Siobhan McHugh is an award-winning writer, oral historian and producer of podcasts and audio documentaries. The first edition of The Snowy won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 1990 and was the basis of an ABC radio series and a Film Australia documentary. Her other books include Minefields and Miniskirts, about Australian women's involvement in the Vietnam War, and Cottoning On, a social history of the Australian cotton industry, shortlisted for the NSW Premier's History Awards. Siobhan's audio documentaries have won awards at the New York Radio Festival. She is an internationally recognised podcast producer, researcher and critic, who co-produced, with The Age newspaper, the award-winning Phoebe's Fall and its follow-up, Wrong Skin. She is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Wollongong.
This classic work is the last word on the extraordinary human, industrial, ethnic and social event of the Snowy River Scheme. The tales of the men and women involved were more diverse than for any other Australian phenomenon, and Siobhan McHugh conveys the varied tales of humans spread by it all over the Snowy Mountain region with a humane historian eye. If you want to have a passing knowledge of the making of modern Australia, you should read this tale of an era when Australia dared to have a vision.' - Thomas Keneally