At least seven workers died building the Silvan Dam — crushed in tunnel collapses, thrown from ponies, buried in earth slides — to create the structure that now supplies drinking water to more than half of Melbourne.

Why Silvan? From May 1914 to April 1915, much of Victoria experienced one of the state’s most severe droughts.

  • After conditions improved, the state government began planning to expand Victoria’s water network.

  • At about 245 metres above sea level, Silvan was chosen because water could be drawn from major remote reservoirs including Thomson, Upper Yarra and O’Shannassy, then distributed across the region by gravity, reducing the need for constant pumping.

  • The dam is 43 metres deep and has a total capacity of about 40,500 megalitres. A megalitre is one million litres.

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Works underway: Construction ran from 1926 to 1932, with an aerial ropeway built from Mount Evelyn railway station to the reservoir site.

  • Stretching about five kilometres, the ropeway carried sand and cement in buckets to the wall site.

Accidents: The first recorded death was in September 1927, when 20-year-old Italian migrant Angelo Condello was thrown from a pony into a tree, suffering fatal skull and neck injuries.

  • In September 1928, 40-year-old Luigi Longo died after being buried in an earth collapse. Six months later, 28-year-old Salvatore Migliorino was killed by falling timber.

  • In April 1929, 70-year-old worker Henry Glen died in a tunnel collapse, about 86 feet below the surface.

  • In June 1930, what became known as the “Silvan tunnel tragedy” occured. Three men died and two escaped after a tunnel collapsed about 120 feet underground.

  • Walter Crosby, 35, Patrick Walsh, 33, and Frederick Scales, 40, were reported to have been “entrapped by an almost impenetrable wall of sodden clay”.

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All workers welcome: The project attracted workers from around the world.

  • In a February 1930 feature in the Argus, Lewis Thomas Luxton described an “astonishingly cosmopolitan population”, including Australians, Englishmen, Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Italians and Yugoslavs.

  • Most received free accommodation in the form of “well-constructed huts”.

  • At night, Luxton said workers played cards, wrote letters home or played accordions and strummed banjos.

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