Tim The Yowie Man sits down with Owen Davis, who worked at the Snowy Hydro adit portal near Guthega during the early 1960s.
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00:00Owen Davis is one of the thousands of workers who toiled away on the Snowy Hydro Scheme.
00:06In the early 1960s he worked here at the Snowy Addit Portal, a tunnel on the banks of the Snowy
00:12River just downstream from Guthiga. I recently caught up with Owen under this tree, under which
00:19he used to drive locomotives laden with goods and people into the tunnel entrance.
00:25I started here as a labourer after doing some diamond drilling and I graduated from labourer
00:37to a loco driver. I still have my loco driver's ticket actually, restricted to the Snowy Mountains
00:43for driving a train and then got a stiff-legged crane operator's ticket, then a form carrier,
00:50then worked on the face but I realised that it was pretty dangerous there so I got
00:54out of that after a couple of months and worked on a gunite rig and then transferred out from
00:59underground up to Barunga Buggy on the shaft. It was a hive of activity, you know there were
01:06trains coming in and out, there was face material coming in and out and going up to the crusher,
01:11there was concrete coming in and out, there were formwork going in and out so it was all go,
01:17you know 12 hours a day virtually. It's an interesting question, was it unsafe? No,
01:22most people were pretty aware of safety or you know didn't want to put themselves in danger that's
01:27for sure. There were accidents, there was, you know, even before they started they estimated
01:32one a mile, one death a mile and that's what they virtually achieved and I don't mean they
01:37aimed to achieve that, that's virtually what happened, you know, so they knew from experience
01:42what was likely to happen. Did you see anyone injured, you know, in the tunnel?
01:48I saw a hand crush, that's all, that was the worst thing I saw. I know there were worse accidents,
01:52certainly up at Island Bend behind the dam where they were putting shafts in, there was
01:56a case of concrete, a large amount of concrete falling down on the workers below and guys,
02:02you know, who died virtually locked in concrete before the doctor could get them out.
02:07Right, so buried alive in concrete, yeah. Because of the shift work, there was, you know,
02:12if you went to the wet mess it was okay, there was a sense of camaraderie, there was a
02:16movie house there too, you could go to the movies, but it wasn't a tight camaraderie,
02:25there was more, you know, there would be the Italian groups, the Australian groups, the German
02:30groups, the Austrian groups, they all had their own groups going. It was more get some sleep and
02:35get back to work. So no days off? Maybe about once a fortnight we had a Sunday off. And what did
02:41you do on that Sunday? Fish. Fish? In the river behind us? In the river. Was it good fishing?
02:48Did you catch a fair few trout? Yeah, it was fabulous fishing, yeah, it really was, and beautiful fish too.