Adaminaby Emerges

Collaboration with Caolan Mitchell

My first experience of a drowned town, resurrected by Australia’s worst drought in 100 years, was coming across the town of Killara whilst on a project filming mining ghost towns of Queensland in December 2003. The town had been flooded to make way for a dam which had evaporated leaving relics of the town emerging through thick mud, fence posts, a bridge, and most surprisingly the town cricket pitch the packed earth still holding it’s form after all these years. People exploring the emerged town had set-up stick stumps in homage to the games played there. 

The drowned town of Adaminaby is perhaps a more significant site having being submerged in 1957 to make way for Lake Eucumbene, the largest catchment area of the nation-building project of the snowy mountain hydroelectric scheme. The town of 700 was re-located to the current site of Adaminaby. Ensuing droughts have seen the old town of Adaminaby re-appear most recently in 2007.

What must it have been like for the locals of Adaminaby to have the physical reference for their life memories slowly submerged by water never expecting to see them again only to have the remnants of the town reappear?

“Among the sharpest memories are those of frequently returning to the water’s edge to stare at that which soon will be nothing.
They stand in fascination, dismay, anguish or horror before the scummy water inching towards what remains of their homes. It’s lapping at the back fence, creeping up the garden, swirling about the outhouse, eddying around the lintel, muddying the fireplace, splashing about the chimney. Oblivion.” 1

As we were about to film at Adaminaby a man perhaps in his eighties stopped to tell us that he had come for the first time to see his old town and remember his wife who had died a week ago. They had met, courted and married in Adaminaby. “You grow closer as you grow older,” he said as he turned to walk towards the town.

Walking through the town searching for banks of stable ground to walk-upon we found an archaeological site revealing relics and objects to affix fragments of stories to; the foundations of a home, lines of dead trees tracing the borders of a property, the entry posts to a gate way, a hearth, shards of patterned plates, a car stripped down by the waters.

Are climate change and the continuing drought making hydro power generation methods redundant? And making the emergence of drowned towns a more common story? In the 1960s English sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard explored the terrains of the abundance and lack of water caused by human activity in his novels the Drought and The Drowned World, as with other Ballard novels there is an eerie prescience to them. 2 Our zeitgeist does appear to be a story of the need for basic resources such as water beginning to dictate to a greater extent where we can enact our suburban/urban ideals and also where they must be disassembled. 

1. From Peter Read’s recounting of the people of Adaminaby’s experiences in “The meaning of Lost Places” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996).

2.  J.G. Ballarsd’s novel “The Atrocity Exhibition” famously foretold Ronald Regan’s presidency and the “Drowned World” has been related to the New Orleans disaster.