Australia is the driest continent in the world and long droughts cause devistation and financial losses to the whole county. Since the early days of settlement men of vision have brought forward ideas for making use of the water which is held in natural storage during winter in the great snofields in the south-east corner of the continent. Their plans to catch the melting snows and divert them to the dry inland where welcomed, but the problems of reconciling the diverse agricultural, industrial and political needs of the time, of meeting the growing need for power, and of surmounting the technical difficulties involved, took many years of discussion and planning. The ideas and the blueprints gradually crystallized into what is now known throughout the world as the Snowy Mountain Scheme. It is today an undertaking far greater than was at first thought possible, and the huge dams and miles of pipeline, which store the waters and divert them through the granite of the mountains to the farms and irrigation settlements, also provide the means of generating great quantities of electricity for use in three of Australia's largest cities, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. Struggle for the Snowy was written at the request of the Snowy Mountains Authority, the administratiors of the Scheme, and those who imagination has been caught by the vision of the undertaking will find in this book the full story of how the Scheme came into existence. (Inside Cover).