Hume Dam

Facts and History

Hume Dam is situated just below the junction of the Murray and Mitta Mitta rivers, 16 kilometres east of Albury on the NSW-Victorian border. The dam is about 550 kilometres south-west of Sydney, and about 300 kilometres downstream from where the Murray rises on the Great Dividing Range.

Hume Dam holds a maximum of 3,005,156 megalitres, about six times the volume of Sydney Harbour. The dam’s catchment area of 15,300 square kilometres, two thirds of which is in Victoria, includes much of the rugged Australian Alps where annual rainfall can exceed 2000mm. Flows from the Snowy River may also be diverted into the catchment by the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme.

The dam is named after Hamilton Hume, the first European to explore the river upstream of Albury in 1824.

Why the dam was built

By the 1860s landholders were discussing ways of controlling the Murray River’s waters for better navigation, irrigation, and flood and drought control. The broader Australian community also saw the need for a dam to store winter and spring rainfall from the Australian Alps for summer release.

It was another 50 years until formal agreement to share water was reached between the Australian, NSW, Victorian and South Australian governments. Work on Hume Dam finally started in 1919 and took 17 years to complete.

When finished in 1936, Hume Dam was the biggest in the southern hemisphere and one of the world’s largest. It was hailed alongside Sydney Harbour Bridge as one of the mightiest Australian structures of the inter-war years and was one of the first great inter-government cooperative projects facilitated by Federation.

Today, Hume Reservoir is the main storage on the River Murray system. It supplies water across three states for irrigated agriculture, environmental flows, town supplies, industry and domestic requirements, flood mitigation and recreation. Energy is produced by a 60 megawatt hydroelectric power station. The dam also supplements water supplies to South Australia from Lake Victoria and Menindee Lakes.

How the dam was built

The original structure at Hume Dam consisted of a concrete gravity section containing the spillway and outlet works across the river bed, a long earth embankment with a concrete core wall across the river flats on the southern (Victorian) end, and a short earth embankment on the northern (NSW) end. The curve of the dam wall follows a line of granite bedrock.

Construction began in 1919 and continued during the Great Depression until the project was finished in 1936. At its peak, over 1000 tradesmen and labourers used steam engines, horse-drawn carts and manual labour to build the massive dam.

Later, the Snowy Mountains Scheme resulted in increased flows in the River Murray and, as part of the scheme, it was agreed to double the storage to its current capacity of 3,005,000 megalitres.

Between 1950 and 1961, the dam was enlarged by adding 29 spillway gates on the main dam wall, building two extra earth embankments to prevent water flowing out through low saddles on the Victorian side, and placing post-tensioning cables through the dam wall to anchor it to the bedrock.

These works involved a large number of post-war migrants, the relocation of Tallangatta township, and the raising of Bethanga Bridge.

Later improvements

To meet modern dam safety standards, structural improvements were made during the 1980s and 1990s. In 2010 a further program of improvements began to increase dam safety in the event of extreme flooding and earthquakes, and to upgrade the dam in line with contemporary best practice.

These works included an improved filter and drainage system between the concrete spillway and southern embankment, and construction of a 50,000 tonne concrete buttress wall to strengthen the southern training wall.