AustLit

Musical set among the migrants working on the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

Yeldham notes on his website that

'Before I went to England I was a 23 year old radio writer concerned with shows like 'Nightbeat', 'Famous Trials' and a thriller called 'The Long Shadow', when out of the blue came an offer to write the script of a musical. It was to be a story of the Snowy Mountains Scheme and a convoy of cars containing production crew, technicians, director, composer and me; we drove to Cooma on the first stage – research for a musical about the greatest project since the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

[...]

'Back in Sydney I started work on the script; the composer got busy, and then came the third calamity. The promised money to fund the show had fallen through. The musical about the Snowy was cancelled.

'When things like that happen in our business you shrug and get on with something else. Little did I realise at the time how valuable that few weeks of research would be. About six years later, now living in London, I was asked to write a television play for Armchair Theatre. I wrote 'Thunder on the Snowy' drawing on the miners and characters I’d met at Guthega.'

Source: http://www.peteryeldham.com/featured-book-tide/ (Sighted: 17/10/2014)