Jindabyne Will Die With a Fat Purse

By Eric Bell-Smith

In the doomed township of Jindabyne deep in the heart of the Snowy Mountains, five carpenters are building a temporary bar next to the 80-year-old Jindabyne Hotel.

The bar will hold 1000 men – men who are helping to fashion Jindabyne's grave in a granite gorge of the Snowy River a mile below the township.

In a few years, the temporary bar, the hotel, all Jindabyne's 60 dwellings – every quiet stone of its little history – will lie 100 to 240 feet below the surface of the great artificial lake that will stretch from the Jindabyne Dam to Adaminaby, 30 miles away.

The Snowy River which made Jindabyne will also drown it.

## Jindabyne will die with a fat purse

The Federal Parliamentarian who gave Jindabyne five or seven years to live was a bit out in his reckoning, the 250 permanent residents of the township think.

They expect 10 years to pass before the rising river drives them to the new town of Jindabyne – wherever that may be.

The sadness of Jindabyne's twilight is overlaid by an odd garishness, by glints of wealth the place has never known.

Five hundred workmen on the Snowy River hydro-electric project are already encamped around Jindabyne and at Island Bend, 14 miles away at the foot of Mt. Kosciusko.

Two thousand more men are expected by next March. To follow them are more thousands, stretching like a gold and silver vista along the few remaining years.

Jindabyne is the only township within 30 miles where these workmen can spend their money. Jindabyne will die with a fat purse.

One man still living saw it born; men from half Europe will watch it die.

Most of Jindabyne is built on a little hill rising from the west bank of the Snowy River, and in a house on the side of this hill lives 93-year-old Jack Adams, who saw the township come into being nearly 80 years ago.

Jack Adams was born eight miles from where he now lives. He has spent most of his time shepherding in the Snowy Mountains.

He selects as Jindabyne's birthday (and it seems a good selection) the day in the early 1870's on which the hotel was finished and the door of its tiny bar first opened.

He recalls with the vivid wistfulness of age that on that faraway day rum WAS rum – 40 per cent overproof and they broke it down with sparkling Snowy water.

Before the hotel went up, the site of Jindabyne was part of a 20,000-acre cattle and sheep run, on which stood a post office and store to serve the surrounding homesteads, and an old stone house.

There were other big runs in the district and children bearing the names of the original owners still attend Jindabyne school.

With the opening of the hotel Jindabyne began its slow and dreamy growth by the tree-fringed river.

The other day workmen pulled down the stone house. Nobody cared.

Its early history as a dwelling was long forgotten. It became the dead-house – Jindabyne folk still do not use the word morgue.

It housed the bodies of men which were sometimes taken from the Snowy in the spring floods. Older inhabitants recalled how, as children, they hurried past it, afraid.

Workmen pulled it down because they needed material for the concrete floor of the temporary bar, which they hope to have ready by Christmas.

It was good stone, too. It would stand 2000 feet of the living as faithfully as it had sheltered the dead – though not for so long.

This temporary bar epitomises the prosperity which has come to Jindabyne in its last years.

Buses packed with new Australians and old arrive from the camps each day as the sun slants toward Kosciusko. Men swarm into the little old bar, overflow on to the stone verandah.

Nearly all the old Australians drink beer. Many newcomers from Europe favor drinks that would have astounded the customers of the old days.

They think nothing of buying a bottle of liqueur (cherry brandy is a favorite), getting a glass, and sitting down to drink the bottle.

Next to the hotel a corrugated iron garage with seven gleaming petrol pumps has sprung up. The lucrative business of truck-carrying for the Snowy Mountains Authority needs fuel.

As soon as the carpenters have finished the temporary bar they will start running up a men's clothing store next to the garage.

The township's only butcher used to open a few days each week. He now opens daily, and another butcher is soon going to start. It would not be fair to say in opposition, because that doesn't hold good in Jindabyne.

There is no competition among the township's other four shops – two general stores and two mixed businesses.

A new store with plate-glass windows framed in chromium stands empty, awaiting supplies before it opens its doors to join in the brief boom by the river bank.

So far, few women have come with the men, though some new Australians have built shacks near the camps and river bank for their womenfolk.

But Jindabyne expects an inrush of women soon, and the people are chewing over the problems this will raise.

Though not widely experienced in such matters, they sense that women and trouble will come hand-in-hand, with even greater spending.

Since work on the Snowy scheme began, many Jindabyne people have found it difficult to get firewood, though the township is surrounded by dead, dry timber vital to the everyday life of its people.

Jindabyne has never had the electric power which its death will provide for other towns. Except for a few private power-plants, the town depends on wood for cooking and heating, kerosene for lighting.

They used to pay around £1 a ton for firewood, cut and delivered. But few trucks in the district now carry wood. They are too busy working for the Snowy Mountains Authority.

Many Jindabyne folk, looking at their dwindling wood piles, are fearful of 1951's long, hard winter.

## A new township of 5000 is planned

This is one rough patch on a fairly comfortable road to extinction.

Jindabyne's people have been promised a new town.

To the north-west the Snowy Mountains Authority has already marked out streets, recreation, business and residential areas for a new town near the dam camp site.

The planners envisage a town of 5000 people, and buses running to the camp already show the sign New Jindabyne.

But hold on. The folk of the old town refer to the camp and the proposed town as "the works camp" and "the works town."

The new town will be virtually the working headquarters of permanent dam workers and other officials before and after the Snowy project is finished.

Whether the people of old Jindabyne will have any part of the "works town" remains to be seen.

The betting is that they will, but they are somewhat clannish and may agitate for a site nearby – close enough to get their share of the business and far enough away to retain their identity.

They are determined on one point. The name Jindabyne is theirs by inheritance. If they decide on a separate site, they will carry the old name with them and the Snowy Authority can select some other name for the "works town."

For property doomed to lie under water, land values in old Jindabyne have an exhilarating uncertainty.

This is because home and land owners believe that the Snowy Authority will give them new properties on a kind of new-house-for-old basis.

Strongest of the theories about the final rites (or at least the most vocal) is that the townsfolk will leave with only their furniture, personal effects and other movable possessions.

They think the Authority will then hold a great auction sale of windows and other detachable building fittings, and close the dam gates.

So Jindabyne to which the aborigine gave his word for valley, the Jindabyne to which the white man came 80 years ago, falls into its sleep beneath the waters.

Many of those born in Jindabyne expect to live to see flying-boats landing on the lake, loaded with weekend visitors to Kosciusko.

They are probably right.

Seventy feet below, perhaps still pointing upward with their everlasting meaning, will be the twin crosses on top of the church which now looks softly down on the old township.

— Eric Bell-Smith

*Strange wealth has come to Jindabyne in its last years as thousands of men arrive in the Snowy Mountains to build the great dam that will drown it.*