I met my first galaxiid several decades ago, in a small creek near my home. I caught it accidentally when I was flyfishing for trout: I noticed the tiniest disturbance on the surface of the water, imagined the huge wild brown trout that was surely responsible for it, gently landed a size 18 Parachute Adams, and suddenly found myself holding a creature whose striking fragility shook me. A tiny animal pearlescent, transparent, and translucent all at once, tinted and shaded here and there with the colours of the stream and streambed, as if it couldn't quite decide if it were made of water, air, or biological tissue. The galaxiid lay helpless in my wet palm, resigned: just waiting there silently, motionless. This same palpable impression of vulnerability has struck me every single time I’ve encountered a galaxiid in the wild: you fully expect them to burst open just by glancing at them.
Above: a West Gippsland Galaxias, like the one I accidentally caught.
When I slipped that fish back into the water it moved off slowly, as if something were on its mind, and it was weighing up if it should turn and offer profound wisdom. But it didn’t, and continued to swim away with all the gravity of a seasoned being who has encountered and survived obstacles unknowable to humanity.
I recall reading, some decades ago, about a man in the United States that shot himself in the shoulder just to see how much it hurt: and then, after he’d nursed his shoulder back into some kind of normal working order, shot himself in the same place again to see if it hurt just as much the second time.
Up in the mountains of New South Wales in Kosciuszko National Park, under the direction, tolerance, collusion, apathy and deceit of the NSW Government and the Commonwealth, our Nation- on behalf of the Commonwealth-owned entity Snowy Hydro Limited- is currently in the act of shooting itself in the shoulder again: for the second, more painful, more irretrievable time.
The first time around was painful enough. Completed in 1974, the Snowy Mountains Scheme- a hydro-power-generating, farmland-irrigating network of 16 dams, hundreds of kilometres of aqueducts, tunnels and pipelines, and thousands of kilometres of roads- hijacks high-altitude headwater and re-routs it inland, robbing coastal-flowing rivers of 99% of their environmental flow. This has resulted in the usual, predictable suite of environmental degradation and ecosystem collapse, of living systems smudged out to the edges of existence, ’unfortunate’ occurrences that, well, are the small costs of ‘nation-building’ and ‘progress’.
The residual effects of this first wound are largely forgotten and long since scabbed over, leaving shiny scars on our cultural skin, scars meant to sparkle and reflect our national identity like ghastly medals of honour, as if the Scheme is something we have collectively been through and emerged from relatively unscathed. Yet beneath the scars, the unhealed ecological consequences of the Snowy Hydro Scheme still fester in ongoing witness to the scale of large-scale environmental damage that can only be wrought by State backing: rivers stripped of fish. Drastic reduction in invertebrates. Decline of vegetation: both in-stream and on land. Sediment plumes impacting fish breeding sites. River flow reduced to 1%. River flow reduced to 1%.
Eventually, years after its completion, when people still wouldn’t stop kicking up a fuss about what had been done to our rivers, our forests, our animals, our natural cycles, promises were predictably made to reinstate environmental flows: just as predictably, these goals have never been met. Most predictably of all, nobody seems to be accountable.
No matter. The ‘Snowy Hydro Story’ has been so successfully spliced into our national identity as something to admire, to be immensely proud of and grateful for, that the negative impacts are not even a cautionary footnote in any telling of it. Instead, the Snowy Hydro Scheme has become fully integrated within our national history as an engineering marvel, lauded to this very day as a prime symbol of what it means to be an Australian. Laughably- concerningly- the Scheme is now even listed on the Australian National Heritage List.
This first installment of the Snowy Mountains Scheme was only the first shot. Bravely, stupidly, our country has rolled up its sleeves and bared its shoulder for a second round: and, if it's possible, the outlook is even worse.
Today, the inbred cousin of the Snowy Mountains Scheme is being constructed: and, like all things designed to sound as benign, useful, simple, and immediately necessary as a harmless software update, the new version- the second bullet- has (cringingly!) been named ‘Snowy 2.0’. ‘Snowy’, because why not use a harmless, affectionate, squeaky-clean pet name which also nods back approvingly at the original Snowy Mountains Scheme: and ‘2.0’ because, well, the whole show simply must be as upstanding and straightforward and as it sounds, like some kind of 20th century computer update.
It’s not like an update of any sort would ever harm anything, is it? A phone or computer update, by design, does not infect your device with viruses, make your power usage more inefficient, delete lines of code critical to the operation of the whole, or crash your hard drive. That wouldn’t sit too well with everyday people.
But when governments and businesses collude to tell citizens what is best for them, nothing has to be sold. You just pulverise a path forwards, deflecting scrutiny whilst ignoring those voices who perhaps offer other ways of tackling similar issues more responsibly, and try not to look too personally implicated if any need to distance oneself arises. On this terrain, pre-existing environmental laws are not guiding principles: they are relatively boring obstacles.
The gist of Snowy 2.0 is this: pump water uphill from one reservoir via a massive underground tunnel (using power), store it a while in an upper reservoir, then let it flow back downhill again to produce power. Physicists will immediately raise their hands, but the aim here is not to save energy: it is to save money. The hands slowly go down. The water is pumped uphill when the power is cheaper, stored, and released to generate power for the grid when the prices are higher. It does not even look like a good idea on paper.
So what are some of the more urgent issues with Snowy 2.0? You certainly won’t read about them in Snowy Hydro’s very own digital childrens pop up book- not the many recent breaches of environmental code, not any hint of the degradation to the physical and biological world this scheme will, by design, cause: not the fact there are other ways to generate electricity that are cheaper, more efficient, and without catastrophic ecological consequences.
Seeing as we are stuck with the uncreative and lazy ‘2.0’ naming, and are meant to turn the screen off while the update installs (there is no public access to the 2.0 construction sites), let’s- whilst using the suggested computer-jargon designed to make the scheme feel familiar, useful, and beneficial- look at the Viruses, the Deleted Lines of Code, the Crashed Hard Drive, and the Inefficient Power that are written into the 2.0 update.
THE VIRUS
When the two reservoirs are joined by the tunnel, two separate watersheds will be connected, leading to the introduction of a virus with particularly nasty and lethal pathologies. Our virus of interest has a name: haematopoietic necrosis virus. It’s carried by redfin perch (a fish), and affects the Critically Endangered Macquarie perch (another fish), one of last wild populations of which is downstream of Tantangara: that’s 2.0 (harmless new version) country.
Exactly how bad is this virus? It’s not exactly the common cold. Symptoms include haemorrhages (eye, gill, and abdominal), eyeball protrusion, and fin bleeding. The stomach becomes distended with a ‘gelatinous substance’, organ tissue dies, and tissues associated with organs haemorrhage. Behaviour becomes frenzied, yolk sacs and fatty tissues haemorrhage, necrosis of leukocytes occurs, hematopoietic stem cells die, and fish suffer spinal deformities. The connecting tunnel pumps this virus uphill to Tantangara and introduces all this, and more, into new territory within a national park.
You need to know this much: that redfin are certain to enter the Tantangara Reservoir and from there be distributed throughout the watersheds of four major (and iconic) river systems: the Murray, Snowy, Murrumbidgee and Tumut. Snowy Hydro has attempted to placate opposition by stating they will install fish screens to stop the invasion of redfin: but fish screens screen fish, not larvae and eggs, and certainly not viruses. Attempting to contain a fish species with a mesh barrier is like placing a chair in an open doorway to stop the mosquitos getting in: the Invasive Species Council calls the screens ‘a poorly designed solution set to fail’ and a ‘major aquatic biosecurity risk’: one reason being that the virus- shed from infected fish into the water- can be transferred not only by fish and eggs, but by contaminated water. Even birds and insects can transfer the virus: I’ve tried hard, but I still can’t quite understand how the hell a screen submerged in water is meant to control the movement of birds. If that was not enough, the virus can survive in a frozen state for years, and can also survive for extended lengths of time in sediments and on equipment.
With or without the virus, redfin are famously aggressive predators: they are the hot-dog eating champions of the fish world, one of the reasons they are so highly sought after by fishermen. The damned things just want to slam down your lure. So one way or the other- be it by virus or insatiable appetite- Macquarie perch are very likely to be wiped out of this region as a result of the conscious introduction of redfin.
On top of the viruses, there is yet another source of harm: and for this, we introduce yet another fish. The Climbing galaxias is native, but invasive outside its natural range: and Climbing galaxias predate upon Stocky galaxias, the second fish to be impacted by 2.0. These Climbers can scale wet surfaces, and there tends to be no shortage of those around large water projects. Because of this, there is no current scenario in which the Stocky galaxias will not be driven to extinction by Snowy 2.0.
Two fish extinctions, one local (Macquarie Perch) and the other global (Stocky galaxias): maybe that is why the scheme is labelled 2.0.
Perhaps you, like any other normal person, are by now wondering why there are not laws to stop this kind of thing. Well, there are: but the NSW Government, in a deranged act of self immolation, eagerly granted Snowy Hydro an exemption to break these very clear, very strict laws designed to stop major biological catastrophe. Experts seemed to agree with the laws: in the journal Viruses, a 2019 article stated that ‘existing policies to reduce the likelihood of spreading out of the [current] endemic area are justified’. Apparently, the conclusions of these professionals are more inconvenient than enlightening.
Grass-roots folks don't particularly like it when governments and corporations piss down their backs and tell them it’s raining. Cowardly addressing a problem with a solution doomed to fail tends to rub people up the wrong way. And so these actions have led everyday citizens and nature groups to shine a quiet, bright light upon the sheer scale of environmental appropriation and destruction pioneered, and perpetuated, by Snowy Hydro: and, as the beam of light widens and assesses each corner of this giant operation, the apparent scale of harm inflicted upon the land only increases.
THE DELETED LINES OF CODE
It is important to understand that the deliberate, planned, and calculated introduction of noxious species has results that are inherently predictable. These things have happened on our planet more times than can be possibly tallied. So there will be no ‘tragedy’ or ‘unfortunate outcome’ when the last of the native fish species die: the extinction is a planned act, you must understand, which is something darker than even genocide. Genocide, as horrifying as it is, only applies to a small subset of a global population: wilfully causing the eradication of an entire species on a planetary scale, though: there is simply no word for that. Annihilation, maybe, comes closest. But even this word only communicates the severity, not the gravity of the act. Put simply, this upcoming extinction could and should have been easily avoided: powerful people have allowed it to happen anyway.
So, the billion-plus base pairs of the Stocky galaxias’ genome: these are the deleted lines of code. And, like every other extinction, along with the code we lose one more way in which life has forged a path ahead and survived, in an unbroken lineage, for 3.7 billion years. The ways in which the species encountered and negotiated apparently insurmountable obstacles throughout biological history- infection, predation, colossal planetary impacts, extreme temperatures, forest fires, erosion events, overpopulation, genetic bottlenecks, millenia of contact with humans, nuclear fallout- all this will be lost: the intricate ways of understanding and knowing that have enabled this species to exist on Earth far longer than humans, as a species, have.
All this: all this, and all it took was human cowardice and greed to sign their fate.
Fish-minded people, too, have already fallen. The former Chair of the NSW Fisheries Scientific Committee Mark Lintermans immediately resigned in protest upon learning the NSW government was sanctioning the certain extinction of the Stocky galaxias, saying “I cannot continue to serve a government that so wilfully ignores the destructive impacts of Snowy 2.0… it is unprecedented for a government to grant an exemption that will likely cause the extinction in the wild of a species.”
Mark is no armchair expert. He is a member of the Hall of Fame for the Australian Society for Fish Biology, has earned many awards for outstanding contribution to fisheries science, and has decades of field experience studying threatened species, including the galaxiids and Macquarie perch. An important (and inconvenient) voice at the table now missing, I’m guessing heartbroken by the betrayal and white-hot with anger, a person who should have been listened to and who we should all be listening to. This is what good people are driven to when their lifes’ work is lynched in front of them.
If Snowy 2.0 could find a way of guaranteeing that viruses and noxious species would not enter new waterways, I would applaud that, loudly. Many others would as well, including organisations fighting this Scheme (some of which are fighting it in the legal system). But until that happens, we have to assume what is most likely to happen: and that is, the worst. We are fools to sit back and idly hope for anything more than that.
THE CRASHED HARD DRIVE
Since the Snowy Hydro Scheme first fired up, species diversity and population numbers have declined in local waterways: reduce stream flow to 1% and that kind of thing tends to happen. Underpinning this is the dramatic and concerning decline (again, both in diversity and population) of invertebrates, themselves a major food source for numerous species in and out of the water. These are small creatures, often minute, some of them right on the edge of human perception. Conveniently for Snowy Hydro, the scale at which humans interact with the world often makes ecosystem collapse invisible, even when it is happening right in front of you.
There is more. Sediment-laden flows originating from Snowy Hydro dams have the ability to infill the deeper sections of river used by native Australian Bass as critical breeding sites. In-stream vegetation also suffers. Up and down all trophic levels, in the water and out, Snowy Hydro has dictated the way animals and plants have been allowed to exist.
Enter Snowy Hydro Limited with Snowy 2.0. Already, the list of environmental breaches is growing too lengthy to tolerate. Dumped waste rock from this latest act of environmental desecration will see around 10 million tonnes of rock discarded within the park, of which a significant quantity will be dumped directly into waterways. It is hard to visualise this much rock, but assuming an average rock density, 10 million tonnes would conservatively occupy a space of 4 million cubic metres.
Even this is hard to get your head around, though. So try this: arranged into a towering mass with a footprint of a single square metre, this amount of rock would reach over 14 times the height of the minimal operational altitude of the International Space Station.
It was never going to be a good idea dumping this rock into waterways: rock containing harmful substances such as asbestos and acid-forming minerals. It certainly wasn't a good idea the first time around, either. When the initial Snowy Hydro Scheme was completed and similar rocks were discarded into waterways, the dumping was linked to the Tooma River being almost completely stripped of all its fish. But, when you are ‘nation-building’, these kinds of effects are, well, an unfortunate (but necessary) price to pay in order to place unsustainable farming practices on perpetual life support, and to pump power into the grid using methods long rendered archaic.
Already, Snowy Hydro and its 2.0 contractors have received warnings, fines, enforceable undertakings, and cautions for breaches of environmental guidelines, including several ‘pollution incidents’. These facts, despite making global headlines, are simply not enough of a big stick for companies of this scale and backing. Though the National Parks Association (NSW) has called for far greater consequences for future breaches, nobody is waiting on the edges of their seats for this to actually happen. The NPANSW website is a good source of information, if you care to learn more about this.
THE INEFFICIENT POWER
The whole point of Snowy 2.0- it’s one job- is to produce power: but even that is not going to happen in the way it’s been claimed.
Firstly, Snowy 2.0 is not ‘green’ power, or renewable. Water is pumped uphill (using coal (!) and wind power to achieve this) when power is cheap (readily available), and then the same water is released to drive the hydro when electricity costs are more pricey. It all sounds good, until you factor this in: it takes energy to pump water against gravity. This energy cost is significant: 25% of generated hydro power will be lost getting water uphill. This gluttonous waste of energy means it’s vastly more efficient, and environmentally friendly, to store excess wind and coal power in chemical batteries than it is to use pumped hydro: ridiculously more efficient, once you factor in the multi-billion-dollar cost blowouts 2.0 has already booked up to taxpayers.
There is more to the Power story, though. Snowy Hydro knew that overhead powerlines were prohibited in Kosciuszko National Park: but, with the self-assured arrogance of a company owned by the Commonwealth, they went ahead and put it in their application anyway. And now, inexplicably, inexcusably, magically (given they are prohibited), a network of 75m tall transmission lines, with the associated maintenance tracks, cleared easements, and assortment of visual blights, is being constructed not only through a nearby State Forest, but a National Park.
Snowy 2.0 is certainly flaccid and impotent, but it’s a lot worse than that. On behalf of all citizens- Australian and global- it has embraced the incorporation of multiple extinctions, finding the calculated loss more than acceptable given the financial rewards. A company part owned by the Commonwealth does not so much wield unimaginable power: these corporations operate in another dimension beyond the requirements for it.
The political, cultural and moral overreach of titans cannot easily be stemmed.
I hope to hell those Stocky galaxias and Macquarie perch get through this: but hope is never enough on its own.
I think often of these fish: particularly the galaxias. Before the last of them dies- parasitised, eaten, hemorrhaged, or maybe poisoned, infected, plumed out of existence- I wonder if it will know it’s the last. Do animals behave differently when oblivion is imminent? Not just individual death, but final, genetic annihilation? Will the last fish imagine itself inhabiting a void? Would it feel at peace? Would it feel relief? Horror? Would it fight, even though it might know all it is fighting for is to have existed in time and space a few minutes, or days, or seconds longer, fight against the extinguishing of a flame that can never again be fired?
The NSW government and Snowy Hydro have the funding, expertise, knowledge, resources, and opportunity to source our power needs elsewhere, without the need for self-aggrandising mega-projects, themselves mid-20th century political relics. And yet even with all the resources, funding, and expertise available to truly lead the world on renewable energy, these corporations and governments choose environmental ruin, even as they fiercely try to align themselves with ‘green’ energy: as if destroying our wild places is somehow beneficial to the natural world.
Stocky galaxias, like other Galaxiids, are animals that gather, focus, and redistribute light. Far from being animals that merely live in water, these translucent, ancient fish are more like beings coalesced from it: alarmingly fragile, surprisingly beautiful, as resistant as they can be with what they have. When they come to the surface, which they sometimes do, the expanding circles left behind seem to travel not through water, or air, but precisely within the interface between the two: a membrane in space as tenuous as the fish themselves, expanding circles that flatten out and re-form into a moving skin with an indefinable beauty- one that speaks some deep truth about the world, if only we could decipher it.
The people who are quite comfortable destroying one more corner of the world for financial gain, even at the expense of an entire species: I wonder how many of them can identify a galaxias, or Macquarie perch, from a line-up of 100 fish? I wonder how many can draw one, even badly? I wonder if any of them can communicate what will be lost when the viruses, the diseases, the predators, the plumes, the chemicals, the changes in water temperature and turbidity, the altered pH levels, the upturned ecosystem, the noxious species- when the eternal, dark, senseless oblivion- arrives?
If you are interested in reading about Snowy 2.0, here are a list of links, starting with a bunch of letters and research papers copied and pasted directly from the NPA website, followed by some suggested further reading.
Open letters to the Prime Minister and NSW Premier, and the NSW Planning Minister and NSW Environment and Energy Minister from groups of eminent experts in the energy and environment sectors opposing Snowy 2.0.
It’s heartbreaking and infuriating how something like Snowy 2.0, framed as progress, is instead erasing what little remains of ecosystems already hanging by a thread. The loss of native species feels so personal; it’s not just biodiversity we’re losing, it’s entire stories, relationships, and histories tied to the land. Reading this reminded me of how often "solutions" bulldoze the very thing they claim to save. It’s like we’ve forgotten how to listen—to the land, to the species, to the communities who know these ecosystems best. Thank you for putting this out there. Pieces like yours hold us accountable to truths that are too easy to ignore.
It’s heartbreaking and infuriating how something like Snowy 2.0, framed as progress, is instead erasing what little remains of ecosystems already hanging by a thread. The loss of native species feels so personal; it’s not just biodiversity we’re losing, it’s entire stories, relationships, and histories tied to the land. Reading this reminded me of how often "solutions" bulldoze the very thing they claim to save. It’s like we’ve forgotten how to listen—to the land, to the species, to the communities who know these ecosystems best. Thank you for putting this out there. Pieces like yours hold us accountable to truths that are too easy to ignore.