Adaminaby: Why Moving Buildings Did Not Move the Whole Town

Adaminaby stands on Ngarigo Country beside the Snowy Mountains Highway in New South Wales. Its most memorable feature is not a lakeside view but an awkward fact: the present town is not on the original site. To build Eucumbene Dam for the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the old valley settlement would be inundated. In 1956–57, more than a hundred buildings were taken to a new site about seven kilometres away, while two masonry churches were dismantled and rebuilt.

Residents were not entirely without a choice. The NSW State Heritage Register records that a 1954 vote selected a lower, more sheltered site beside the highway, in the hope that through traffic would secure the town’s future. The relocation also brought electricity, reticulated water and sewerage that the old settlement had lacked. In engineering terms it was an extraordinary transfer of physical fabric: weatherboard houses travelled intact, while streets, shops, schools and public facilities were laid out again.

But buildings can be loaded onto trucks; relationships to place cannot. The reservoir covered valuable grazing land and severed old routes. Some farming families could not find replacement properties, jobs declined, and established neighbourhood and commercial ties loosened. The heritage listing estimates that about half the population of the town and immediate district eventually left. When low water exposes old roads, foundations and chimneys, it makes plain that the new town and the drowned site are not interchangeable containers.

Adaminaby shows how large infrastructure can deliver modern services and local loss at the same time. Moving houses may preserve part of a town’s architectural memory, but it does not prove that the community has been kept whole. A town is also land, livelihoods, routes and relationships accumulated over time.

https://apps.environment.nsw.gov.au/dpcheritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5060670
https://aso.gov.au/titles/sponsored-films/snowy-hydro-adaminaby/clip3/
https://snowyschememuseum.com.au/