Blowering Dam

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Type: Programs
Date: 1968
Place: Talbingo, New South Wales, Australia; Blowering Dam, New South Wales, Australia; Jounama Dam, New South Wales, Australia; Snowy Mountains, New South Wales, Australia
Materials: Paper
Collection: Snowy Scheme - Ken Johnson collection
Accession number: 2006.0074.0007.001

Description

A program pamphlet titled "BLOWERING DAM" with a colour photographic illustration of the dam on the front. It has a fold-out page inside the front cover. The pamphlet contains; a brief synopsis of the project, illustrations, maps and technical specifications.

About the collection

The Snowy Scheme - Ken Johnson Collection consists of several objects once belonging to Ken Johnson, an engineer on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. The items are a gelignite box, slide rule, various souvenir and opening programs and invitations, official reports and manuals, and project reports relating to various major Scheme structures. The Snowy Scheme is Australia's largest engineering work and one of the great engineering feats of the world. Designed to produce irrigation water and electricity, the Scheme took 25 years to construct, 1949-74. Including 7 power stations, 16 dams and 225 kilometres of aqueducts and tunnels, the Scheme was built by a workforce of 100,000 people, two-thirds of whom came from overseas. The scheme played a major part in making Australia multi-cultural, and also in developing Australia's manufacturing, technical and engineering capacities. This collection, consisting of items mostly used by Snowy engineer Ken Johnson, helps to remind us of the role of engineers in such a massive undertaking. The project reports and opening invitations and programs chart the construction of many elements of the Scheme, the slide rule reflects the calculations made by engineers, and the gelignite box is a reminder of the massive excavations created by Scheme workers.

Read live from the Museum's Collection API (12/11/2026, 5:44:42 am). Record last updated by the Museum 2025-07-25. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.