People who remember Old Adaminaby recall a picturesque village on the banks of the Frying Pan Creek in the southern highlands of New South Wales. Disbelieving the news in 1957 that the town was to be inundated, a town resident wagered that he would be able to cross the creek at Christmas without getting his socks wet. By then the crossing was 20 m under water. Old Adaminaby had become one of several Australian villages submerged beneath artificially created lakes. The mining town of Yallourn, in the Latrobe valley of Victoria, is remembered more easily by former residents because its demolition was not complete until 1980. Yallourn was much bigger, better designed and more productive, the campaign to save it was better organised. It too was destroyed, by an enlargement of the open cut mine upon which its existence depended. In this chapter I consider in particular the attempts by outside authority to undermine residents' attachments to these vanishing sites.

Adaminaby was settled by nineteenth-century Kiandra goldminers after the workings cut out. The miners became squatters, trappers, shopkeepers and farm labourers, and their names were commemorated in the street names of the old town. After the Second World War, just before the advent of family motoring, the 500 inhabitants were still almost as remote from the rest of Australia as they had been half a century earlier. Seven or eight gates had to be opened and shut between Adaminaby and Dry Plains only 15 km away.