-fingered and precise. "You were a student?"

"Engineering," Stefan said. "Warsaw."

Bronislaw shook his head slowly. "Forget Warsaw, young man. Here, you are a laborer. The Australian engineers are young blokes from the cities or imported Americans from the Reclamation Bureau. They don't care about your Warsaw diploma. They only care how many tons of muck you can shovel into a mucking car in an eight-hour shift."

"I can shovel," Stefan said quietly.

"Good," Bronislaw said, wiping his mustache with the back of his wrist. "Because you're going to shovel until your back feels like broken timber. But the food is good, the pay comes every Friday in a paper envelope, and nobody asks to see your political papers at midnight."

After breakfast, the men were assembled on the parade ground for assignment. A row of dark green Ford trucks with canvas-covered trays was idling along the edge of the camp, their exhaust pipes sending white plumes of smoke into the freeze.

An Australian overseer with a clipboard began calling out names, reading off a list provided by the Department of Work.

"Radzinsky, Stefan!"

Stefan stepped forward. "Here."

"Truck three. You’re on the road clearing crew for the Eucumbene access route."

"Giuseppe Rossi!"

Giuseppe raised his hand, stepping out of the line beside Stefan. "Presente."

"Truck three as well. Move it along, blokes. We’re losing the sun."

Stefan and Giuseppe climbed up the wooden tailboard into the back of the heavy truck. Ten other men were already packed onto the narrow timber benches inside—a mix of Poles, Germans, and two young Australians who sat near the opening, smoking roll-your-own cigarettes and talking about horses.

The engine roared, and the truck lurched forward, pulling out of the camp and turning south onto the rough dirt highway leading toward the mountains.

Stefan sat near the canvas flap at the rear, watching the camp fade into the cold morning haze. The road rose steadily, winding out of the broad Cooma basin into steep, rolling hills covered in dense grey bush. As they climbed higher, the air grew colder still, biting through his coat. The smooth earth gave way to rough gravel, and the truck bounced violently over rutted tracks cut through the dry red soil.

Beside him, the two young Australians were chatting casually. One of them, a bloke with bright red hair named Tommy, noticed Giuseppe shivering. He unbuttoned his canvas jacket, pulled out a small glass flask of dark rum, and offered it across the tray.

"Have a swig, mate," Tommy said, gesturing with the bottle. "It puts a coat on your inside."

Giuseppe looked uncertainly at the bottle, then at Tommy. He took the flask, wiped the lip carefully with his palm, and took a small sip. His eyes widened, and he let out a sharp cough, his face flushing red as the harsh alcohol hit his throat.

"Grazie," Giuseppe gasped, handing the bottle back with a faint grin. "Good... good wine."

Tommy laughed loudly, taking a long swig himself. "Wine? That’s overproof Queensland rum, pal! That’ll kick your heart back into gear."

Stefan watched the exchange, feeling the invisible ice that had hung over the men since they left Europe begin to melt, if only a fraction.

The truck rounded a sharp turn on the crest of a ridge, and the timbered hills suddenly parted to reveal a vast, breathtaking panorama. Below them lay the valley of the Eucumbene River, a winding ribbon of clear, dark water cutting through a deep granite gorge. And beyond it, towering over the landscape like a massive, impenetrable wall of grey rock and brilliant white snow, rose the peaks of the Snowy Mountains.

The sun caught the high snowfields, turning them into a dazzling mirror that hurt the eyes. It was a landscape of terrifying scale—wild, untouched, and utterly indifferent to the small men riding in the back of the green truck.

Stefan stared at the mountains, his hands tightening around the wooden rail of the truck bed. The Warsaw University classrooms, the mud of Fallingbostel, the long, dark years of hiding and survival—all of it felt instantly compressed and eclipsed by the sheer, timeless mass of the rock waiting ahead.

They were small, he thought. They were just tiny specks of dust riding in an army truck into a wilderness that had not changed since the beginning of the world. But as the truck began its gear-grinding descent into the gorge, carrying its load of shovels, picks, and broken men from across the sea, Stefan knew they had arrived at the battleground. The mountains were waiting, and the work had finally begun.