Cooma sits on the Monaro plateau in southern New South Wales and serves as an important gateway to the Snowy Mountains. The Monaro remains connected to Ngarigo Country; the town’s later pastoral and administrative history is not the beginning of time in this place.
The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, begun in 1949, changed Cooma’s scale. National Archives records show that about 100,000 people worked on the Scheme between 1949 and 1974, and more than 65 per cent were migrants from over 30 countries. The local council says Cooma’s population roughly quadrupled from the 1940s to the 1960s, while hundreds of homes, schools, shops and services were added. The dams and tunnels extended across the mountains, but much of the Scheme’s social centre settled in this town.
Cooma is therefore more than an engineering headquarters or a collection of memorials. Engineers, technicians and workers from postwar Europe rented homes, raised families and educated children here, bringing languages, food and social networks into regional life. Major infrastructure is often told as technical history, yet it also redistributes people. Cooma shows how a national project could rapidly turn a pastoral service town into a concrete setting for Australia’s postwar multicultural society.
https://www.snowymonaro.nsw.gov.au/Community/Welcome-to-the-Snowy-Monaro-Region/Local-History
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